The Battle Over Citizen Kane
| The Battle Over Citizen Kane | |
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| Directed by | Michael Epstein Thomas Lennon |
| Produced by | Michael Epstein Thomas Lennon |
| Written by |
Richard Ben Cramer Thomas Lennon |
| Starring |
David McCullough (host) Orson Welles (archive) William Randolph Hearst (archive) Richard Ben Cramer (narration) |
| Distributed by | PBS |
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Release date
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Running time
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113 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
The Battle Over Citizen Kane is a 1996 documentary film about the clash between newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst and actor/writer/director Orson Welles over Welles's 1941 motion picture Citizen Kane, which is widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time.
The Battle Over Citizen Kane aired January 29, 1996, as an episode of the Public Broadcast System's The American Experience series. The documentary was narrated by Richard Ben Cramer, who co-wrote the program with Thomas Lennon.
In Citizen Kane, Welles plays Charles Foster Kane, whose fictional life partially mirrors that of Hearst's. However, Chicago inventor and utilities magnate Samuel Insull, Chicago Tribune publisher Robert R. McCormick, and even Welles's own life were used in creating Kane.
In 1939, based partly on the strength of his imaginative and successful New York plays which were produced under the aegis of the Mercury Theatre (such as an adaptation of William Shakespeare's Macbeth, which featured an all-black cast and was set in the jungle), and the infamy of his October 30, 1938 radio broadcast of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds which sent residents of Grover's Mill, New Jersey into a panic, Orson Welles was able to negotiate a virtually unheard-of two-picture deal with RKO Pictures, the smallest of the 'big five' major studios in this era. The deal gave him creative control under a budget limit.
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