Orson Welleswas once the king of the film world, or so it would seem. With the release ofCitizen Kane, Welles was anointed a wunderkind, the future of Hollywood filmmaking itself, at just 26 years old. The film got a warm critical reception but a miserable box office return, and as a consolation prize, it got nine Oscar nominations for its trouble. It’s good when great works of art actually get recognized by the Academy. That is, unless everybody in the room is booing each of your nominations out loud at the actual Oscars ceremony, then that feels like cruel hazing. That is also if you take Orson Welles at his word, which is a dubious gesture, to be sure.
‘Citizen Kane’ Is Considered One of the Greatest American Films
Citizen Kanewas many things: Welles’first major Hollywood film, arguably the single most important film made in American history, and inarguably one of the most triumphant instances of true artistic control in all film history.Patrick McGilligan’s biography,Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane,attests that, in order to properly pull Orson away from his previously dominant domain of theater, RKO Pictures headGeorge Schaefer, Jr.gave him an eye-popping contract: a two-picture deal where Orson would get $75,000 for acting, $60,000 for producing, and 45% of the combined net profits, for the two pictures. Even more importantly, Schaefer assured Welles that the only interference RKO would provide was story approval and potential editing of the final cut. In all other ways, Welles was free to do whatever he wanted artistically. In a time when auteur theory has been bastardized by modern Hollywood and big studios use the allure of a promising filmmaker to get audience interest only to then trample on said artist, Orson Welles was given the dream scenario that any artist would kill for.
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For that matter, what a dream project he wound up spinning.Citizen Kaneis a brilliant character examination of an immensely damaged mancorrupted and subsumed by his wealth and narcissism; it’s also one of the most formally innovative films of its time, full of roving camera shots and sharp angles and cross-cutting across time and unreliable narrators stacked upon unreliable narrators in a kaleidoscopically stitched together cinematic quilt. The saga of Charles Foster Kane and his childhood trauma has cast a shadow over all of American cinema, and an even bigger one over Welles himself, as the rest of his career could never live up to it. As Simon Callow wrote in hisbiography on Welles,The Road to Xanadu, therest of his career would be definedby “interference, containment, manipulation, limitation,” due to studio practices, constant budget problems, and his own extreme personality getting in the way of his vision.
Orson Welles Became a Victim of His Own Personality
WhenCitizen Kanewas finally released into the world, it was met with a…strange response. It was quite critically praised for the most part, but a miserable box office return; in total, the $737,740 budgeted film barely managed to make $1.6 million over the course of several re-releases, which was due in no small part to the powerful media mogulWilliam Randolph Hearst’s smear campaignagainst the film, angry for having so many elements of the film be based on Hearst’s own life. Despite that, the film received a total of nine Oscar nominations, four of which went to Welles himself. By his account,every one of these nominations were booedat the actual ceremony, and on top of that, he said that the crowd cheered harder for his co-writing partnerHerman J. Mankiewiczwhen the film won Best Screenplay. While on some level it would make sense for the crowd to openly boo Orson’s name, it’s quite telling that the only on-the-record source to make this claim is Welles himself. Callow makes this claim, but he doesn’t cite a direct quoted source, while McGilligan attributes Welles directly with the story, and immediately guesses that this could be an “exaggeration” of a bad memory, since neither Welles nor Mankiewicz was present at the Oscars that night.
So why would people boo Welles? For that matter, how did a film mostly liked by people, but also hated by a powerful man like Hearst, walk away with so few awards?VarietyMagazine reported on the Oscarsback in March 1942, and they mention three possible factors: one, the industry voters were easily persuaded by the eventual Best Picture winnerHow Green Was My Valleydirected by industry veteranJohn Ford; two, it theorizes thatCitizen Kanegetting nine nominations was an apology for how grotesquely he was “treated and maligned by the Hearst papers”; third, and most interestingly, the “extra vote scuttled him. It was patent that the mob didn’t like the guy personally.” At the time, extras were allowed to vote on “best picture, the four actor and actress classes and the best song.” In other words, an estimated 6,000 extras held sway over the fate ofCitizen Kane’s Best Picture status because they collectively looked at Orson Welles and said “that guy’s a prick.”
The Pride and Bluster of Orson Welles
As far back as his theater days, Orson Welles was known for being a prick. By Callow’s account, Orson’s ego-driven behavior could manifest in countless ways: from reinterpreting stories from his past to make him look or feel better, to finding it unacceptable that a suggestion of his could be refused, to planning on his Mercury Theater doing numerous productions and nationwide tours without any proper consultation with the actors and crew he worked with. He always put his artistic endeavors before everyone else, and was also quite verbose in talking about how he felt about all things artistic, most notoriously when he condescendingly referred to getting to make a Hollywood film as like getting the “greatest railroad train a boy ever had.” Per McGilligan’s book, this combination of public knowledge of his behavior and the gossip of the influential columnists likeLouella ParsonsandHedda Hopperspreading the gospel on this image of Welles as a supposed “genius” with the most “record-breaking” contract despite having no actual filmmaking experience, snowballed into pro-Welles and anti-Welles camps being formed both in the industry and among the public. This wasn’t helped by Welles continuing to engage in behavior that would warrant such debate, like insisting that most screen actors couldn’t compare to theater actors.
All told, you take a brilliant yet mercurial actor, prone to shooting his mouth off and coming off as self-impressed. Then you give him unfathomable amounts of artistic power, roll the media out to help introduce the film world to him, only to have himself again proven as both easily charming and fiercely divisive in his personality. He makes a film that, regardless of whether it’sthe best of all time or not, is a promising first step in what could be an illustrious career, that hits quite well with the industry but not with the public. The industry decides to reward said film in spite of all the controversy it’s brought, at a time when one of the most powerful men in the world is trying to actively keep the film from even existing, and a certain chunk of the audience can’t stand the man responsible for said film. What do you get when you put all that together? You get Orson Welles getting booed at the Academy Awards…if you ask Orson Welles.
