Citizen Kane (1941): 15 Weird Facts You Didn't Know!

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Remember when a black and white movie from 1941 somehow became the film that everyone calls the greatest of all time?

[00:00:06]Released by RKO Radio Pictures, starring Orson Wells as Charles Foster Kain, Joseph Cotton as his best friend Jedadia Leland, Dorothy as the doomed Susan Alexander, and Agnes Morehead as Kane's stone cold mother. A reporter chases down the meaning of one whispered word, rose bud, by digging through the life of a billionaire newspaper tycoon who built an empire, lost everyone who ever loved him, and died alone in a giant mansion full of stuff that he never opened. Today, we're going to count down 15 weird facts about Citizen Kane that you probably never knew. and stick around for number one because an actual billionaire declared fullon war on this movie and the lengths that he went to are wilder than anything in the film itself. But before we get into it, hit the like button and subscribe. It helps YouTube put this in front of more classic film fans who'd want to see it.

[00:00:57]All right, let's head to Xanadoo. Number 15. A 25-year-old rookie got Hollywood's most insane contract. Picture this.

[00:01:04]You're 25 years old. You've directed exactly uh let me count zero movies and a major Hollywood studio walks up, drops the keys in your hand and says, "Hey, the Final Cut's yours. Have fun." That actually happened. His name was Orson Wells. And in 1939, RKO handed him a contract that veteran directors couldn't pry out of a studio's cold dead hands, meaning final cut approval, full creative control to a guy who had never yelled action in his life. Wells had no feature films and no directing experience >> and I was supervised it and I thought a director did that in a movie. So for the first 10 days I was moving the lights around. You see >> what he did have was the lingering fame of his War of the Worlds radio broadcast. And he didn't ease in. He co-wrote Citizen Cain. He directed it, produced it, starred in it. One man takeover. The credits basically read like Wells four different times wearing four different hats. To prep for this, Wells grabbed John Ford's stage coach and watched it reportedly around 40 times. He ran it late at night with studio technicians. He would pause scenes. He'd ask how every shot was pulled off. Called it a movie textbook.

[00:02:10]Everyone else just called it what we watch on a Tuesday. Wells famously called RKO the greatest electric train set a boy ever had. That's a great line until you realize that he was about to tear up every piece of track in the layout. Number 14. There are literal dinosaurs hiding in the background. Now, Citizen Canain is a brooding saga about a newspaper empire, ego, and the meaning of one mysterious word. You know what?

[00:02:33]Nobody expected it to need dinosaurs.

[00:02:36]During the Everglades picnic scene, they're birds flying in the background.

[00:02:39]Except they're not birds. Those are pterodactyl silhouettes, most likely lifted from RKO's 1933 hit King Kong or its sequel, Son of Kong. Flying reptiles from the studio vault, casually flapping around the swamp like they clocked into the wrong movie. almost nobody notices because the footage is a bit dark and blurry and buried in the background. So, your brain just shrugs and labels them as swamp birds. And this wasn't some deep artistic statement about evolution or power. This was just a budget call.

[00:03:08]Building the Everglades on a sound stage was already burning cash. So, Wells and his team raided RKO's archives and asked the most reasonable question in Hollywood history. What do we already own? Answer: leftover dinosaurs. They layered the old footage in via rear projection and suddenly the background looked bigger, wider, and slightly off in a way that you couldn't quite name.

[00:03:29]Number 13. That massive crowd, that was just a giant optical illusion. The rally scene where Wells stands like a political rockstar addressing what looks like a stadium packed with thousands of cheering supporters. Well, that crowd didn't exist. They didn't have the cash to hire thousands of extras just to clap on command. So, Wells and his team faked the whole thing, but not the cheap way.

[00:03:50]Now, for the wide shots, the crew used a giant map painting of an audience. And then they punched holes through it and rigged moving lights behind the canvas.

[00:03:58]Those flickering pinpoints suddenly looked like thousands of people blinking, shifting, and reacting in real time. It was just a flat painting pretending very convincingly to be a packed arena. The painting team was led by Mario Larinaga, a guy who had already worked on King Kong, so visual trickery was kind of his day job. Chelsea Bonestelle and Fitch Falton joined in.

[00:04:17]The stage where Wells stood was the only thing physically real in the frame.

[00:04:22]Everything else that was just paint, holes, and lights. And then Wells leaned on his radio instincts and layered in echoing crowd noise and reverb until your ears were convinced that you were inside a giant auditorium. Your brain filled in the rest. Get the camera too close and the whole thing falls apart.

[00:04:38]But stay wide, keep it dim, and let the lights twinkle. And a flat painting, it becomes Madison Square Garden. Number 12. The fake news reel fooled audiences completely long before mockumentary citizen Kane pulled off one of the most convincing fakes in movie history and audiences fell for it completely. The opening news on the march sequence looks exactly like the kind of real news reel that played before features in 1930s theaters. That was the entire point.

[00:05:04]Wells wanted viewers to feel like they were watching actual history, not just a movie. To pull it off, they broke the film on purpose. The crew scratched the stock, messed with the contrast, manipulated processing, and matched inconsistent lighting to the varying quality of real archival material. They took brand new 1941 footage, and then beat it up so it looked decades old.

[00:05:24]Wells modeled the whole thing on the March of Time, a hugely popular newsre series of the era, and went full method on it by hiring RKO's actual news reel department to edit the sequence instead of their own film editor. The narration was recorded in that booming announcer voice that made everything sound earth shaking, even when it was describing a guy eating toast. Then they blended real stock footage of real world leaders like Adolf Hitler and Theodore Roosevelt with hidden camera shots of Wells as elderly cane. They even slipped in recycled footage from the 1940 Republic serial Drums of Fu Manchu, including, of all things, a rubber octopus. Number 11.

[00:06:01]That awful opera performance was 100% on purpose. Now, there's a scene where Susan Alexander steps onto an opera stage, opens her mouth to sing, and something just feels off. Not bad enough to laugh, but not good enough to enjoy.

[00:06:14]Just painfully uncomfortable. That wasn't an accident. Wells was messing with you on purpose. Instead of doing the obvious thing and casting someone who couldn't sing, he went the opposite direction and hired a trained soprano, Gene Forward. Then, composer Bernard Airman stepped in and basically said, "All right, cool. Now, let's make this unbearable." He wrote Susan's Arya in a style of a 19th century French opera, big and dramatic and emotionally intense, and he pitched it in a key that forced the singer to strain. The pieces climaxed on a brutal high D that sit well outside the character's supposed range. So, what you get is a skilled soprano deliberately sounding like she's reaching for notes that she can't quite grab. The whole opera was fake, too.

[00:06:56]Salambo. It doesn't exist. Herman composed it specifically for the movie because the massinet opera that Wells originally wanted to use was still under copyright. Cheaper to invent a whole new opera than license a real one. Wells didn't stop with the sound. The scene's most famous shot is the camera slowly drifting up past the stage, past the curtains, all the way up to the rafters until it lands on two stage hands on a catwalk. One of them looks at the other and gives a literal thumbs down. That's the review. That's how Wells tells you that the performance is a disaster without saying a word. Number 10, the screenplay was written from a hospital bed. Now, modern writer room drama has nothing on Citizen Kane. Try drafting a screenplay from a half-body cast on a remote ranch with a producer outside your door whose only job is to keep you sober. The screenplay is officially credited to Orson Wells and Herman J.

[00:07:46]Mangowitz. But who actually wrote it is what Hollywood spent the next 80 years arguing about. Let's start with Manowitz, or just M. Before the awards and the film school worship, he was laid up after a brutal car accident that shattered his leg in three places. So, Wells shipped him off to a secluded ranch in Victorville, California, about 80 miles outside of LA, and basically exiled him to the desert with one assignment, right? The location wasn't random. The ranch banned alcohol, which was the whole point. M was a famously messy drinker, and Wells needed pages, not bar tabs. John Houseman went along to ride herd on him priorities. So for roughly 10 weeks, M dictated the screenplay to his secretary, Rita Alexander. Yes, the actual inspiration for the name Susan Alexander Kaine.

[00:08:31]Those early drafts already had everything. The structure, the Hurst inspired storyline, even Rosebud.

[00:08:37]Meanwhile, Wells wasn't sitting around waiting for pages to show up in the mail. He'd spent weeks brainstorming the story with Mangawitz before any writing started. He drafted his own parallel version back in Hollywood and then reshaped everything in the final passes.

[00:08:50]So, who actually wrote Citizen Kane? It depends who you ask and what year you're asking. For decades, Wells downplayed M's role and leaned hard into being the primary author. But then, in 1971, critic Pauline Kale lobbed a grenade into the conversation with a New Yorker essay, arguing that Manowitz deserved sole credit. Most film scholars who actually went back and read the surviving drafts concluded the truth was actually somewhere in the middle. Both men contributed. Joint credit was correct. Number nine, Citizen Canain changed how movies were shot forever.

[00:09:21]Now, Hollywood had a system before Citizen Cane. Safe angles, flat lighting, sets without ceilings. Then, Orson Wells and cinematographer Greg Tolen walked in and basically said, "Yeah, we're not doing any of that."

[00:09:33]Tolen was already one of the most in- demand cameramen in Hollywood. And here's the wild part. He came to Wells.

[00:09:39]He walked into his office and pitched himself. When Wells asked why, Tolen said because Wells had never made a picture. So, he didn't know what couldn't be done. That's how the whole thing started. The pro just found a rookie naive enough to break every rule.

[00:09:52]Let's start with the ceilings. Most sets were open at the top so studios could shove massive lights and microphones overhead. But Wells wanted rooms to feel real and slightly suffocating. So, for that, they added muslin ceilings thin enough for sound to pass through so the audio team could hide a microphone up there without casting a shadow. Toland loved it. Mic shadows have been photobombing half of Hollywood for years. And then came the low angles. The crew built camera boxes into the floors so they could drop the lens below the action. For one specific shot, the brutal confrontation after Kane loses the election, well, they literally jackhammered a hole into the concrete to get the camera even lower. That's how you get those shots where the characters look like skyscrapers. So, when the camera physically couldn't pull off the shot though, they cheat beautifully.

[00:10:38]Effects wizard Lynwood Dunn used an optical printer to stitch elements together in post. so much that by his own estimate more than half the film contains some kind of effects work.

[00:10:48]Number eight, Orson Wells nearly destroyed himself making the film. You know how people say an actor gave everything to the role? Well, Wells took that a little too literally. During pre-production, he was reportedly drinking 30 to 40 cups of coffee per day. This wasn't a quirky habit. It landed him with a diagnosed case of caffeine poisoning before the cameras even rolled. So naturally, Wells decided to cut back by switching to tea, which would have been a smart move, except he had an assistant making it for him constantly. So he somehow ended up taking in even more caffeine to the point where his skin reportedly changed color. Then filming started. There was a scene where Kane absolutely loses it and trashes Susan's bedroom, smashing furniture, ripping things off walls.

[00:11:29]Full emotional meltdown. The catch?

[00:11:31]Well, Wells was wearing custom contact lenses to age his eyes. and they were so painful and distorting that he basically couldn't see what he was hitting. He also badly cut his wrist mid-cene.

[00:11:42]Toland had already rigged four cameras to capture the whole thing in one take.

[00:11:46]So, Wells just kept going, bleeding, still smashing things, still in character. That footage made the final cut. Wells later summed it up with the understatement of the century. I really felt it. And that was on top of the makeup. Three plus hours of prosthetics every morning starting at 2:30 a.m.

[00:12:02]applied by Maurice Ciderman, a guy that Wells found sweeping floors in the RKO makeup department. Hey, if you're enjoying this trip through old school Hollywood chaos, do us a favor. Hit that like button and subscribe if you haven't yet. And in the comments, tell us why you agree with critics and put this at the top of the list for best movie of all time. All right, let's try to make some sense of Rosebud. Number seven, one of the most famous props in the movie got rescued from the trash twice.

[00:12:28]Rosebud, the most famous word in Citizen Cane, the sled that powers the entire emotional payoff of the movie. The studio almost threw it in the trash multiple times. Per Wells, three balsa wood sleds were built for the furnace scene. Balsa burns fast and looked beautiful on camera. Two went into the fire. One pine sled was made for the earlier snow scenes with young Kane.

[00:12:48]That accounting got more complicated later. First, the Spielberg sled. The unused balsa from the furnace scene avoided getting burnt and then nearly got chucked anyway. A studio watchman pulled it from a literal trash pile outside the prop vault. It eventually went to auction in 1982 where Steven Spielberg picked it up for $60,500.

[00:13:07]He hung it at his office for decades and then donated it to the Academy Museum in 2018. Next, the Bower Sled, a pine sled from the childhood snow scenes that RKO gave away in a 1942 contest. The winner was a 12-year-old kid in Brooklyn named Arthur Bower. His family hung on to it for over 50 years before selling it at Christy's in 1996 for $233,500.

[00:13:33]And then there's the Dante sled. In 1984, a crew member cleaning out a storage room on the Paramount lot stumbled across an old sled and handed it to a young director shooting on the lot, Joe Dante. Dante kept it quiet for decades, even slipping it into his own movies as an Easter egg in Explorers, The BBS, and a few others. Then, in July of 2025, Dante sent it to auction. It sold for $14.75 million. That makes it the second most expensive piece of movie memorabilia ever sold, behind only Dorothy's Ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz. Three sleds, three rescues from the garbage.

[00:14:09]The only person who never owned one was Orson Wells himself, and he could have used the money. Number six, Rosebud might have been a filthy inside joke.

[00:14:18]According to one of Hollywood's most enduring rumors, Rosebud was William Randph Hurst's private pet name for a very intimate part of his mistress, actress Marian Davies. Yeah, not exactly something that you want turning up as the emotional centerpiece of a major motion picture. Writer Gore Vidal popularized the story in a 1989 New York Review of Books essay. The catch? Vidal admitted that he had no direct source.

[00:14:42]He never asked Hurst. He never asked Davies. The rumor had reportedly been circulating in Hollywood circles for years before he put it in print. But nobody could ever nail down exactly where it started. In Hollywood though, you don't need proof. You just need a rumor good enough to stick. And boy, this one stuck. The brilliance of the choice is right there on the surface. To anyone watching, Rosebud is a poetic little symbol of lost innocence. Sweet, respectable, Oscar friendly. But underneath, it might also be a private detail that would make a newspaper tycoon completely lose it. If Hurst believed that Wells had weaponized something that personal, his all-out war on the movie suddenly makes a lot more sense. Number five, the film was booed at the Academy Awards. Today, Citizen Cane sits on a throne. But back in 1942, Hollywood looked at the film, looked at Wells, and basically refused to clap for it. The 1942 Academy Awards turned awkward fast. According to Wells, every time Citizen Kain or his own name got announced as a nominee, parts of the crowd would boo. The catch? Well, Wells wasn't even there. He skipped the ceremony. So, the story comes from people who told him about it later. But the trade press at the time backed up the basic mood. Variety even reported that The Room had a personal grudge against Wells himself. The reasons were a bit obvious. Hurst had spent a year hammering the movie in his newspapers.

[00:16:00]Wells had spent that same year burning bridges with half of Hollywood. Industry veterans like rival nominee John Ford a lot more than they liked the 26-year-old wonder kid. So, the Oscars stopped being a celebration and just turned into a public grudge match. And then came the real punchline. The film walked in with nine nominations. Best picture, best director, best actor, the whole prestige bingo card. It walked out with only one.

[00:16:24]Best original screenplay, one trophy, good night. That single result locked Citizen Canain into one of the most famous Oscar snub stories in cinema history. The same film that got booed in 1942 now sits on top of every greatest movies ever made list. Like, it built the building. Number four, the movie quietly destroyed an innocent woman's career. The biggest real world casualty of the film wasn't a studio. It was Marian Davies, Hurst's longtime companion. Audiences walked out of theaters and made what felt like an obvious connection. Susan Alexander Kaine, the talentless singer being shoved into stardom by a powerful man.

[00:17:00]That had to be Davies, right? Well, that assumption stuck for decades. The reality was the exact opposite. Davies was a successful, respected comedic actress with sharp timing, genuine screen presence, and films that actually made money. She was named the number one female box office star in Hollywood in 1924 and crowned queen of the screen by theater owners. She survived the brutal silent toalkie transition that ended a lot of careers. Despite a lifelong stutter offscreen, she was a sharp businesswoman who once personally bailed out the Hurst Corporation with a million dollars of her own money. None of that survived the movie. Wells tried to correct the record. Later in life, he called Davies an extraordinary woman, nothing like Susan Alexander, and wrote the forward to her postumous 1975 memoir, defending her legacy. But once the public decides who you are, good luck rewriting that. And here's the kicker. Susan Alexander wasn't even based on Davies. Wells pointed to two Chicago tycoons as the actual blueprint.

[00:17:59]Samuel Insul, who built the Chicago Civic Opera House in 1929, and Harold Fowler McCormack, who pushed an opera career on his wife, Ghana, a singer of famously modest talent. But despite all that, Davey still stayed loyal to Hurst until his death in 1951. Number three, the original Master Negative was burned in a freak fire. Now, people love saying they don't make movies like this anymore, but with Citizen Cane, they literally cannot. Sometime in the 1970s, the original camera negative was lost.

[00:18:28]Most accounts say it burned in a lab fire. A few film historians think that it may have been mistakenly sent to a silver reclamation plant and stripped down for the metal and its emulsion.

[00:18:38]Either way, gone forever. If it did burn, that was nitrate film going up.

[00:18:42]The most volatile movie stock ever invented. It's so flammable that it could ignite without a spark. And once it goes up, it's nearly impossible to put out. Less fire hazard and more built-in self-destruct button. Every version of Citizen Cane that you've seen since, it's a copy, not the original.

[00:18:58]Restoers have had to rely on second generation materials. Firerin master positives and duplicate negatives. And in film preservation, every step away from the source costs you something. A little sharpness here, a little clarity there. Shadows get muddier. It's the photocopy of a photocopy problem. The cruel irony writes itself. In 1941, a coalition of Hollywood executives led by MGM boss Louis B. Mayor offered RKO 805,000 bucks to buy the negative and destroy it on Hurst's behalf, but RKO refused. The film survived its enemies.

[00:19:32]It sat in a studio vault for decades, and then somehow it disappeared. Anyway, now modern restorations, the 70th anniversary Blu-ray in 2011, the 80th anniversary 4K release in 2021 pulled the best surviving fine grain masters from archives around the world and digitally rebuilt the image scratch by scratch. Number two, those iconic shots cooked the cast alive. And those gorgeous, crystal clear, deep focus shots came with a price tag that nobody talks about. Heat and a lot of it. To keep everything sharp at once, Toland had to flood the sets with arc lamps so powerful that they turned the sound stages into ovens. No climate control, no craft services with cold towels. Just hit your mark and try not to melt. Wells had it worst. While everyone else was sweating through their costumes, he was buried under heavy prosthetic makeup to play elderly cane. Latex and adhesive don't love being parked under ark lamps for hours, which meant constant touch-ups between takes. For a man who was already getting up at 2:30 in the morning to put the stuff on in the first place, the lights themselves were a problem, too. To keep that much wattage from wrecking the image with glare, Toland had to bring in newly developed coated lenses just to cut the reflections. Revolutionary cinematography and absolutely brutal working conditions. The shots that put Citizen Kane in every film school textbook were paid for in sweat, sunburn, and slowly melting glue. And number one, a billionaire tried to burn the movie to the ground. You think online pylons are brutal? Yeah, cute.

[00:20:59]Citizen Kane was getting hunted by an actual newspaper tycoon with an actual army of newspapers before anyone knew what a hashtag was. The second that William Randph Hurst clocked that the movie looked suspiciously like a tour of his own life, he didn't get upset. He went to war. Step one, total blackout.

[00:21:16]Hurst owned dozens of newspapers and he ordered every single one to scrub the film from existence. No ads, no reviews, not even the title. That's not bad press, that's worse. Step two got darker. Hurst's allies, led by MGM boss Louis B. Mayor, offered RKO 805,000 bucks for the original camera negative.

[00:21:35]We just talked about that, right? Not to release it, but to burn it. The offer was delivered by Nicholas Shank, president of MGM's parent company.

[00:21:43]basically showing up to ask if the movie could quietly stop existing. Meanwhile, hostile studio interests reportedly planted spies on set to keep tabs on Wells. The cast and crews response, well, anytime unfamiliar suits would show up, they drop everything and start playing softball. Nothing kills a corporate intelligence report faster than a crew turning into a weekend wreck league. Step three was the smear.

[00:22:05]Hurst's papers branded Wells a Communist sympathizer. And in 1941, that's not a punchline. That was career ending. The accusation stuck. The FBI opened a file on Wells in early 1941, around the time of Citizen Kane's release. One internal report flatly concluded the film was an extension of the Communist Party's campaign against Hurst. The file stayed open until 1956, courtesy of one cranky media mogul who never let it go. And there you have it, everyone. 15 weird and wild facts about Citizen Kane, the movie that Hollywood tried to bury and then accidentally turned into a legend.

[00:22:39]What facts surprised you the most? Well, drop it in the comments. And if you enjoyed this one, hit that like button, subscribe, and share it with a friend who loves classic movies. Until next time, this is remember when.