Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (60 page)

Henry Kissinger’s real name: Heinz Kissinger.

In 2000,
Kane
was voted the best film of all time by the American Film Institute. Good choice. Here’s why.

When
Citizen Kane
premiered on May 1, 1941, the
New York Times
film critic called it “far and away the most surprising and cinematically exciting motion picture in many a moon. As a matter of fact, it comes close to being the most sensational film ever made in Hollywood.”

But in early 1941 it seemed like the film would never even make it to the theaters, let alone win public acclaim. Newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, the inspiration for the film’s main character, Charles Foster Kane, waged a no-holds-barred campaign to destroy the film. He offered RKO president George Schaefer $800,000 to burn the negative and all the prints in a bonfire; Schaefer refused. When that failed, Hearst tried to prevent it from being widely released.

For the most part, he succeeded: because of Hearst’s influence the major theater chains refused to book it, forcing
Kane
to premiere in smaller, independent theaters. The film was a commercial flop, and Orson Welles—the genius who made it—never recovered from the disaster. RKO never again gave him the artistic freedom he’d had in making
Citizen Kane,
and most of his later film projects were commercial flops.

To the few who saw
Citizen Kane
in its initial run, it was a masterpiece. To the rest of America, it was quickly forgotten. As Harlan Lebo writes in
Citizen Kane: The Fiftieth Anniversary Album,

Through 1950,
Citizen Kane
played here and there, principally in the scattered revival theaters in larger cities that showed “oldies.” But that was all.
Citizen Kane
disappeared in the United States almost entirely, and it didn’t emerge again for more than five years.

Why is honey so easy to digest? Because it has already been digested by the bee.

In the United States,
Citizen Kane
finally reappeared in 1956—on
television.
And there it developed a following. “Its time had finally come with the general audience,” Lebo writes. “Several polls of film fans placed
Citizen Kane
at the top of the picks of screen favorites.”

Citizen Kane’s
TV showings also made it a hit with a new generation of film critics. Over the next several years, the film’s stature continued to grow. In 1962 the British magazine
Sight and Sound
released a critics’ poll of the best films of all time.
Citizen Kane
was #1.

In a world where no one can agree on anything, most serious critics seem to agree that Citizen
Kane
is the best film ever made. Why?

For one thing, “talkies” had only been around for 14 years when
Kane
made its debut, and in that time filmmaking had become predictable. Virtually all movies used the same stale camera angles, the same lighting, and the same types of sets.
Citizen Kane
broke all the rules. It introduced avant-garde storytelling and cinematography methods to Hollywood. And the film was crafted with Welles’ incredible attention to detail, from the music to the lighting.

• Before
Citizen Kane,
most films were organized chronologically: they began at the beginning and ended at the end.
Kane
famously begins at the end, when a dying Charles Foster Kane whispers “Rosebud.” From there the film moves back to Kane’s childhood, and tells the story of his life…from the perspectives of five different people. Welles explains: “They tell five different stories, each biased, so that the truth about Kane, like the truth about any man, can only be calculated, by the sum of everything that has been said about him.”

• Welles also compressed much of Kane’s life story into a fictional newsreel segment that was incredibly realistic for its time. Editor Robert Wise blended 127 different clips of film into the newsreel: Some were clips of actual news footage, others were staged shots of Welles and other actors. Wise “aged” the new footage by dragging the negatives across a concrete floor, giving them authentic-looking scrapes.

• In another famous sequence, Welles illustrates the breakdown of Kane’s first marriage with a montage of scenes of Kane and his wife at the breakfast table. The first shot shows the newlyweds madly in love with each other; over the next several scenes, they age gradually, denoting the passage of time, and become increasingly distant. In the last scene, they sit at opposite ends of a long table in stony silence. The sequence is less than three minutes long, but it took six weeks to put together.

• Welles and cinematographer Gregg Toland spent weeks setting up
Citizen
Kane’s scenes and planning camera angles. “This is unconventional in Hollywood,” Toland wrote in
Popular Photography
in 1941, “where most cinematographers learn of their next assignments only a few days before the scheduled shooting starts.”

• Toland used “deep-focus” camera techniques, including special film, lenses, and lighting developed especially for
Citizen Kane,
that made everything on screen appear in focus at the same time, an unheard-of practice in Hollywood. “The normal human eye sees everything before it clearly and sharply,” Toland wrote. “But Hollywood cameras focus on a center of interest and allow the other components of a scene to ‘fuzz out’.…The attainment of approximate human-eye focus was one of our fundamental aims…in some cases we were able to hold sharp focus over a depth of 200 feet.”

Liza Minnelli, daughter of Judy Garland, married Jack Haley, Jr., the son of Jack Haley, who played the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz.

It was no accident that the musical score fit the film like a glove: unlike other films,
Citizen Kane
and its music were created side by side. “I worked on the film, reel by reel, as it was being shot and cut,” composer Bernard Herrmann wrote in 1941. “Most musical scores are written after the film is entirely finished, and the composer must adapt his music to the scenes on the screen. In many scenes in
Citizen Kane,
an entirely different method was used, many of the sequences being tailored to match the music.”

Since the story takes place over 50 years, the actors age greatly throughout the film; Kane, for example, ages from 25 to 78. Makeup artist Maurice Seiderman invented many techniques to age the characters in the film. Rather than just cover Welles with latex wrinkles and gray hair, he made a complete body cast and used it
to create custom-fitting body pads and facial appliances that show Kane aging gradually over 27 different stages of his life.

son of Jack Haley, who played the Tin Man in
The Wizard of Oz.

The level of detail is astonishing: Welles wore special milky, bloodshot contact lenses to make his eyes look old, and 72 different facial appliances, including hairlines, cheeks, jowls, bags under his eyes, and 16 different chins. Some pieces even had artificial pores that matched those in Welles’s own skin.

If you look for ceilings in most movie scenes, you won’t find them. The powerful lamps needed to light a scene are usually hung above the set, where a ceiling would normally go. But scenes in
Citizen Kane
used a cloth canopy that simulated an actual ceiling. “The sets have ceilings,” Toland wrote, “because we wanted reality, and we felt it would be easier to believe a room was a room if its ceiling could be seen in the picture. Furthermore, lighting effects in unceilinged rooms generally are not realistic because the illumination comes from unnatural angles.” Since ceiling lights were not possible, most shots were lit using floor lights.

• Most of the actors in
Citizen Kane,
Welles included, had never been in a movie before. They had only appeared on stage and on radio as members of Welles’s Mercury Theater company. They were not a part of the Hollywood culture and did not feel bound by the conventions of 1940s filmmaking.

•
Citizen Kane
had almost no close-up shots of the actors, which were extremely common at the time. But the Mercury actors were used to performing with the audience at a distance. Welles was afraid their exaggerated gestures and boisterous theatrical acting style—which were calculated to be seen and heard in the most distant seats of a large theater—would look artificial at close range. So he left the close-ups out.

“Fifty years later, Citizen Kane is as fresh, as provoking, as entertaining, as funny, as sad and as brilliant as it ever was. Many agree it is the greatest film of all time. Those who differ cannot seem to agree on their candidate.”

—Film critic Roger Ebert

Story most often made into a movie:
Cinderella
(59 times).

More proof that truth really is stranger than fiction.

TOPEKA, Kansas—“A 53-year-old Kansas woman reportedly shot herself in the head and then called 911 for help. Firefighters found her unconscious and assumed she was dead, without checking for a pulse. An ambulance was cancelled, and firefighters and deputies waited outside the home to protect it as a crime scene. Meanwhile, the woman regained consciousness and called 911 again. Firefighters outside the home were told of the call and rushed inside to provide medical care.”

—
Bizarre News

“A 51-year-old London man, out of work 14 weeks with broken ribs after being hit by a bus, was billed $850 for damage to the bus.”

—
Funny Times

“In one of the strangest alliances ever, members of the Pagans Motorcycle Club allegedly conspired with some young Amish men to sell cocaine to Amish youth groups. According to their plan, the drugs were to be sold during hoedowns.”

—
Wacky News

“Prominent Vermont hunter Thomas Venezia, 41, was finally brought to justice after several shooting sprees, marauding through Canadian woods. An undercover agent quoted Venezia after one illegal shooting: ‘I have the
K
chromosome. I love to kill. I have to kill.’ Once, Venezia spontaneously leaped from a truck and started firing at ducks, then later at pigeons because, he said, he had gone an hour without killing anything. At a hearing in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Venezia, sobbing, admitted the incidents and was
permanently barred from Canada. However, he remains licensed to hunt in Vermont.”

—
News of the Weird

A third of the Earth’s land surface can be classified as desert.

“Children at a kindergarten in Nelson, New Zealand, are now required to carry a pretend weapon permit if they want to carry a pretend weapon to play pretend cops and robbers.”

—“Quick Takes,” Chicago Sun-Times

“According to Sasquatch researcher David Shealy, who also owns an RV park in Ochopee, Florida, love is in the air for a Florida Bigfoot known as the ‘skunk ape.’ Shealy claims as many as nine of the creatures roam the Everglades, and reports their love calls sound ‘something like Barry White doing a dove call.’ ”

— “The Edge,”
The Oregonian

“Poet William Adrian Milton, 59, told reporters that his recent CAT scan revealed to his complete surprise that he had a bullet in his head. Searching his memory, Milton recalled a 1976 incident in which he wandered too close to a street fight, heard a noise, and was knocked down. He said he staggered home bloody and went to bed, but failed to seek medical treatment because the bleeding soon stopped and the remaining lump was consistent with being hit by a brick. Milton said he’ll leave the bullet there.”

—New York Post

“Eight farmers in the town of Nemaha, Iowa, have taught themselves to perform various square-dancing routines (do-si-dos, promenades, etc.) on their tractors. However, since all the farmers are men and square-dancing is a couples activity, four of the dancers operate their tractors while dressed in calico skirts.”

—Universal Press Syndicate

The average American ate the equivalent of 23 whole chickens in 2000.

Did you hate your name when you were growing up? Maybe that’s because you didn’t know what it means. See if you can match the following names with their meanings.