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RKO 281 Review by Sean Axmaker
In
1995 the high-profile documentary, The
Battle Over Citizen Kane, framed the drama behind the making of what has is
now considered the greatest film ever made as a conflict of two powerful,
bull-headed personalities: Orson Welles, the upstart firebrand artist from the
East Coast whose first film took on a man that you simply do not take on, and
William Randolph Hearst, the millionaire newspaper tycoon who took such a dim
view of seeing his life, however veiled, dissected on the big screen for the
entire country to see that he did all he could to have the film destroyed before
it was ever seen. For a documentary that sought to explore the history of an
American masterpiece of complex motivations and contradictory personalities, it
reduced the drama to that battle. That’s not to say they ignored the factors
and the facts surrounding the drama, but it strains the portraits of its
protagonists to create parallel personal histories and reduces the complexity of
the conflict to fit within a neat collision of larger than life personalities:
irresistible force (art) meets immovable object (commerce). And if art wins the
battle, suggests the filmmakers, then commerce wins the war. The documentary
concludes that Hearst effectively destroyed Welles’ career and he again never
reached the aesthetic heights of Citizen Kane. RKO
281, the
drama inspired by the documentary, bends a few facts, shuffles the historical
timeline, and passes a few legends off as fact, but is actually a truer, more
complex view of the tenor of the time and the factors in the filmmaking. It too
turns on the conflict of personalities, but whereas the documentary, a work
rooted in fact and teasing the meaning from the accumulation of detail, reduces
the world of detail to a colorful war of egos, the fictional recreation, taking
liberties with history to create a dramatically exciting work of art, radiates
outward from that central war of wills to pull in the myriad of factors that
orbited around the conflict to suggest the web of complicated factors in the
production and release of Citizen Kane,
and the eventual reverberations of the entire wrestling match. Director Benjamin
Ross (The Young Poisonner’s Handbook)
and screenwriter John Logan distort the facts (perhaps more than necessary) to
paint an inclusive and complex portrait of the event and their conclusion
challenges the standard line (Kane is
the high point of a career in a downward spiral), insisting that Welles
continued to challenge the system and make great films on his own terms both in
and out of Hollywood. The
structure cleverly apes Citizen Kane,
opening with a moment from Welles’ childhood. The young Orson is at his
mother’s deathbed, a scene that evokes both Kane’s death scene and his
childhood farewell to his mother (in Thatcher’s flashback), colored in a
golden amber light in a darkened room that suggests both the warm glow of memory
and the darkness of death. Cut to a newsreel of the “boy wonder” Orson
Welles (Liev Schreiber) arriving in Hollywood, à
la “News on the March,” only without the aging, or for that matter
without any attempt to give it the look of grainy, high contrast 1940 newsreel
filmstock – a minor flaw. The reel finishes and the light comes up in the
screening room of Louis B. Mayer (David Suchet), who’s already tired of the
genius, and he hasn’t even shot a foot of film. Ross makes the quotes work by
giving them their own dramatic use. Like Kane,
these scenes quickly and succinctly give the viewer a quick sketch of our hero,
his history, and his new world, and the quotations are a clever nod to the
master. From
here on in the film goes it’s own way. For dramatic purposes, Logan has
centered Welles’ social life on a friendship with Herman J. Mankiewicz (John
Malkovich), Hollywood screenwriter, famous wit, and former scriptwriter for
Welles’ radio shows. The real life Mank was a Hollywood character, a
self-destructive alcoholic and gambler who by 1941 had a reputation for
unreliability and a tart tongue: he enjoyed skewering Hollywood with scalding
cracks and venomous quips. In the movie Mank is turned into a professional
party-guest who bandies his barbs in private and puts on a public face, playing
the stooge like he’s sold his soul to the Hollywood lifestyle. Malkovitch
plays him with great charm and good wit, though the script never approaches the
acidic sense of humor that earned the real life Mank his reputation. In perhaps
the film’s greatest historical fiction Mank takes Welles to a dinner party
thrown by Hearst, where Welles draws the ire of the bitter old man when he draws
all eyes with his storytelling prowess and wanders
the mansion, drinking in the details that will manifest in Citizen
Kane: the lavish works of art, the cavernous rooms that echo with quiet
footsteps, the unfinished picture puzzles on the floor. “I’ve got it,”
Welles blurts to Mank. “I know what we’re going to do… A modern feudal
lord.” Mank’s shocked response: “Because he insulted you at a dinner
party?” In point of fact Mank was persona non grata at the Hearst estate by the mid-1930s, Welles
never visited San Simeon, and historians agree that it was Mank who brought the
idea of Hearst to Welles. This bit of dramatic license doesn’t diminish the
film as drama but does challenge its claim to history. Welles
sells the idea to a reluctant George Schaefer (Roy Scheider), the head of
production at RKO. As much an artist as a businessman, Schaefer is an
often-neglected hero in the Kane saga
but is presented here with dignity and respect and invested with a courageous
passion by Scheider. Ross launches into a shorthand sketch of the pre-production
and production work on Kane, a streamlined version of events that only touches
on the creative aspects of Kane but nonetheless suggests the famous preparations
in a brief montage: repeated screenings of Stagecoach,
Welles editing the script in slashes and condensing with furious swipes of his
pen, his sneaky shooting under the guise of test shots, even digging a hole in
the studio floor to get that camera resting on the ground for his famous
distorted low angle shot. After an angry break with Mank precipitated by Welles
grabbing complete screenwriting credit – another facet the film distorts by
leaving the arbitration out and making Welles’ compromise a kind of peace
offering to Mank – he’s brought back in to become Welles’ confidant and
partner in crime and the two exchange conspiratorial glances on the set as they
break the rules and thumb their noses at the man who, predicts Mank, “will
destroy us.” Liev
Schreiber’s Welles comes into his own in these scenes, the charmer and the
monster, the face of modesty over the soul of the megalomaniac, the creative
artist plunged into his project and the egotistical star who takes Mank’s name
off the screenplay. Welles is no angel – he’s often a tyrant on the set
given to adolescent temper tantrums and has the nasty habit of turning on his
friends and allies as if they’ve betrayed him when things don’t go his way
– but neither is he the devil. Ross and Logan paint him as an ambitious artist
given to a temper and an ego, and a man who grabs onto his art with both hands
like it’s a living thing. Schreiber, who makes no pretense of aping Welles’
booming voice or theatrical flourish, creates his own character rather than a
funhouse distortion of an icon. If he doesn’t quite capture the intensity and
charm of Welles, he effectively suggests the richness and the contradictions of
the character. Enter
Hearst, played with haughty pride and the spoiled appetite of a man who has
always gotten his way by James Cromwell (who delivers a fine if one-dimensional
performance). Hearst is the hypocrite that Welles (appropriately enough given to
dissemblance himself) describes him in a rant. He keeps a mistress while railing
against immorality, fumes at seeing his life paraded on the screen while doing
just that to the public figures he dislikes in the Hearst newspaper chain, and
resorts to the blackest kind of blackmail to force Hollywood to keep Kane
off screens. But he’s in a position of weakness that even he won’t
acknowledge: he’s on the verge of bankruptcy. The mistress in question, former
silent movie star Marion Davies, is played with remarkable sweetness and
self-awareness by Melanie Griffith, perhaps her best performance in a decade.
When Hearst finally sees Kane he’s
incensed that anyone would have the gall, the effrontery to pass judgment on
him, while Marion tears up and says “They really pegged us, didn’t they Pop?
At least Kane married her.” If there is a real victim in the whole drama,
it’s Davies, unfairly tarred in Kane
as an untalented kewpie doll foisted on the public by a glory-hound husband, in
reality a talented comedienne whose career was mismanaged by Hearst (who saw
comedies as too vulgar for the mistress of a great man). One of the film’s
most touching moments is an illustration of her selfless sacrifice for Hearst as
she sticks by him through his financial woes. Ross
and Logan continue to play fast and loose with history, moving up the timelines
of Heart’s bankruptcy and George Schaeffer’s removal from RKO for dramatic
effect, and playing two apocryphal stories as history: the rumored original of
“Rosebud” as Hearst’s secret nickname for Marion Davies’ clitoris, and
the infamous elevator ride between Welles and Hearst days before the premiere of
Kane, where Welles offers an opening
night ticket to the old man. While it’s bad history, they do make for good
drama, something Welles would have enjoyed. After all, his own life was given
over to dramatic license. But
for all the historical inaccuracies, they get much of the story right. Even
better, they sketch the complex convergence of forces surrounding Citizen
Kane, including the pressure from RKO’s New York offices, from other
studio heads and from Hearst, with just enough detail to put the history in
perspective. Louella Parsons (Brenda Blethyn) and Hedda Hopper (Fiona Shaw) are
given over to brief but uncanny portraits of ego and competitive catty
nastiness, and for a brief moment Kane
and the career of Welles becomes a pawn in their own personal game of
one-upmanship. Unfortunately
lost in details is anything more than a cursory look at the production, which
hits all the highlights without really delving into the creative process or
Welles’ collaborations with his talented crew. Gregg Toland (Liam Cunningham)
buzzes through the film as a Welles confidante, but Bernard Herrmann (Kerry
Shale) and John Houseman (Simeon Andrews) get but one scene apiece. (The film
misses a brilliant opportunity by overlooking the volatile love/hate creative
partnership of Welles and Houseman, whose working relationship resembled a
bickering old couple, and Houseman was a silent but important behind-the-scenes
collaborator on the Kane script). The
weakest parts of the film, not surprisingly, are the dramatic recreations of the
scenes themselves being shot on the Kane
set. Angus Wright, through no fault of his own, is no Joseph Cotton, but his
efforts at mimicry made me cringe. For
the average film fan and the curious viewer, RKO 281 makes history into a fascinating story of the Hollywood
Studio system, the forces that actually run it, the rebel that thumbed his nose
in the face of authority. For the historians and Welles buffs it peppers the
drama with images and scenes that resonate with greater meanings (one marvelous
scene on a staircase suggests The
Magnificent Ambersons without actually quoting it), even if it distorts
facts to fit the filmmakers’ dramatic structure. Okay, the conflict becomes
more personal if Welles created Citizen
Kane out of schoolboy pique for getting insulted at a dinner party by one of
the most powerful men in America, even if it didn’t happen. But given the
constraints of budget, running time, and shooting schedule, I’d say they did a
better-than-fair job of it. (Ridley Scott originally developed the project as a
$40M film with Edward Norton as Welles, Dustin Hoffman as Man, and Marlon Brando
as Hearst, before the studio shot it down as too expensive for a boutique
picture.) But
factual details aside, Ross and Logan make the history live. RKO
281 is no Citizen Kane, nor is there any reason to expect it to live up to
“the greatest American film ever made,” but in its own way it pays homage to
Welles and his film by making its creation one of the most exciting Hollywood
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