At the beginning of "News on the March" the several shots of buildings with Spanish Architecture were filmed at San Diego's Balboa Park. The statues "El Cid" and "Youthful Diana" were also located in Balboa Park. Both statues are by Anna Hyatt Huntington (1876-1973). "El Cid" is still standing. "Youthful Diana" is not currently visible but is owned by the San Diego Museum of Art. The large birdcage in the newsreel is one of two located at the San Diego Zoo.
Both the appearance and the voice of Charles Kane when he's older were inspired by Victor Moore as "Pa" Cooper in Make Way for Tomorrow.
Both Welles' and Mankiewicz's Oscar statuettes were auctioned by Nate D. Sanders Memorabilia. Welles' statuette sold for $861, 542 on December 20, 2011. Mankiewicz's statuette sold for $588, 455 on February 28, 2012.
Despite all the publicity, the film was a box office flop and was quickly consigned to the RKO vaults. At 1941's Academy Awards the film was booed every time one of its nine nominations was announced. It was only re-released for the public in the mid-1950s.
Dispute still rages over ownership of the original idea for the script, with many claiming that it was the brainchild of co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz. In his school days, Orson Welles wrote a play titled "Marching Song." Though never produced, it was the exploration of a public figure through the testimonies of the people in his life. Mankiewicz certainly wrote the first draft of the screenplay, which took him about six weeks.
During filming Orson Welles received a warning that William Randolph Hearst had arranged for a naked woman to jump into his arms when he entered his hotel room, and there was also a photographer in the room to take a picture that would be used to discredit him. Welles spent the night elsewhere, and it is unknown if the warning was true.
During the opening shots of Xanadu, the single light coming from the window of Kane's mansion stays in basically the same position of the frame even though the angles of the house change every few seconds.
During the scenes where Kane first buys his newspaper and delivers the line about going bankrupt in 60 years, Orson Welles appears to be dressed as himself at his actual age. Welles has indicated in interviews that he was even more made up playing a young man than he was playing Kane as an old one; "temporary" facelifts and hair styling as well as camera tricks make him look much more beautiful than he actually was. Welles said that he spent years living down how far he'd come down from his "youthful looks," when in fact he never really looked that good.
For the later scenes featuring an older Kane, Orson Welles sat in the make-up chair from 2:30 am to be ready for a 9:00 am start.
For the new footage in the opening newsreel to look suitably grainy, editor Robert Wise came up with the idea of physically dragging the footage across a stone floor and running across a cheesecloth filled with sand. These efforts went unappreciated in some quarters: one cinema distributor contacted RKO to complain about the film stock being of inferior quality and demanded a replacement print.
For the opening shot of the "El Rancho" sequence where the camera appears to move through a gap in the neon sign, a collapsible sign had to be built that could be split in two to allow the camera to pass through.
For this movie Orson Welles, along with cinematographer Gregg Toland, pioneered "deep focus", a technique that keeps every object in the foreground, center and background in simultaneous focus. This brought a sense of depth to the two-dimensional world of movies.
In 1971, shortly after Pauline Kael's infamous "Raising Kane" essay first appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire printed the "Kane Mutiny", an essay apparently by Peter Bogdanovich that disputed most of Kael's claims. However, the essay was actually written by Orson Welles.
In an attempt to recoup some of its losses after its initial box-office flop, RKO distributed this film in January 1942 on a double bill with The Little Foxes starring Bette Davis.
In the 1970s, film critic Pauline Kael wrote an essay called "Raising Kane". In it, she credited co-screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz for writing the entire script for this film, while alleging that Orson Welles "didn't write one line of the shooting script." However, this conclusion has very little factual basis, and was largely based on hearsay. The shooting script was actually based on two scripts (written separately by Welles and Mankiewicz) that Welles combined into one for the final version.
In the scene where Bernstein enters the Inquirer amidst a pile of boxes and luggage, some of the boxes are labeled "891" and "LOT 891." Unit 891 was the WPA theater company Orson Welles directed for (and starred with) before shooting this picture.
In the scene where Jedediah confronts Kane, Joseph Cotten had stayed awake for 24 hours before the shoot so as to finish in order to start a play in New York. He makes an error and says "dramatic crimiticism," a flub that Cotten inadvertently made in rehearsals that Welles decided to use.
It is widely believed that Ted Turner had plans to colorize the film, but that wide public outcry led to his decision not to. The rumor came from a tongue-in-cheek comment from Turner that he would colorize the film in order to bait critics of the process. In actuality, Orson Welles had the rights to the film, and Turner couldn't have colorized the film even if he had wanted to. Nonetheless, the controversy over the potential alteration of this film was one of the catalysts that eventually led to the film industry requirement that all future video and TV releases of films that have been altered in any way - including the standard conversion from widescreen to "pan and scan" - must carry a disclaimer indicating the film has been "modified from its original version." It is also widely believed that when he heard about it, Welles supposedly roared, "Tell Ted Turner to keep his crayons away from my movie!" However, being that he owned the rights to the film, it is highly unlikely that he ever made any such statement.
It was RKO head George Schaefer who suggested the title change from "American" to "Citizen Kane." Orson Welles had also wanted to call the film "John Q."
Mr. Bernstein's first name is never revealed.