Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane (106 page)

Most books say that Van Nest Polglase, the head of RKO’s production design department, assigned art director Perry Ferguson to Orson’s still-undisclosed project. “There are
Citizen Kane
alumni who maintain to this day that assignment to the Welles unit at RKO was a sure mark of studio disfavor,” wrote Robert L. Carringer in
The Making of Citizen Kane.
“Ferguson’s case demonstrates the contrary. At the time, he was the RKO art department’s rising star.”

In at least one published interview, however, Welles said he asked for Ferguson. Born in Texas, long a draftsman before rising to unit art director at RKO in 1935, Ferguson had distinguished himself working with top director Howard Hawks on the screwball comedy
Bringing Up Baby
in 1938 (“one of the costliest pictures made by the studio up to its time,” according to Carringer) and on a number of George Stevens productions, culminating in 1939 with
Gunga Din.
Stevens gave the unassuming Texan high marks for ingenuity and cost-efficiency.

Ferguson listened as Orson outlined his unusual ideas for creative camerawork. Welles envisioned using miniatures to conjure the towering Xanadu, for instance, and matte backgrounds to fake crowd scenes. Illustrating his thoughts with quick pencil drawings, Orson explained that he wanted to shoot certain scenes from extremely low angles, and wanted the camera to show the ceilings of rooms. “I suppose I had more low angles in
Kane
just because I became fascinated with the way it looked,” Welles said decades later, “and I do it less now because it’s become less surprising.” His ideas would require unusual adjustments: soundstage floors would have to be dug up for the camera crew, and the sound and light would have to pass through false ceilings.

Ferguson met every idea halfway, suggesting that they could try crafting the ceilings from dyed muslin—a material that was both flexible and, crucially, inexpensive. The script had not yet been evaluated for costs, but Orson and everyone else worried about limiting expenses as much as possible. “It became necessary to cheat many of the settings, particularly those at Xanadu,” Simon Callow wrote. Ferguson knew how to design only what the camera would show, with Orson’s extreme low angle shots leading the eye into darkness, where the unconstructed borders could be shrouded in velvet drapes, recalling the “black art” of magicians.

Ferguson listened amiably, nodding. He was already preparing preliminary storyboards by the time another man strolled into Orson’s studio office in early June. God had sent Orson a gift in the form of cinematographer Gregg Toland—God, or perhaps the veteran director John Ford, one of the unlikely patron saints of
Citizen Kane.
Toland had just shot Ford’s films
The Grapes of Wrath
and
The Long Voyage Home
, both released in 1940. Did Ford encourage Toland to visit Orson and volunteer his services? Ford knew that Welles had been studying his pictures, screening them repeatedly, and the veteran director visited the set of
Citizen Kane
on one of the first days of shooting to say a brisk hello. (He also warned Welles that Eddie Donahoe, his assistant director, was a front-office snitch: “Old Snake-in-the-Grass Eddie,” Ford muttered.)

Toland was about ten years older than Welles but they had much in common. Both were from Illinois, both were the children of divorced parents. Toland’s hometown—Charleston, Illinois, about two hundred miles southeast of Chicago—was not far from Orson’s mother’s hometown, Springfield, yet it was so far south it was almost Kentucky. (During the Civil War, half the Tolands joined the antiwar “copperheads.”) When Toland was about ten, his parents had separated bitterly, his father moving to Chicago, his mother taking Gregg to California.

As a young man Toland showed an aptitude for electrical engineering, and at fifteen he dropped out of school to work at the Fox studios, first as an office boy, then joining George Barnes’s camera crew, becoming an assistant cameraman in 1920. Since his first cinematography co-credit in the mid-1920s, Toland had established himself as one of the outstanding practitioners of his craft, and in the last five years he had earned five Academy Award nominations, winning for
Wuthering Heights
in 1940, a short time before he reported to work on
Citizen Kane.

A mustachioed, diminutive figure in thick, buggy glasses, Toland was a man of “extreme reserve,” according to one newspaper profile. Although soft-spoken and easygoing, he was highly disciplined at work, with a regular crew that followed his every slight gesture or whispered instruction. (By contrast, Welles told Bogdanovich, Toland was “quite a swinger off the set.”) Toland had studied acting, makeup, and costuming to understand the challenges they posed for cinematographers, and he kept up with the theater scene in New York. (One of his Oscar nominations was for the faithful Hollywood adaptation of the Broadway hit
Dead End.
) Toland had been impressed by Welles’s Voodoo
Macbeth
, the Nuremberg lighting of his
Julius Caesar
, and the striking scene and lighting designs of several of his other plays. When he met Welles, the cameraman stuck out his hand. “My name is Toland,” he said: “I want you to use me on your picture.”

Orson, of course, knew Toland’s name. When the cameraman asked about the spectacular lighting of Welles’s New York productions, he raised an eyebrow at the reply: Orson said that he always designed his own lighting, and that it was common practice for the finest stage directors. Later, during the filming of
Citizen Kane
, Orson initially tried to supervise the lighting himself, with Toland “behind me, of course,” in his words, “balancing the lights and telling everybody to shut their faces.” Toland wanted to make Welles’s ideas work without deflating him, and was infuriated when a subordinate told Welles that the lighting was Toland’s job. After that, however, Orson deferred to his cinematographer.

Orson told Toland that the film he was preparing would involve many interior shots with both sharp foregrounds and pristine backgrounds, as well as hung ceilings to strike “the desired note of reality,” Toland recalled. The challenge lay in lighting from the floor as much as possible, and obtaining what was then called a “universal focus,” bringing clarity to both foreground and background. Toland called it “pan-focus,” a technique that kept everything in focus even when the camera was panning (moving from side to side). And the camera, much like Welles himself, would be moving often, almost continuously.

Orson said he wanted to avoid the standard master shots; to limit the use of close-ups; and as often as possible to combine the elements of a conventional two-shot setup into “a single, non-dollying shot,” in Toland’s words. One example that Toland later cited was the “big-head close-up of a player reading the inscription on a loving-cup” in the scene where Kane displays the photograph of celebrated reporters from a rival newsroom—a shot in which the inscription on the loving cup and the faces of Bernstein and Leland are closest to the viewer. “Beyond this foreground,” framing the loving cup, “a group of men from twelve to eighteen feet focal distance” is revealed with equal crispness—as is, finally, a young man in a doorway at the back of the room, far from the camera, shouting, “Here he comes!”

Always the innovator, Welles was eager to test the limits and break the rules of standard camera practices. And Toland was tired of the limits and rules followed by even the very best Hollywood directors—with their studio overseers often forcing their hands. “I want to work with somebody who has never made a movie,” Toland explained. Welles, who never forgot Toland’s generous gesture, frequently repeated those words to interviewers later in life.

Toland and Ferguson had never collaborated before, and together with Welles they developed a creative team spirit. Like Welles, Toland and Ferguson were fast and flexible. When Orson told them his idea for the fake newsreel
News on the March
, Toland started planning techniques to replicate the scratchy image of a real newsreel. (When
Citizen Kane
was shown in Italy, Welles later told Peter Bogdanovich, audiences “stood up and hissed and booed” during the
News on the March
sequence because the footage appeared “so bad.” He added: “You know the total run in Rome in the entire life of
Citizen Kane
is three days—since it was made!”) Ferguson made lists of stock set pieces and props the filmmaking team could poach during the filming: train platforms, high balconies, painted backdrops. “There was a big back lot,” Welles remembered, “and as we were moving from one place to another, we’d say, ‘Well, let’s get on the back of the train and make [a shot of Kane] with Teddy Roosevelt, or whoever it was. It was all kind of half improvised—all the newsreel stuff. It was tremendous fun doing it.”

They had the same fun on a shoestring with the home movie–type trailer Orson concocted during the filming
about
the filming. It’s probably the greatest trailer ever made, four minutes long, voiced by Welles, unseen, who wittily introduces the other leads as they don their makeup or bump into microphones backstage. (Here’s Agnes Moorehead—“one of the best actresses in the world”—and Joseph Cotten: “Hey, give Jo a little light. Now smile for the folks, Jo!”)

Orson completed his production team with a sensible young editor who later would sit patiently alongside him for months, shuffling through the footage, looking for the perfect combination of shots. Robert Wise, a midwesterner the same age as Welles, had worked genially with Garson Kanin on small comedies and he also had edited
The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
With so many shots that required images to be composited, or overlapped with another image (“One informed estimate is that fifty percent of the film’s total footage involves special effects of one kind or another,” Robert L. Carringer wrote), Welles also relied heavily on RKO special effects chief Vernon L. Walker and Linwood G. Dunn, the optical illusion master on
King Kong
who had helped with the
Heart of Darkness
tests.

Although Ferguson was entirely responsible for
Citizen Kane
’s art direction, studio tradition mandated that his department head, Van Nest Polglase, be given the onscreen credit, with Ferguson listed only as “Associate Art Director.” Mindful of this slight, Orson often took care to lavish praise on Ferguson in later interviews. When it came to Toland, however, Orson honored him with an onscreen credit that was almost unique: Welles placed his own credit, “Orson Welles, Direction-Production,” on the same card as “Gregg Toland, A.S.C., Photography.”

When Welles boasted about the gesture in one of their later interviews, Peter Bogdanovich pointed out that John Ford had given Toland the same special credit on
The Last Voyage Home.

Welles didn’t blink. “Gregg deserved it, didn’t he?” he rejoined.

On May 28, RKO issued a program announcement listing fifty-three feature films the studio planned to produce in 1940–1941. Among them was “John Citizen, U.S.A.,” the title it was still using for the project. The cameras were scheduled to roll on Orson Welles’s first production on June 10. According to the announcement, Welles would star as a “crusading publisher,” aging from twenty-two to seventy-five in the course of the story. “Maybe he’ll even have the chance to wear a beard again,” Edwin Schallert speculated in the
Los Angeles Times.

Orson went to New York for a studio sales convention at the Waldorf-Astoria, where he joined RKO stars Anna Neagle, Lee Tracy, and Jean Hersholt and director-producer Herbert Wilcox for a luncheon with exhibitors and distributors in the grand ballroom. Afterward, Welles met privately with the studio president George Schaefer. Neither man was enamored of the title “John Citizen, U.S.A.,” or the alternative, “American,” and it was at this meeting that Schaefer proposed a keeper: “Citizen Kane.” Orson leaped at the suggestion. “The head of the studio, imagine that!” Orson recalled to Peter Bogdanovich. “It’s a great title.” By the time Welles returned to Hollywood, the new title was in place. “One of the quickest title changes on record,” noted Thomas M. Pryor in his Hollywood column in the
New York Times.

Except for the brief flap over his supposed contempt for Hollywood, expressed in his speech in Kansas City, the press had been unusually quiet about Orson since February. The studio had stopped issuing progress reports on
The Smiler with the Knife.
Now the news of the imminent filming of
Citizen Kane
flew across the wires and stirred anticipation in the screen trade.

But June 10 was overly optimistic, Orson told Schaefer in New York. Welles renewed his pledge to start photography before the one-year anniversary of his RKO contract, but first he had to finish work on the script—and to finish it properly he had to get away from the studio and Hollywood. After a night at Ciro’s with Dolores Del Rio, who became more conspicuous in his life as the start of filming neared, Orson left town—not for Victorville, more likely for Palm Springs.

“Am just now polishing up a script that needs it very badly,” Welles reported in a June 8 telegram to Ashton Stevens in Chicago, “and during the past week have been mostly and literally in the desert pursuing a strict, even fanatical isolationist policy.”

Orson’s periods of isolation always fueled his creativity. Here, in the California desert, he would finalize the script, although the rewriting and refining would continue throughout the filming. (“I saw scenes written during production,” said Orson’s secretary, Kathryn Trosper. “Even while he was being made up, he’d be dictating dialogue.”)

The character of Charles Foster Kane was a chief focus of the desert getaway. Mankiewicz’s characterization of Kane was still too rigidly tied to the real-life Hearst. And just as Orson waited until the last moment to master his own performance in a stage play, he waited until now to surrender his attention to Kane, transforming the character “from Mankiewicz’s cardboard portrait,” in Robert L. Carringer’s words, “to the complex and enigmatic figure we see in the film.”