different screenplays?

[Colmena]

I downloaded a CK screenplay, I'm not sure from where, assuming it would be what one finds in the Kael volume... but now I see that it is different, repeatedly and fundamentally. E.g. There's a scene where Kane visits the president! Can anyone identify or/and date this screenplay? -- the one where Kane visits the president.

Also, is Mank's original screenplay, The American, available anywhere?

Speaking of, in _This is OW_, Welles notes that he was unaware of Sturges' The Power and the Glory.
But it's certainly possible that Mank had seen it, and that it was an influence on The American, right?

(BTW, just to make this clear, in referencing Kael and Mank I am not advocating the position that the final script is still essentially Mank's.)

[Roger Ryan]

From my understanding, there were quite a few drafts of the KANE screenplay...probably more than any subsequent Welles film. The one included with the 50th Anniversary Videotape box is different from the one that Kael published as well (I'll have to check to see if it includes a "visit with the president"). The one big scene that Welles wrote himself (the 1929 meeting of Kane, Thatcher and Bernstein) was even written shortly before filming; it's a scene I consider to be one of the best in the film.

[Roger Ryan]

UPDATE: The 50th Anniversary set came with a screenplay dated "June 18th, 1940" and it does indeed contain the scene where Kane meets with the President to protest the leasing of oil reserves. Shortly after the President ignores Kane's pleas, the Inquirer publishes an article accusing the President of "Oil Theft!" ostensibly influencing an assassin to kill the President shortly thereafter. The sequence appears to be inspired by both President McKinley's assassination in 1901 and the "Teapot Dome" oil scandal which happened twenty years later. By the "third revised final script" dated "July 16th, 1940" (the one Kael published), this entire sequence is gone; the only remnant left is Kane's brief mention of "...this whole oil scandal" during one of his breakfasts with Emily.

Given that the screenplay published in THE CITIZEN KANE BOOK is the third revised final script and a letter written by Joseph Breen refers to a "July 9th, 1940" version as the "second revised final script", then the "June 18th, 1940" draft is either the first "final script" or the first revision of that script! Either way, that makes four drafts of what was called "final" and that doesn't count any earlier drafts. Welles would continue to edit and add his own material up to and during the shooting.

[Glenn Anders]

Yes, colmena, as usual, Roger is correct. There were many drafts of the screenplay. One example, which I quote extensively in my Epinions review, concerns the funeral of Kane's son, after a Fascist riot in Italy, in which Kane reads the epitaph on the tomb, an ancient, mordant poem about the foolishness of materialism. And of course, the most famous example of Welles' improvisation on the set of the picture involved his shutting down the shoot for a couple of days while, inspired by a play by his friend, Thornton Wilder, he came up with the montage sequence in which he summarized the marriage of Kane to Emily Norton Kane in a moment or so.

In many ways, the shooting continuity IS the screenplay for CITIZEN KANE.

Glenn