Noted author Harlan Lebo has provided Orson Welles fans with something special as the 80th anniversary of Citizen Kane nears — a new transcript of the landmark film.
Lebo, author of the acclaimed Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker’s Journey, noted that he found previous transcripts of the finished film to be “universally dreadful.”
“I guess that all of the transcripts come from the same original source, because they all have the same large volume of errors, missing scenes, and misspellings,” he added.
He undertook the production of a new transcript for film scholars and Welles fans. It has been posted to Scribd and shared with Wellesnet.
With the upcoming Netflix release of the Herman J. Mankiewicz biopic Mank, Lebo expects the issue of Kane‘s authorship will again be raised.
He believes the transcript and another project will be of interest to cinephiles.
“Regardless of who wrote the actual draft scripts, the final film is much different than any of the drafts,” Lebo said. “I thought that the best way to compare the scripts to the actual film was to take a copy of the last script — the ‘Third Revised Final’ — and overlay on top of it every edit, deletion, and addition that occurred during production.”
He is currently finishing that overlay, which he hopes to share here in the very near future.
Citizen Kane — Corrected Transcript September 2020
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