“This is The Inquirer. Yes, dot com.” It’s a younger generation of the Kane family at work in Citizen Kane 2, a parody sequel to Orson Welles’ landmark movie.
The 21-minute short film was produced by The Yale Record in conjunction with its “Lights, Camera, Action!” issue. The Record is the Ivy League campus’ humor magazine.
The parody follows the grandson of Charles Foster Kane, now a journalist for his grandfather’s company and facing struggles with his career and marriage.
“We were nervous because as a satire, we expected people to laugh, but we didn’t know much of it would land,” director Fernando Cuello Garcia, Class of ’24, told The Yale Daily News. “But the screening was fantastic — you couldn’t hear half the movie because people were laughing. It was great to hear people really enjoy our work.”
Garcia, who was brought in to direct by The Yale Record, discussed the challenges of creating a short film with a tight turnaround.
“We shot the whole thing over a weekend and edited it in very few hours,” he said. “We had a small crew of three people, and the only people on set with film experience were me and Julia (Arancio, the producer). But even though we were a tight crew, it was easy from a talent perspective — Brennan Columbia-Walsh and Chesped Chap, who were actors we worked with most closely, were fantastic.”
Citizen Kane 2 is available on The Yale Record’s YouTube channel at https://youtu.be/b4dZdINZ8rY and embedded below.
Yale is home to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which houses scripts and papers related to four early Welles film projects The movies — two filmed and two not fully realized — span the years 1940 to 1943 when Welles was under contract to RKO Radio Pictures.
The library acquired papers associated with Citizen Kane, The Way to Santiago and Journey Into Fear, which join documents already in the Yale collection related to Welles’ unfinished Latin America documentary, It’s All True.
Beinecke is one of the world’s largest libraries devoted entirely to rare books and manuscripts.
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