The Print Media's Commentary on Kane Fiasco

[tony]

Here's something interesting: a well-written report on the print media's response to, and coverage of, the Welles-Hearst battle as it happened:

http://list.msu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0109b&L=aejmc&P=7296

[Glenn Anders]

Thanks, Tony, for that paper.

I found particulary interesting the information about the proposal to "road show" CITIZEN KANE.

It also occurs to me that all the personal harassment Welles received for over a year following the completion of CITIZEN KANE may have given him additional reason to accept Nelson Rockefeller's call to the colors in Brazil.

The corporate infighting between Odlum (a kind of Howard Hughes tycoon) and Rockefeller is revealing also.

Thank you for digging this piece out of the archives.

Glenn

[Le Chiffre]

David Thomson tried to make the case that Kane is based on the director himself.
"I suggest that Herman Mankiewicz_ wrote a script that was a cunning challenge to Welles. It said: Look, Orson, the world will think this is Hearst. But you and I will know it is you- with your great voice, your raging beauty, your notorious genius, your animal energy, your little boy vanity, your royal arrogance and that selfishness that permits you no other exit except self-destruction. So here it is, Orson, my gift to you. And Welles read and understood and accepted the challenge."[10]

A good reminder of why I hated Thompson's book. To paraphrase Clinton Heylin, it reflects an 'ostentatious ignorance' in it's lack of research.

By now, it should seem obvious from the research that Mankiewicz's first drafts pretty much represented a straightforward muckraking satire on Hearst. In the later drafts, Welles softened the Hearst connection by putting in autobiographical allusions himself.

[ToddBaesen]

Thanks Tony for posting the link to that very interesting and obviously well-researched piece on on CITIZEN KANE by Christopher Allan Faidley. It's nice to have all the documentation and quotes from the press of the period, something that writers like David Thompson and Pauline Kael never felt the need to do, since they came up with such "interesting" theories about KANE on their own, and having the facts would no doubt throw water on their own burning imaginations.

And as M. Teal points out, is there even one shred of circumstancial evidence for Thompson's bizarre theory about KANE being about Welles? Thompson's imagined dialogue between Mank and Welles is so ludicrous, it's too bad it didn't make it into that camp classic, RKO 281: "Here it is, Orson, my gift to you." Welles read and understood and accepted the challenge."


Meanwhile, it's quite interesting to find out that Hearst was apparently in denial about the fact that "Death comes, as it must, to all men..."

If that was the case, you can really imagine why he stirred up such a furor over the film. Since, as Faidley notes, "Citizen Kane revolves around the lonely, dying words of Charles Foster Kane, a powerful newspaper publisher who built his empire after a failed political career. The death of Kane is believed to be one of the main reasons for Hearst's ire against the picture.

"Death is a word never uttered in Hearst's presence. On his San Simeon and Wynston estates it belongs to a foreign language. The death of 'Citizen Kane' is understood to be one of the cogent reasons for the publisher's attitude against the picture." [Variety]

[Le Chiffre]

Meanwhile, it's quite interesting to find out that Hearst was apparently in denial about the fact that "Death comes, as it must, to all men..."

"Death is a word never uttered in Hearst's presence. On his San Simeon and Wynston estates it belongs to a foreign language. The death of 'Citizen Kane' is understood to be one of the cogent reasons for the publisher's attitude against the picture." [Variety]

I've never read Aldous Huxley's AFTER MANY A SUMMER DIES THE SWAN, which is said to have inspired CITIZEN KANE, but there's a good synopsis of it at the Wikipedia, and apparently it also does a potent job of satirizing Hearst's life, including his nuerotic fear of death. It also has a thinly-disguised account of the Thomas Ince affair, and towards the end, even seems to veer into FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH territory, as the Hearst-like character travels to Europe to investigate a mysterious life-extending formula. Got to read it sometime.

[Glenn Anders]

I recommend After Many a Summer Dies the Swan to you, mteal. It is one of the relatively rare novels I've read twice. Not highly regarded in the Huxley canon, it is nevertheless a pure pleasure. When you read it, you may realize that it bears no greater resemblance to CITIZEN KANE than the picture does to Hearst. It is really a cleverly amusing satire on the Darwinian Theory of Evolution (closing the circle, as it were). And strangely, I had always thought that the mogul owed more to Sam Goldwyn or L.B. Mayer (whose daliances were not so public) than to William Randolph Hearst. But that suggests how far speculation and intimation can take one.

I liked Mr. Faidly's report, but it is after all a kind of term paper. Simply quoting or chronicling Louella Parsons' fulminations on the possibility that Hearst was the subject of CITIZEN KANE does not make it "necessarily so." The picture is a work of Art, not a term paper, nor a biography in any strict sense. And it is a picture which has as a central concern, in its substance and in its mechanism, the difficulty of communicating any truth about a human, far less summing up that individual or an event. And by extension, how that difficulty is compounded the further the effort strays from the source, the individual him-or-herself. Tabloid journalism, especially when it must use a camera, as in The March of Time, may have a clue, but it doesn't know what the clue means!

[We see these clues BIG TIME every day now on CNN or Fox News.]

Hearst and the Hearst Corporation were in the business of tabloid journalism. Ms. Parsons was a queen bee of their tabloid entertainment division long before there was an Entertainment Tonight or "The Girls Next Door" on E-Channel. No matter what Hearst might have thought about the CITIZEN KANE personally, his editors were prepared to believe that he would green light a vendetta because it would attract publicity, sell newspapers. And Hearst was willing to take it far enough to buy up the film. If he had been successful, that would have been the first "lost film" of Orson Welles, his first cinematic "rosebud."

And that reminds me that there is not a great deal of primary hard evidence to support the almost universally accepted notion that Citizen Kane is about William Randolph Hearst. My own research (unfortunately, still in a closet under a mountain of boxes) suggests a number of alternate possibilities.

But I do have at least one answer to haughty Todd Baesen's question ". . . is there even one shred of circumstancial evidence for Thompson's bizarre theory about KANE being about Welles?" [Or is it mteal's question?]

The answer is, "Quite a lot."

Let me cite one source which supports the wild speculations of David Thomson and Pauline Kael, in lieu of several I have read in the past. Here is what, in part, Peter Conrad has to say on the subject of CITIZEN KANE, in his recent Orson Welles; The Stories of his Life:

". . . above all [CITIZEN KANE] is a film about Welles making a film, and about our watching it." (p. 149)

And he goes on for about five pages developing the theme of "Welles: Khan, Kane, Cain." In those pages, Conrad fastidiously avoids the newspaper clippings that the industrious Faidly has xeroxed. In fact, Conrad mentions Hearst only once:

"Hearst's story merges with that of Kubla Khan, from whom Kane borrows the name for his private kingdom; their story is also Welles's."(p.152)

And while Conrad does mention Hearst elsewhere because CITIZEN KANE examines the new media tabloid phenomenon as well as the old "Yellow Journalism," he makes it pretty clear that Welles, in his inimitable way, was into "method theater production" and "method movie making" before there was "method acting." CITIZEN KANE, according to him, is pretty much about George Orson Welles in the various self-deprecating avatars he had been assuming since he was a small boy.

One of those avatars may have been William Randolph Hearst, a man who ran his own show for much of his life, but it is foolish, I think, to dismiss the idea that CITIZEN KANE is an imaginative, psychological predictive biography of George Orson Welles. Without that piece of the puzzle, the picture becomes what its critics call it: cold, clinical, unfeeling. Welles built himself into the matrix of CITIZEN KANE.

In retrospect, Thank Goodness.

Glenn

[tony]

Glenn:

I feel very strongly that Welles would vociferously disagree with the notion that Kane is about him: in fact, I'm sure he would think it ridiculous. He would probably call it "dollar-book Freud" as he did Rosebud. But I'm intrigued by the possibility that Kane was not about Hearst, either: is it just possible that Kane was a character of fiction, and that Welles was actually telling us the truth all those years when he claimed it was based on several individuals (such as Robert Mccormick) but was, finally, only a character in a film which was not a 'Roman a clef'?

I know this is heresy to even suggest!

[NoFake]

I agree that Welles would tab the notion Kane = Welles "dollar-book Freud." I also like your idea, Tony, that for him, Hearst was indeed the very amalgam he claimed. From what I've read in too many sources to count (or even remember at this point), it was largely Mankiewicz whose troubled personal history with the Hearsts made him want to get the old S.O.B., and hit him where it hurt . Welles, who was never averse to challenging authority, and whose little-boy-who-never-grew-up probably continued to enjoy the thrill of the challenge, may have gone along with it, one side telling himself "it's not Hearst" and the other, perhaps subliminally, curious to see what the impact would be -- maybe even hoping for fireworks...

[Glenn Anders]

Tony, No Fake: CITIZEN KANE is about all the Robber Barons, many literary or dramatic characters, and Welles himself. That is the point Mr. Peter Conrad is making in Orson Welles; The Stories of His Life. He begins Chapter 7 ("Kubla Cain") on CITIZEN KANE:

"Welles bluffed when he said that the belligerent telegram ["YOU PROVIDE THE PICTURES. STOP. I'LL PROVIDE THE WAR"] was the only explicit reference to Hearst in CITIZEN KANE, but at the same time he tantalizingly hinted at the truth. Hearst was a cover, as Kurtz, Faust, and all those Shakespearean characters had been. The film is Welles's fractured, refracted self-portrait." (p. 149)

Now, I agree that Welles would have rejected that idea, if presented to him straight on, but I consider the evidence overwhelming, as do at least Conrad and the evil David Thomson. Ruth Warrick reported that Welles told his cast that CITIZEN KANE was to be a film about all the powerful men that Americans admire for all the wrong reasons. In his soul, Welles, at 26, may have seen the possibility of his becoming one of those men.

After the fact, he was very careful to give fulsome credit to Mankiewicz for the mechanism of CITIZEN KANE. But think about it. The picture is metaphorically about Orson Welles, about a little boy from the West. as Wisconsin would have been considered late in the 19th Century, early in the 20th. He loses his mother, or as the boy thinks, he is abandoned by her, in the way Welles may have emotionally regarded the death of his mother, when he was nine.

Little Charlie Kane is turned over to a harsh task master, who takes him away from home, and lays out a rigorous schedule to prepare him for his future. There is little time for playing in the snowy Eden of the West ever again. The task master is like a combination of Welles' harsh, alcoholic father, and as time passes, a blundering but loyal factotum named Bernstein -- the same name as Dr. Maurice "Dadda" Bernstein, Welles' own guardian after his father's demise -- who takes care of many details in the young man's life.

Charlie Kane inherits a family fortune at the age of 25. Welles inherited his father's fortune, such as it was, when he was 25. More to the point, Welles came to Hollywood in 1940, when he was 25, on the strength of his lucky Mercury Theater on the Air Production of "The War of the Worlds," in 1938. For Welles, that was his "Colorado Load."

Welles ran the Mercury Theater like a vertical industry, as did the Robber Barons of the past. In 1940 and 1941, for a few months, Welles had absolute power -- or at least, might have thought so, feared so -- over the equivalent of a powerful tabloid industry like the Time/Life, Inc.

Welles had been married once, between 1934-1940, unhappily as it turned out, to Virginia Nicholson, not quite "the niece of the President," but something of an aristocrat. Conrad points out that Welles, in his screenplay for The Cradle Will Rock, describes her as a mother or an egg. Welles, before the marriage was over, was embarked on series of affairs with young women of varying accomplishments. He had not yet set his cap for Rita Hayworth, but with his inclinations toward being "an educator," it might have been predicted that he would carry out his treatment of Susan Alexander Kane in real life.

And so, as Welles, Houseman and Mankiewicz worked out the screenplay for CITIZEN KANE, the question in Welles' mind must have been, occasionally: What next? What do I do now?

There were many options but few conclusions.

He finally decided to return to a more conventional autobiographical theme, in making THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS. Every film following had some conscious autobiographical connection. Welles as either a Byronic hero or, more often, as a variation of Lucifer.

As you suggest, Tony, Welles told Peter Bogdanovich that "Rosebud" was Mankiewicz's idea, that he had never liked it, that it was "dollar book Freud." But think about that again:

What would CITIZEN KANE be without "Rosebud"? Without "Rosebud" there would be no picture, only the jumble of unrelated, contradictory testimony which makes up a conventional documentary or Time autobiographical profile.

Welles may have denied the autobiographical elements in CITIZEN KANE and his other films, but I think we have a case here of "The Unreliable Narrator." Rosebud? Welles' life? Remember the proverb bestowed on Gregori Arkadin: "Give anything away but your secret."

Rosebud. It'll probably turn out to be quite a simple thing.

Glenn

[tony]

Glenn:

The trend of the last 25 years or so to read artists' work as essentially autobiographical is, I think, a dangerous trend, leading to the proliferation, for example, of far too many "dollar book Freudian" analyses at the expense of critical thought about the work itself. Ultimately, the work is the only important thing, and any connection to the "author" is, in the final analysis, simply unimportant- unless one has some special interest in the author. Thank God we have little information about Shakespeare- or we would have had 6,000 pseudo-Freudian David Thompson-like tomes on the deep meaning and connection to Will's life of every scene and character in his work.

I remember someone once saying "The further removed an artist's work from their perrsonality, the more pure the art." Personally, I might not go that far, but I believe that the relations of the work to the artist are totally unimportant to the value of the work itself, and can never be proved in any case. Recall "The Other Side of the Wind": seemingly an obvious autobiographical work of Welles about him as a director. But: was Welles gay? Did he persecute his male stars? Welles maintained it wasn't about him: how could it ever be proven that he was wrong? Or right? There is no criteria by which it can be conclusively proven that TOSOTW is autobiographical, therefore this claim is useless as a critical tool. The same can be said about "The Immortal Story", which it has often been said is obviously about Welles himself and his power as a director to control people. However, Welles said that simply wasn't true. And for me, that's the end of it: we can never prove the claim either way, so it's useless to discuss. Carringer published his notorious essay "Oedipus in Indianapolis" which has been almost universally attacked as superficial, trite and just plain silly, probably because it is so badly written. But my complaint with it is that it is a member of the "autobiographical" family of criticism, that tells us nothing that can be proven, and which therefore is worthless.

Conventional criticism discusses the ideas and issues which matter to the work of art; these observations open up the work for the person pondering the work. No claim to truth can be given here either, but no claim is made, unlike that of the "autobiographical style". Autobiographical connections, even if they could be proven, tell us nothing about the work, and the work's the thing, not the author, as Welles stresses throughout "F For Fake".

Shakespeare is so lucky: we don't even know for sure who he was, or if he was male or female, gay or straight: we must deal only with the work: the Carringers and Thompsons must remain mute.

[Glenn Anders]

I quite agree with your general premise, tony. Even when I was an undergraduate, my professors were decrying a modern tendency for critics to value analysis, interpretations and just plain gossip about an author more than his/her actual works. Our celebrity culture makes that criticism more acute.

I was simply challenging evil Todd Baesen's question, assertion really: ". . . is there even one shred of circumstancial evidence for Thompson's bizarre theory about KANE being about Welles?" I'm afraid Orson Welles is a special case, and CITIZEN KANE a particular example. Welles often selected subject matter which reflected his concerns, often adapted them to stress certain aspects of what he considered his own duality in the area of good vs. evil, democracy vs. fascism, as reflected in the individual. CITIZEN KANE presents a rare example, and an almost perfect example, of a Wellsian work which was not an adaptation. Collaborative though it may have been, the film is more than almost any other a work from Welles' imagination.

Let me add one more factor. Unlike most authors, Orson Welles not only created or shaped his characters, but he usually embodied them upon the silver screen. We are left with a record of the living, breathing avatar before our eyes. We cannot stipulate that for, say, F. Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway.

In the evidentiary area, I'm afraid you are left with the old conundrum of "proving a negative." I disagree with Todd Baesen, and I provide a good deal of evidence for an autobiographical level (and it is only one level from a complex work of Art) in an analysis of CITIZEN KANE. You simply deny that my premise can be valid.

You present no evidence to counter mine in the singular regard to CITIZEN KANE.

Unless you are a follower of old Leslie Fiedler and believe that Charlie and Jed had spent too much time together, your introduction of homosexuality to the discussion is purely a straw red herring in regard to CITIZEN KANE. And as you remark yourself, one can say anything he/she pleases about Shakespeare because we know so little about the specific detais from his (her, you suggest?) emotional life.

Orson Welles, on the other hand, like Charles Foster Kane in CITIZEN KANE, had armies of media people, some what would be called today investigative reporters, some from the new industry of Public Relations, some just plain fabulists, invading his most intimate privacy from the age when he was 23 or so.

That, too, is what the picture, in part, explores, but you say evidently, irrelevant.

We disagree, then.

I would be happy if we should agree the easy assumption that the picture is purely about William Randolph Hearst is not necessarily a true one. My initial comment on Mr. Faidly's paper avoided that question because I did not want to enter into a discussion like this one. But here we are. Like David Thomson (but probably not like Pauline Kael, another straw red herring), I think Welles is a special case, and CITIZEN KANE full of telling autobiographical evidence. Interesting coincidences?

I would not maintain, though evidence might be presented, that F. Scott Fitzgerald was Jay Gatsby or that Ernest Hemingway was Francis Macomber.

So there we are.

Glenn

[ToddBaesen]

Dear Glenn:

I don't quite understand why you say "Evil" Todd Baesen's question... I presume you meant that as a joke.

But obviously we disagree about whether Welles based KANE on any particulars of his own life, but why should that make me evil?? Anyway, to get back to the point of the topic and my question, (which was a question, not a assertation): I really didn't see much evidence in your reply to make me change my mind. That Kane's mother and Orson's left them both at age 8, (but in completely different ways) isn't much evidence to me.

However, I agree in general, that every artist puts something of himself into his work. So in that sense all of Welles works could be seen as autobiographical, to a certain degree. But not to the point of calling KANE autobiographical. Certainly not in the way David Thompson means when he posits the explict notion that Mank gave Welles the finished script and challenged him to rewrite it as his autobiography. That in my my opinion is absolute rubbish.

By the way, I agree with Tony that bringing up OSOTW is a very valid and quite interesting point of comparison, in that (again in my opinion) OSOTW is quite a bit more autobiographical about Welles than KANE. But once again, I believe it's just a few bits and pieces, that Welles has added to what is an overall ficticious character. But just the fact that Jake is a film director, makes OSOTW far more easy to swallow as autobiography, then trying to see traces of Orson Welles life in a portrait of very rich and ficticious newspaper publisher. In one point, however, I'd say there can be little disagreement: Since Welles was only 25 when he made KANE, it would seem logical that everything that happens to Mr. Kane after that age in the movie, would have to be taken as ficticious.

Anyway, let's meet for a drink next week at the Fairmont Hotel, where Welles claimed he ran into Mr. Hearst in a elevator during the S.F. premiere of KANE so we can discuss this in further detail...

[tony]

I couldn't say it better, Todd. I would add that TOSOTW is more of an Orson Welles creation than is Kane, which seems to me almost an adaptation of the Mank script. I can't stress enough that, to me, whatever the connection to the author, the only important thing is the work: what does it matter whether it happened to the author or not, or whether it's important in their psychology? It's only importance for us can be the work, and what it means to us- unless we're voyeurs, which of course has been the ever-accelerating trend of the last 40 years or so. Again (and this ain't no red herring, Glenn) what does it matter if Welles and Will were gay or staight? I see this as the essential distinction between a writer like Thompson, and a writer like Rosenbaum: the latter actually does critical thinking about the work, whereas the former just creates nonsense based on real and imagined biographical material: this is why Thompson is not taken seriously by any serious writer on Welles, for example. Rosenbaum has described a conference attended by several writers who have authored critical material on Welles, and the only time Thompson's name came up was as an example of how not to write a biography.

You should have listened to those professors more closely, Glenn!
:;):

[Glenn Anders]

Tony: What is this? You are tag teaming me with Todd Baesen. And when I'm looking the other way, one or the other of you is sucker punching me! Where's the referee?

Of course, evil Todd Baesen is right when he says that THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND is more obviously autobiographical than CITIZEN KANE. TOSOTW is like the warehouse at the end of KANE. Everything that Welles ever thought had value is thrown in there, left waiting for someone to put it together for him. CITIZEN KANE, by accident or design, is his artistic model, which he built upon, or took away from, for the rest of his life.

I'm not a scholar. I'm just an amateur. I'm a lover of things Wellsian.

Young man, I was there at the beginning -- before the beginning!

But on a bad day, all I have are my intuitions.

My memory, in comparison to five years ago, is shot.

Still, Tony, having been there before the beginning (meaning, just barely, before anyone heard of Orson Welles), I still don't think you realize how influential "dollar book Freud" was in the 1930's and 1940's. All that Dali stuff Hitchcock put into SPELLBOUND, the Theremin, the dream imagery -- and all those veiled sexual interpretations. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's SMALL BACK ROOM, with the hero struggling against a gigantic bottle of scotch. People so inclined literally believed all that stuff. The film makers believed a lot of it. They were educating the masses. The general public was a good deal more literal then.

[Sometimes, these days, I wish we could go back, but we can't.]

I think you forget that in 1925, when Welles was ten, Dr. "Dadda" Bernstein was sending the little fellow to Madison, Wisconsin, for "psychological testing"! Do you realize how rare that would have been in 1925? And of course, one of the things they would have been looking for would have been "homosexual tendencies." If that is why you are hung up on Welles and Shakespeare's sexual proclivities, okay, you are welcome to your obsessions. But dwelling upon them, strikes me as a bit strange, when you are protesting biographical interpretations of Welles' work. Even Evil David Thomson only devotes six pages out of 460 to the subject.

Fifty years later, certainly thirty years after the making of CITIZEN KANE, Welles talking to Peter Bogdanovich is sliding away from the psychological interpetation of "rosebud" because the verdict had come in on psychoanalysis, that most of it was worthless mumbo-jumbo, but I say again, that in memory, "rosebud" is valid, and Welles must have bought into it.

That there are not autobiographical references salted all through CITIZEN KANE is not to have eyes and ears!

If there were a professor in the house, I'd ask him, if all that matters is the work, on the page or on the screen, what are we doing here? We should all be just down in the swap section. There is no point to the rest of Wellesnet. We all sit in the dark, and see what we shall see.

Right?

Wrong. I say that when we watch CITIZEN KANE in the cool dark of its tomb, we see Orson Welles, we see ourselves, we see America, we see our future, we see our beginning, and we see our end.

That's why CITIZEN KANE is probably the greatest film ever made in the English-speaking world.

Tony, it is Baesen who has led you astray, I know.

Just lie back on the couch. Let me sum up this session.

We both admire Jonathan Rossenbaum. He has done more to keep Welles' reputation growing, done more to refurbish and complete the legacy of Welles' works, than anyone I can think of. But just because we both admire him and his efforts, does not mean that we have to condemn the intuitive productions of David Thomson. Maybe, it is because CITIZEN KANE had such a singular effect on both our lives, maybe it's because Thomson is a fellow San Franciscan, maybe it is because when he was seeing the picture for the first time, I was seeing it for a second, in the same city (London), in the same Classic repetory film house chain, that I have a soft spot for his work.

He is not an academic writer. He is a poetic writer, if you will. But while he may have been in the thrall of the bad turn biographical writing took in the time of "Dutch," I find many of his intuitions and conclusions valid. I would put him up against Simon Callow -- but not Rossenbaum -- any day (both of whom he politely credits in Rosebud).

Let us, some time soon, take evil Todd Baesen up on his invitation to meet in that once startlingly marvelous outside elevator at the Fairmount (which Cocteau raved about), where Welles said he confronted Hearst. [If you have had much contact with minor aristocrats or present neocons, you know why Hearst ignored Welles: Never allow inferiors to speak first.] Todd Baesen, you, and I will have a drink. All will be well.

[But now, I don't want to enter that elevator, and find you over in a corner with Larry French (whom I believe lives, too, in the City by the Bay). None of this chanting: "Macresarf1 doth murder sleep!" But if you see Dr. Baesen in noirish light, I'm convinced he will not have a shadow. You have been warned!]

Anyway, to good scholarship, and to the human heart.

Glenn

[tony]

Tag team wrestling? I guess it's kill the father time- bring on Thompson and Oedipus!

But seriously, Glenn:

I always like to challenge you, if I can, and see how you respond: you know, thinking about difficult things gets the neurons going and preserves the brain...I know I can use that! And your responses always intrigue me, even though I often disagree. I think your approach is more poetical, and I'm from a different school of thought; remember when Welles talks about symbolism to Bogdanovich, and says that he hates it and never does it? I say "yea!"

As for the prevalence of Freudianism (or pseudo-Freudian symbolism)) in the arts in the post-war decades, I believe I am aware of that.

Your idea that Kane is the alpha and Wind is the omega of Welles I cannot agree with: I think they are just 2 Welles films, and if allowed, Welles would have made many better pictures than Kane (I think he made a few anyway) and several more after Wind: it's the last only by accident.

As for sexual proclivities, I'm not dwelling on them, but rather using sexuality as a convenient example of how the private biography has no real bearing on the work, at least any bearing which can tell us anything of worth about the work: whether or not Welles or Will were gay means nothing to the permanent value and social importance of the work: it's just not important to the interpretation and understanding and meditating about the work: let's say Bach was gay: he's another lucky one: we'll never know, and it's not important. Let's hypothesize Tennessee wasn't: would it change the value of his work? Could he not have an understanding of the feminine without being gay?

Actually, I think it is you, Glenn, who are holding onto this tradition of "biographsizing" and doing "dollar-book Freud" when thinking about Welles, which is why I said you should have listened to those profs who warned you about this trend, long before it fully flowered. Thonpson may devote only six pages, explicitly, but implicitly his book continues the tradition, as do Conrad's, Higham's, etc.

"If all that matters is the work" doesn't mean we give up on thinking about and interpreting films: it means we start: all we have is interpretation, inteligent and thoughtful interpretation hopefully, but a critical thinking which stays away from silly and superficial "psycho-bio"; we can never arrive at a kind of scientific proof, because obviously that's the realm of science, not the arts. But we can work our way towards a deeper understanding of work through serious critical thought which can never be based on rumour, supposition, and biography, the latter of which can never be ascertained to have truth value, as it's necessarily inner and private, thus not available to the outer world.

If I was in Frisco I'd take you up on your offer for sure: I only have a handful of film friends up here in Toronto, and none are Welles-nuts. And Glenn: you should feel flattered: 2 of the Wellesnet younger turks are after your hide! You must have something interesting to say!

Evil Todd? Your turn!!!

Tony (Tag-Team member #2, known as "Antonio the Magnifico")