Intended as a feature film with an entirely different cast, RKO 281 is an HBo movie purporting to telling the story of Orson Welles making Citizen Kane.
Obviously because it's a film in a limited time frame, many events had to be simplified and scenes made up. I won't go through everything that is incorrect. Suffice to say the film depended on a lot of urban legend and rumors rather than real facts.
Citizen Kane was supposedly the story of the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. Welles (Liev Schreiber) vehemently denied this at the time. No one knows what was in his mind because he had absolutely no choice but to deny it, whether or not it was true. Hearst, here played by James Cromwell, wants the film suppressed. By having Louella Parsons make inflammatory comments about the moguls in his paper, they were soon ready to buy the film from RKO and destroy it. Free speech won, but Hearst refused to have any of his papers publicize Kane, advertise it, or review it.
What hurt Hearst most of all was that the role of Susan Alexander, supposedly based on Marion Davies (Melanie Griffith), was an alcoholic. He told someone (this wasn't in this movie) that what crushed him was "the drinking." The film did hurt the image of Marion Davies - for years many believed she was a no-talent drunk whose career was totally because she was the mistress of a powerful man.
In truth, something else not mentioned in this movie, is that there were two moguls who had done something similar as Kane did in the film. Samuel Insull built the Chicago Opera House, and a tycoon named Harold Fowler McCormick promoted the opera career of his second wife. This suggests that Kane was, in fact, a combination of men. Marion Davies was a talented comedienne. She truly loved Hearst and when he hit bottom, she was there with financial and emotional support. And rather than help her career, he hurt it due to the types of roles he wanted her to play, and she retired from films in 1937.
As far as the background squabbles, these were complicated. The actors, Richard Dreyfuss as George Schaefer, John Malkovich as Herman Mankiewicz, David Suchet as Louis B. Mayer, Liam Cunningham as Gregg Toland, were all marvelous.
Melanie Griffith I feel was miscast, coming off like a bimbo, which I don't think Davies was; and how anyone could cast Anastasia Hille as Carole Lombard is beyond me. Wrong.
And Rosebud? It seems odd, but not impossible, I suppose, that someone knew Hearst's pet name for part of Davies' anatomy. But since the early story of Kane is actually closer to the story of Herman Mankiewicz's childhood, and since Welles denied that the film was about Kane, why put something so obvious in the film? No one will ever know, but needless to say, that story spread like wildfire.
Liev Schreiber is excellent as Welles - no one was cast to look like the characters they played -- but I question the characterization of Welles in the script as a man afraid of being exposed as a fraud and not a boy wonder. He was coming off of huge success in New York and great notoriety with War of the Worlds. He was 25 years old. Twenty-five year-olds are invincible, immortal - the world hasn't had its way with them yet. Welles was a supremely confident young man and probably arrogant to boot, sleeping with the gorgeous Delores del Rio and having carte blanche at RKO. I don't buy any insecurity.
Nevertheless, I found this movie very entertaining and extremely well acted, and it gives some insight about how the powerful Hearst attempted to manipulate his world via the press.
Obviously because it's a film in a limited time frame, many events had to be simplified and scenes made up. I won't go through everything that is incorrect. Suffice to say the film depended on a lot of urban legend and rumors rather than real facts.
Citizen Kane was supposedly the story of the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. Welles (Liev Schreiber) vehemently denied this at the time. No one knows what was in his mind because he had absolutely no choice but to deny it, whether or not it was true. Hearst, here played by James Cromwell, wants the film suppressed. By having Louella Parsons make inflammatory comments about the moguls in his paper, they were soon ready to buy the film from RKO and destroy it. Free speech won, but Hearst refused to have any of his papers publicize Kane, advertise it, or review it.
What hurt Hearst most of all was that the role of Susan Alexander, supposedly based on Marion Davies (Melanie Griffith), was an alcoholic. He told someone (this wasn't in this movie) that what crushed him was "the drinking." The film did hurt the image of Marion Davies - for years many believed she was a no-talent drunk whose career was totally because she was the mistress of a powerful man.
In truth, something else not mentioned in this movie, is that there were two moguls who had done something similar as Kane did in the film. Samuel Insull built the Chicago Opera House, and a tycoon named Harold Fowler McCormick promoted the opera career of his second wife. This suggests that Kane was, in fact, a combination of men. Marion Davies was a talented comedienne. She truly loved Hearst and when he hit bottom, she was there with financial and emotional support. And rather than help her career, he hurt it due to the types of roles he wanted her to play, and she retired from films in 1937.
As far as the background squabbles, these were complicated. The actors, Richard Dreyfuss as George Schaefer, John Malkovich as Herman Mankiewicz, David Suchet as Louis B. Mayer, Liam Cunningham as Gregg Toland, were all marvelous.
Melanie Griffith I feel was miscast, coming off like a bimbo, which I don't think Davies was; and how anyone could cast Anastasia Hille as Carole Lombard is beyond me. Wrong.
And Rosebud? It seems odd, but not impossible, I suppose, that someone knew Hearst's pet name for part of Davies' anatomy. But since the early story of Kane is actually closer to the story of Herman Mankiewicz's childhood, and since Welles denied that the film was about Kane, why put something so obvious in the film? No one will ever know, but needless to say, that story spread like wildfire.
Liev Schreiber is excellent as Welles - no one was cast to look like the characters they played -- but I question the characterization of Welles in the script as a man afraid of being exposed as a fraud and not a boy wonder. He was coming off of huge success in New York and great notoriety with War of the Worlds. He was 25 years old. Twenty-five year-olds are invincible, immortal - the world hasn't had its way with them yet. Welles was a supremely confident young man and probably arrogant to boot, sleeping with the gorgeous Delores del Rio and having carte blanche at RKO. I don't buy any insecurity.
Nevertheless, I found this movie very entertaining and extremely well acted, and it gives some insight about how the powerful Hearst attempted to manipulate his world via the press.