Great Scene: “Citizen Kane”

One of the great opening sequences in cinema history.

Enticing the reader into the story — it’s one of the most critical goals when writing the first few pages of a script. The opening of Citizen Kane achieves that goal by using mystery. Each shot takes us deeper and deeper into the deep, dark shadows of Xanadu, raising one question after another — whose place is this, what the hell happened here — leading eventually to… well, read the scene sequence and find out.

Of course, Orson Welles is on record as saying that Rosebud was a “rather tawdry device,” but I beg to differ. Tracking the beginning of the script, one eerie shot after the other, ending with that single word of dialogue — “Rosebud” — and its speaker’s death, sucks the viewer into the story’s mystery.

Here’s the opening — the first three minutes and ten seconds of the video.

Here is an 11 minute interview with Orson Welles about Citizen Kane:

It’s a fascinating sequence to analyze. So much detail put into describing all of the ‘stuff’ Kane owned, using physical objects to describe much of the man’s psyche before actually seeing him. And then only to hear him say one word, then expire.

By contemporary standards, the pages are drastically overwritten, but this is an era when there was no thing as a writer’s draft or a selling script. Rather, it was only a production draft or shooting script. Everything relative to actually producing the movie went into the script.

I suggest you compare the script to the movie scene while watching it to really get a feel for how thoroughly what was on the page influenced what ended up on the screen.

What are your thoughts on Citizen Kane?

For more articles in the Great Scene series, go here.