Script To Screen: “Citizen Kane”

A memorable scene from the 1941 movie Citizen Kane, original screen play by Herman J. Mankiewicz & Orson Welles.

IMDb plot summary: Following the death of a publishing tycoon, news reporters scramble to discover the meaning of his final utterance.

Setup: Kane’s wife Susan has just left him.

Here is the scene from the script:

Here is the movie version of the scene:

Really interesting to compare script to screen. Substantially the same and interesting insight into the focus of his rage, Susan’s “whorish accumulation of bric-a-brac.” I’ve seen the movie at least a half-dozen times and didn’t grasp until now that amidst Susan’s novels, Kane discovers a “half-empty bottle of liquor” — never made the connection from that moment [1:10 in the clip above].

But some key differences. First, the way the snow globe ends up in Kane’s hand. It doesn’t roll to the floor and Raymond doesn’t hand it to Kane as in the script. Rather, Kane freezes his destruction when he notices the object on a side table. Picks it up himself. Gives it a shake.

And then a big shift: At that precise moment, Kane whispers, “Rosebud.” And that is the only dialogue in the movie version of the scene.

Why do you think Welles dropped those exchanges between Kane and Raymond? My guess: It’s unnecessary. We know he will cut Susan out of his life. Besides, that dialogue distracts from the remarkable moment of Kane standing with the snow globe. First, we saw his rage, a raw emotion begun when Kane was yanked away from his idyllic Colorado home as a child. Now as he stares at the globe, the snow reminding him of that wonderful time in his life, tears well up in his eyes, and so rage gives way to sadness.

That moment is the key to grasping the wound to Kane’s psyche and which fuels everything he does as an adult to distract himself from that pain.

Finally, this:

He is an old, old man! That is an unfilmable. An example of narrative voice commenting on a character.

“But Scott, I thought unfilmables were against screenwriting rules!

First off, there are no screenwriting rules. Second, who are you going to believe: some supposed rule or Oscar-winning screenwriters Herman J. Mankiewicz & Orson Welles.

Always … ALWAYS … trust the work of professional screenwriters. All the more reason to read movie scrcipts.

One of the single best things you can do to learn the craft of screenwriting is to read the script while watching the movie. After all a screenplay is a blueprint to make a movie and it’s that magic of what happens between printed page and final print that can inform how you approach writing scenes. That is the purpose of Script to Screen, a Go Into The Story series where we analyze a memorable movie scene and the script pages that inspired it.

For more articles in the Script To Screen series, go here.