Winner in the category of WRITING (Original Screenplay) at the 15th Academy Awards, presented March 4, 1943 at the Cocoanut Grove, The Ambassador Hotel.

The other nominees were:
Wake Island — W.R. Burnett, Frank Butler
Road to Morocco — Frank Butler, Don Hartman
The War Against Mrs. Hadley — George Oppenheimer
One of Our Aircraft is Missing — Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

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Opening of screenplay:

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First lines in film:

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BROOM Let’s not do the Mad Men thing where we gleefully list its transgressions against present-day feminism. Let’s try to be more nuanced than that.

ADAM Actually, I thought it was going to be a lot worse than it was. I think the ultimate compromise they arrived at was reasonable, even for a present-day feminist.

BETH I agree with that.

ADAM At times I was a little worried about where they were going.

BETH I was too, but I didn’t really believe that Katharine Hepburn would have chosen to be in a movie with the message that she should surrender her identity to housewifery.

ADAM But poor Gerald!

BROOM When you say “the compromise they arrived at,” you’re really just talking about the one line: “instead of being Mrs. Craig, why can’t you be Tess Harding Craig.” But we don’t see that put into action; we don’t know what it means, to him or to her. And the whole sequence before that, where she tries to cook, is meant to humiliate her.

ADAM But it’s affectionate. That sequence wasn’t mean-spirited. It’s funny in part because he’s good-naturedly playing along.

BROOM Because she shouldn’t even be trying?

ADAM Right. Alma’s not going anywhere — she’ll make the waffles.

BROOM It was very hard to tell whether the movie thought that Tess’s whole value system was bad, or whether it was just comically distant from our value system.

BETH I think it was the latter. The movie was trumpeting her individuality. I think it sided with her living outside of standards.

ADAM Well, towards the 60 percent mark, at the awards banquet, it did seem like it might descend into her being a shrewish villain. That’s the point when I worried that she was the villain and he was the good guy. But it didn’t actually go there. Ultimately it was a sweet movie — notwithstanding its treatment of the effeminate male underling. Who was right: she did have a battleship to launch, guys, so…! How was he supposed to know that it wasn’t a good time to interrupt?

BROOM Are we to understand that Sam hit Gerald over the head with a champagne bottle?

BETH Yeah, I think so.

BROOM That could be deadly! That’s very dangerous. And he may also have pushed him off the porch.

ADAM It turned out that the homosexual was their enemy all along, not Katharine Hepburn. Although we sort of knew that.

BROOM The movie wasn’t unkind to to Gerald until that last sequence; he just happened to be intimidating to our man Spencer. He was just humorless when it would have been more pleasant if he had been personable.

ADAM And he called her “Miss Harding” at an inopportune moment.

BETH That’s true.

BROOM When?

ADAM When he was walking in the door and handing his gloves to Spencer Tracy.

BROOM Why was that inopportune?

ADAM Because that wasn’t her married name, and wasn’t the right thing to say in front of Sam.

BROOM Oh. Were we supposed to read it that way?

ADAM That’s how I read it.

BETH I don’t know. I can read it that way.

ADAM I mean, she was pretty annoying for much of the middle stretch of the movie.

BETH Well, she was making some selfish choices.

ADAM She shouldn’t have brought home the Greek boy.

BETH She definitely shouldn’t have.

ADAM That was a funny scene though. I thought it was going to be a child of hers from a previous marriage.

BETH I knew it would be a humanitarian scheme.

ADAM You knew it would be a Greek boy?

BETH No, I didn’t know that.

ADAM I thought one of the strangest things about the movie was the weirdly tepid raciness. There were clearly meant to be some titillating jokes in there. But they were swathed in cottonballs. That might have been a period thing or it might have just been a tastefulness choice. It was weird, to my modern sensibility.

BROOM What was weird?

ADAM The way that the racy jokes landed.

BROOM Which particular jokes? You said “this is rather racy!” when they first went back to her apartment after their date.

ADAM Well, that scene was strange, because the implication was clearly that they were going to hook up. And he tells her that he would have with other girls. I don’t know, that seems legitimately shocking for a movie from 1942.

BROOM The implicit endorsement of premarital sex?

ADAM The acknowledgement of it. But no, I’m talking more about the joke when he’s talking to his mother and says “You can’t ask a girl that! I don’t know, mom! All right, I’ll ask her if she’s a good cook.”

BETH Right.

ADAM I didn’t have a problem with it. I just thought it was amusingly mild.

BROOM You thought “I’ll ask her if she’s a good cook” was a punchline to a virginity joke?

BETH It was.

BROOM But in the final scene we see that whether she’s a good cook turns out to be material. And I thought the point was that when his mother says “I don’t know if she’s good enough for you,” she isn’t just asking about virginity, she’s asking about femininity. Which is why she’s sent the cookbook that we see at the end.

ADAM I know. But the joke of the phone call is nonetheless “Ma, you can’t ask that!”

BETH Yeah, I think so too. I think that’s how the audience was supposed to hear it.

BROOM Oh. Because in that earlier scene, I was already thinking, “Ah, Tess’s overachievement makes old fogeys like his mother suspicious of her.” Whether or not you read it as being about virginity, she’s this advanced feminist modern woman, and the question is whether that kind of person is a proper wife… So clearly when the mother brings up cooking, that’s genuinely at issue.

ADAM Clearly that’s the literal function of the scene. I’m just saying that the way they set up the joke, it was a virginity joke. There were a couple other funny things like that. I’m not trying to just poke fun at its pastness, but it was funny to me the ways that it was both very frank about sex but also amusingly indirect.

BROOM They did do the whole Marx Brothers stateroom scene except as a “cockblock” joke.

ADAM Poor Dr. Lubbeck. The other thing I was going to remark on about the screenwriting is that the pacing was super strange, from a modern perspective. I’m not saying it was ineffective, but it was very leisurely. In that last scene, before he came in, she spent like five whole minutes setting up the breakfast.

BETH It was enjoyable to watch, though.

ADAM Yeah, it worked! But it’s just funny to watch Katharine Hepburn, you know, moving around a kitchen.

BETH Reading instructions.

BROOM I thought that was an intentionally bold choice, that we should arrive at this final kitchen scene and it should suddenly get very slow. Remember that movie Big Night, with Stanley Tucci and Tony Shalhoub?

ADAM No.

BROOM They think that their restaurant is going to have a really big night because a famous person is coming, and then it doesn’t happen, and it’s a big letdown, and they blew all their money and it’s not clear what’s going to happen to them. And the very last scene, after this big downer, is just one shot where Stanley Tucci makes eggs, and it takes however long it really takes. And they must have gotten that from here. We go through this whole movie with its own narrative rhythm, and then we end with the rhythm of a real task. Of course, the tasks became farcical here. But I actually thought the pacing was strange much earlier, in ways that I was less sure I was supposed to savor. The whole first half had no conflict in it.

BETH The drinking scene was just very leisurely. And the baseball game.

ADAM It was affable rom-com stuff.

BROOM Yeah, but there wasn’t even a romantic comedy plot; just straight romance. They liked each other, they went on dates.

ADAM Well, there were some moments of conflict. Like: Gerald won’t let him into her office, so he reads the Chinese newspaper. There were little bitty conflicts.

BROOM To me it really felt like we were just gradually falling in love, and then getting married, and then living together. It took me a long time to understand what the specific thrust of the movie was.

BETH That’s surprising to me. I knew that’s what the conflict would be, immediately. Maybe that’s only because I came in knowing who each of them is.

ADAM She invites him to a party and there’s all kinds of foreigners there. Get it?

BROOM I just thought that was a kind of charm comedy. She’s upmarket and he’s downmarket.

ADAM But she’s also thoughtless.

BROOM I thought that was just part of his comic journey toward the girl he was falling for. I didn’t see it as having asserted itself as a thematic problem. Yes, I see in retrospect that it wasn’t just color, it was supposed to be seen as actually frustrating to him. But since the mode of screwball is [shrugging tone] “oh dear, this leopard just got into our apartment…” it just seemed like comedy, not conflict.

ADAM Spencer Tracy only has one face: eyes bugging out, annoyed. He’s a redhead, right?

BETH Yeah.

ADAM You can just seem him flushing to the roots of his red hair. By the way, how old were they, in this?

BETH I’m curious to know.

ADAM They seemed like a hundred years old.

BETH They seemed like they were in their early 40s.

BROOM They were probably supposed to be playing mid-20s; they probably were each around 30. Let’s see.

ADAM Well, no, they each already had distinguished careers at that point.

BROOM Let’s see. Katharine Hepburn was born in 1907.

BETH She was 35.

BROOM Which is about how she looked. She looked like the mature 35 of that era. And Spencer Tracy…

BETH Had to be older.

BROOM … was born in 1900. 7 years older: 42.

ADAM Okay, that sounds about right.

BETH But their parents were in great shape!

BROOM Yeah, they looked the same age as the kids. It was the same as Cary Grant’s mother in North by Northwest. When Spencer Tracy was standing with the older woman, and she said, “drive me back?” I felt a little awkward, because we were supposed to see her as completely not a conceivable or appropriate match for him, but she looked like an appropriate match for him.

ADAM I agree with you: at the end the pacing was probably deliberate, and it worked — but they could still have trimmed 20 minutes out of this movie. I was expecting a lot more rat-a-tat dialogue, a la His Girl Friday. This wasn’t really that. He would say something, and she would say something really fast, but then they would just look at each other. It was funny, though. We laughed many times.

BETH I laughed more than I usually laugh at movies.

BROOM During the first section, I thought it was so romantic and charming that I wondered why it isn’t more fondly talked about. But then as it became clear that the central issue is one that has aged, as opposed to being timeless, I understood. And then it ended in a very strange place, for me. It left me not with a bad taste in my mouth, but with surprise that we were left to resolve it for ourselves. I thought it was going to really resolve the issue one way or another.

ADAM I agree that the specific gender flavor of it has aged, but this is basically what the movie Hook is about, right? You know, when he throws his cell phone into the snow at the end.

BROOM You’ve invoked that as a stupid and offensive thing quite a few times.

ADAM Well, that’s the same thing as hitting Gerald over the head with a champagne bottle.

BROOM Those aren’t the only two times that has happened. At least what was wrong with her was mostly that she couldn’t see what was right in front of her, as opposed to simply that a woman shouldn’t be doing these things in the first place. However, the linchpin line — that we had to rewind and confirm that he had really said — that “the woman of the year… isn’t really a woman at all,” is painful.

ADAM Oof. Yeah, what a devastating thrust. Though she doesn’t really take it that way.

BROOM I mean that it’s painful to watch now. Because either the movie is endorsing that it’s wonderful that she’s a woman and she does all these things, or it’s not.

BETH Or it could be that that’s just his problem. The movie wasn’t necessarily taking his side, even though at that particular moment she had turned us against her by bringing in the Greek boy.

BROOM I don’t know. Sam didn’t seem to be portrayed by the movie as having a distinct psychology that we were supposed to track. Admittedly that may be a problem with my watching of it. But I was waiting for it to present some kind of equal failures on both their parts.

BETH It didn’t really care about him.

ADAM Yeah, he doesn’t have much of a personality.

BETH Which made their partnership a little bit confusing.

ADAM He spent half the movie just in reaction shots.

BETH Because she’s such a force.

ADAM And he’s just rolling his eyes: at Dr. Lubbeck, or at the foreigners at the party…

BETH Although that was clever of him, to call in his ragtag troupe of lowlifes.

ADAM That’s true. “You leave it to Flo!”

BROOM He was supposed to be someone for us, the audience, to identify with, because we were expected to share the reaction: “Look at them high-flyin’ folks — well that’s just fine for them! Now, for a woman to be doin’ all that? Hoo-ey brother, I don’t know what I think of that. But I’ll tell you this: if she doesn’t remember my birthday!… if she doesn’t call me when we’re both in Chicago!…”

BETH “If she doesn’t notice my new hat!”

BROOM “If she doesn’t notice my new hat, boy, there is a problem! I kinda thought there was a problem, and now I know there’s a problem.” If he had been a more complete character, it actually wouldn’t have been as disturbing to me.

ADAM Well, I was thinking about this in the context of the romantic comedy tradition. In My Best Friend’s Wedding, the guy doesn’t have a personality either. Maybe there’s something about the fact that it’s a Hepburn-Tracy movie that makes it seem like they should have equal billing — but it’s really a movie about her, just like My Best Friend’s Wedding is about Julia Roberts and Cameron Diaz, and not about… I don’t even know who played him.

BROOM Dermot Mulroney.

ADAM Thank you. It also occurred to me that if this were a contemporary romantic comedy they would each have a best friend.

BROOM They did: he had Pinky and she had Gerald.

ADAM Then they could have talked about their feelings, instead of just having to play out their conflicts with each other.

BROOM They each got to talk about their feelings with the father and the father’s girlfriend.

BETH But contemporary movies overuse the best friend.

ADAM Yeah, it’s a little creaky, but there’s a reason for it. It’s also somebody who can intensify the boyness of the boy character and the girlness of the girl character.

BROOM He was a “sports writer”! What more do you want?

ADAM She didn’t have any lady friends. Except for Gerald.

BROOM She had that woman, the older family friend.

ADAM Her aunt.

BROOM Wait, that was her aunt? Her aunt married her father?

BETH Yes.

ADAM Her mother died when she was a baby and her aunt raised her.

BROOM Okay. I didn’t take in who that woman was. I missed the moment when she introduced herself.

BETH It was at the speech, where he enters through the back curtain. She says, “I’ve always felt about my aunt that she was my mother…”

BROOM Oh right, “… because she was my aunt.”

ADAM No, the aunt says that, while they’re waiting for the plane.

BETH Oh, okay.

BROOM I didn’t recognize that woman as anyone who had been at the speech. I thought it was just a friend who had showed up. I was distracted.

ADAM What’s the classic Tracy-Hepburn movie?

BROOM Adam’s Rib?

ADAM Maybe that’s what I was thinking of when I said His Girl Friday.

BROOM I’ve never seen it.

BETH This is the first one I’ve seen.

ADAM It was certainly amiable and perfectly pleasant to watch. Was there any particularly clever writing? I guess some of the jokes.

BROOM I thought the writing was good throughout, smartly put together. I thought the depiction of her intellectual international stuff was well handled: not cartoonish but also not followable. I mean, it was a little cartoonish, but not in a ridiculous way. Dr. Lubbeck was not Dr. Strangelove. Those people didn’t look like a bunch of Mr. Peanuts. The headlines at the beginning, and the stuff she said on the phone, always sounded serious enough. I appreciated the way that was done, since the whole scheme of the movie was basically for us to feel intimidated by it.

ADAM Alienated from it.

BETH Like we’re on the outside.

BROOM Yes. Spencer Tracy can’t read the Chinese newspaper he’s holding, but that’s his own doing; it’s not as though Gerald is saying [snooty voice] “If you can’t read this, then you, sir, are an idiot!” I liked the dynamic between the two leads when they were falling for each other. It was genuinely romantic. It wasn’t an absurd fast-talk movie but it was still somehow charmed.

ADAM Although they fell in love much too quickly. For a movie with leisurely pacing, that happened awfully fast.

BETH In two days, it seemed like.

BROOM Well, they went to the baseball game, and then to that party, and then he went to see her the next day, and then she asked him to take her to the airport… it wasn’t just a two-scene deal. It was quite a few scenes before they really acknowledged to each other that they had fallen in love. And then they got drunk, and then they went back to the room, and then he left the hat, and then she got him a hat… Remember all those things that happened?

BETH I really liked the party scene, by itself, as just a scene of feeling completely lost and uncomfortable at a party.

ADAM The fact that it went on much too long also contributed to that. Because it was like, “Lgh, this is awkward.” And the Turk: that was particularly awkward.

BROOM Because Sam called the turban a towel?

ADAM No, because I thought he was going to turn out to speak English. “Yes?” “Yes?”

BETH Just as a standalone snippet, I liked that part.

BROOM I enjoyed that sequence too. I enjoyed all the little setpieces. It was all very well balanced. And I can imagine this in 1942 being “the adult entertainment of the season!” It’s all very well put together. So I don’t know why it had to end with him hitting Gerald on the head with champagne. That’s ridiculous.

ADAM Well, Gerald, as the symbol of her officious thoughtlessness, had to be dispatched in some fashion. But that does seem a little bit too Looney Tunes.

BROOM I really didn’t see that he needed to be dispatched. I thought the movie was going to end with them declaring that “this is our home, and this is how we’re going to be at home.” Why she told Gerald to show up there I don’t know.

ADAM She didn’t. He tracked her down.

BETH He traced the call.

ADAM I did think the funniest line in the movie was “Miss Harding said if you’re making eggs she’d like some. She also said I should tell you if I was hungry too. I am.”

BROOM The whole thing was very charming. But it came a little too close to home for me to embrace it as a favorite. Not too close to my home, but to issues of empathy. And, like I said when I watched Summertime: Katharine Hepburn’s energy always feels to me like it has something incomplete about it, like it’s a little bit too brassy to believe.

ADAM She’s not relatable at all.

BROOM And her movies all use that, and say: “that’s just cover, she really needs love just like anyone else.” Which I believe! But then the way they depict that love, how she needs it and how she gets it, it always feels a little shallow, like it’s good enough for the movie’s purposes but it doesn’t really resolve the real issue. I had no sense, at the end of this, that her issues are even remotely resolved. They gave her a whole psychological background: she didn’t grow up in America, she was traveling all around, she never really lived in one place… So when the ending is that he says “You don’t need to cook for me! But you need to be more wifely in other ways!” and she says “Okay!”… I didn’t feel that she would know what that means, or that he would know what that means, or that she will ever be quite happy, or that he will ever really get through to her.

ADAM But that’s a mature comedy, isn’t it? It doesn’t have to be fully resolved; they’re just not going to get divorced right then. Yay, we’re not getting divorced!

BROOM Yes, that’s how I felt at the end: they’re not going to get a divorce today. Someone — maybe I’m still getting this from that Molly Haskell essay — someone called the movies in this genre “comedies of remarriage.” They’re always about a relationship that falls apart — and then the two people each have to find the deeper insights that make it more meaningful, so that in the end they get to be together again.

ADAM Quite literally in this one, she says to him, “Will you marry me?”

BROOM And yet the “first” marriage takes up so much of this movie before the “problem” presents itself, and then in the last scene they just sort of say “ah but don’t you see?” and then it’s suddenly over. It feels like that was just a very thin covering they put over what is essentially an anti-feminist critique built into the rest of the movie.

ADAM If you had walked out of the theater as she’s driving back in the car, you’d think, “Ugh, what a retrograde, regressive movie.”

BETH But didn’t he say “I’m disappointed in you for even trying to do this stuff that has nothing to do with who you are”?

ADAM Yeah. He was saying “I’m disappointed in your attempt at being inauthentic,” not “I’m disappointed in your waffles.”

BETH Which I feel is a very worthwhile message.

BROOM That’s right, and earlier when she gets on her knees and wants to be the little wife, he says, “you’ve been a phony before but this is the worst.” But he never quite said the thing that I really wanted him to say, which was “You’re the most amazing woman in the world, and that’s who I want to be with.” Because he didn’t really give a shit that she was amazing!

BETH Yeah, but in a way, that was what made him deserve her, because he didn’t idolize her, he just liked her. He just loved her.

ADAM He went toe-to-toe with her.

BROOM I’m not sure he did. He kind of just slumped around.

BETH I’m filling in blanks for myself to make it work out.

BROOM I was hoping they would fill them in for us, which I guess represents a kind of nervousness on my part. “Please say the right things and make this okay!” They didn’t sin as badly as I thought they would, but once I started worrying, I couldn’t shake it. Once he said that line, and revealed that the meaning of the title is an ironic question: “Is the ‘woman of the year’ a woman?” That’s some disturbingly high stakes! And they never really “kissed and made up” in the way that would have healed me from having been disturbed by that. But yes, all the stuff they did was cute.

ADAM You’re right; it’s very difficult to imagine Katharine Hepburn playing an ordinary woman. She couldn’t be a housewife. It would be completely unbelievable if she played a housewife!

BETH I don’t think she ever attempted anything like that.

BROOM But try imagining some “more feminine” Hollywood actress playing this role, playing the woman of the year. Myrna Loy or someone, someone who was more of a glamour girl.

BETH Or Ginger Rogers….

BROOM I picked Myrna Loy because she also had an “intellectual” thing that she played.

ADAM Marion Davies! Lucille Ball.

BROOM I think that what you would feel when any other actress was struggling to cook would be, “well, I’m sure you’ll get the hang of it soon enough.”

BETH You’re probably right.

BROOM That’s why that scene was also strange, in insisting that she needed to be humiliated. Because she takes off her coat with some enthusiasm, with the attitude that she’s smart, she can follow instructions, she can do this. And I thought, “yes, that’s probably right. She can figure it out.”

BETH She’s not an idiot.

ADAM She can speak Slovenian.

BROOM She can speak every language in the world, so she might not know how to turn on the burner first thing, but once she figures it out, she’s gonna have it down for life. She learned the rules of baseball in one session!

BETH Sort of.

BROOM The gist was, he says these things once and she takes them in. She’s sharp enough to follow anything, even if it’s not her thing.

ADAM Yeah, you’re right. But she had to be taken down a peg, just in terms of the movie’s geometry.

BROOM Well, that’s exactly it. It’s the idea of pegs and being taken down one that worries me. Does anyone really need to be taken down a peg?

ADAM It wouldn’t have been a satisfying ending if she just said “I love you and I promise to do better” and then she made him waffles. Not only would that not have had any dramatic structure, but it wouldn’t have been satisfying.

BROOM When she hears the marriage vows and tears up, and then drives back while we zoom in on her face, I thought for sure she was going to arrive and makes a speech: “I realized something that I never realized before: I want more than just to be woman of the year. I want you and that means that our home is a place that matters more to me than I knew, and now we’re going to start again.” I thought she was going to invent all that herself!

BETH That’s the Jerry Maguire ending. I don’t think a movie made at this time would have had a line like that.

BROOM Well, I didn’t do a suitably comic version of it. But in this ending, the comedy was just “She don’t know what she doin’!” Also: even if she put yeast in the waffle batter, it wouldn’t come out looking like a rubber balloon in the waffle iron.

BETH It looked like a frog.

BROOM And why did the coffee maker have that huge glass bowl on it?

BETH It was a percolator. I don’t know how those work.

[we read the New York Times review]

BETH So he felt that the ending was essentially that she had returned to find out how to be a wife.

ADAM He seemed to see this as a movie not about men vs. women so much as eggheads vs. ordinary Joes.

BETH It was interesting that he didn’t really mention feminism at all, but I guess that wasn’t part of the public dialogue at the time.

[we then read about the original ending and Ring Lardner’s displeasure with the reshot ending seen in the finished film]

BROOM Like I said! There’s needless humiliation there. But I also understand why their original ending didn’t work, this Gift of the Magi place-switching. Again, I think it goes back to the real problem being that Sam doesn’t have enough of a character.

BETH I think that’s right, yes.

ADAM He’s in a language school in the original ending? That would suggest that he feels shame at being not her equal, instead of just irritation at her.

BROOM Which would have made the movie a little richer; if she could tell him “I don’t need you to be one of these people,” that would mean she had some wisdom to offer him, too: forgiveness for his shame. Without that it felt imbalanced. And surely it didn’t originally end with them launching Gerald. That definitely felt like producers getting in there. “Ya know what people’ll like?” Cigar, cigar.

BETH I did like the last scene, though! I laughed a lot.

ADAM I did too!

BROOM Did you not cringe when he said he launched Gerald?

ADAM We all did!

BROOM Look, I don’t have to dislike things like that. Most of the what I cheerfully lap up from old movies is exactly that they do seem like some producer came up with them, such that they just cluelessly resemble other old movies. But here it did leave me feeling a little queasy.

ADAM She was originally going to write his column for him, just to be a good wife? That’s weird. It’s like, “You think you’ve been castrated so far? Now you’ve been rendered completely superfluous. I can do my job and your job.”

BETH “And you’re not really going to learn these languages; come on.”

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Last line in film:

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The only footage of the 15th Academy Awards ceremony that I can find is the newsreel seen here (scroll down). The Acceptance Speech Database contains more text than appears in the newsreel, so clearly there is more footage out there somewhere. But even that database doesn’t have any record of most of the awards, including the writing awards. Nor are there any photos of the presentation of the Original Screenplay award.

Winner in the category of WRITING (Original Screenplay) at the 14th Academy Awards, presented February 26, 1942 at the Biltmore Bowl, Biltmore Hotel.

The other nominees were:
The Devil and Miss Jones — Norman Krasna
Sergeant York — Abem Finkel, Harry Chandlee, Howard Koch, John Huston
Tall, Dark and Handsome — Karl Tunberg, Darrell Ware
Tom, Dick and Harry — Paul Jarrico

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Opening of screenplay:

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First line in film:

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BETH Well that was definitely the best episode of Hoarders I’ve seen.

BROOM That’s a more profound joke than it seems at first.

BETH I was aware of that when I thought of it.

ADAM I found it exhaustingly theatrical. I recognize that it’s really got a lot of clever lines, and clever photography tricks, and clever acting, and it’s affecting… but it’s so different from modern movie-making as to be foreign and antique.

BETH You’ve seen it once before?

ADAM Yeah, once before.

BROOM I don’t think I could agree with “antique,” because that suggests that it’s part of some historical style, but I don’t think that this is in the style of any other movie.

BETH Before or after. It seems like it’s entirely its own thing.

ADAM There were a lot of things here that reminded me of other things, although some of them I guess are movies yet to come. But it reminded me a lot of Gone With the Wind, and that sort of bigger-than-life… You know: “Romance! Drama! Epic!” So maudlin that it’s almost daring you to not have a straight face. But maybe that’s just my small-minded cynical naturalistic modern sensibility.

BROOM I didn’t have a reaction anything like that, so I’m trying to figure out what you might be responding to. What scenes? Give me an example.

ADAM Every time someone was backlit with dramatic, dusty light.

BROOM I see, the whole tone.

ADAM Or a thunderstorm every time anyone was interviewed. Some of the camerawork is really clever, but awfully melodramatic.

BETH It just makes you notice it.

ADAM Coming in through the ceiling like that. Twice.

BROOM Three times if you include going back out.

ADAM So many of the clever transitions were like, a thing dissolves into another thing that’s totally different from it but looks just like it. Like the swinging doors dissolve into the newspaper plates. There were a bunch of those.

BETH And that tired you rather than exhilarated you?

ADAM Well, maybe it’s just that tonight it tired me. Maybe in a different sort of emotional mood I’d feel differently about it. But at the moment it was just… I mean, no wonder I had thought it was longer than 119 minutes.

BROOM It’s very dense. It must be one of the movies most dense with incident. It compresses so much content — not just narrative time, but perspectives and things that it’s trying to address. So it does feel very long.

ADAM Don’t get me wrong: I didn’t not enjoy it. Although I was fatigued by it, there are so many rich little details that are cool. And clever. Like the scene at the very end when the cockatoo screams in your face.

BROOM Well, your objection is the one that I think critics of the time held over it: that it was technically showy in a way that didn’t necessarily further its cause. But to me, part of what’s exciting and satisfying about this movie is the particular combination of this technique and this material, which is very ambitious even separated from the technique. To me it’s stimulating; it doesn’t feel like they’re fighting with each other.

ADAM I’m not saying that I didn’t think it was successful. I’m saying that it felt like I ate an entire fruitcake at one sitting.

BROOM I feel stimulated by exactly what you’re saying was fatiguing to you. Beth and I are reading our way through the George Smiley novels of John Le Carré, and the first one — Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy — was striking to me the first time I read it, and again recently when we reread it, for being hard to follow. It doesn’t belabor anything; it makes it difficult to keep track of what’s significant. But as a result of having to turn your brain up to that level, it has an intensity. What you glean out of it seems somehow richer than just some genre spy novel. Whereas in the third one, which we’re reading now, he’s being a lot more obviously careful not to lose the reader, and as a result the whole thing seems thinner. And this to me worked on the same principle. The fact that there’s so much shadowplay and trickery put me in a state of having to run, and then the blood is pumping and you feel that something exciting is happening to you as you experience the non-trickery part of it, the material itself. Which I think is thrilling exactly because as a result, the ambition of what it’s trying to be about, which is pretty grand, works. At least for me. You can have this movie that’s about the meaning of life, or “who is a person?” — it works because the audience is put into this state of being drawn through a haunted house and things are jumping out at you. It intensifies your experience of what’s there. So I didn’t feel fatigued. Except for maybe in that haunted house sense of “Whoa! This is really intense.” It didn’t feel too long. But I guess it has to do with how sleepy a person is.

BETH It does, because I know that in previous viewings I have felt that it was a slog, and “I know I’m supposed to like this but.” But this time I completely did like it. Partly because I’m reading a biography of Orson Welles, and I’m drawing parallels. I was connecting with it, not on the level that you’re talking about, but just sort of analyzing Orson’s psychology.

BROOM I think I had the best experience of it, then.

BETH You probably did.

BROOM This was probably my best experience ever watching it. I got goosebumps and felt overwhelmed by what it was saying.

ADAM It could have used more levity and moments of exhaling. I guess it had those, but they weren’t really coded that way.

BETH It didn’t have many.

ADAM Like the scene with the dancing girls I’m sure is supposed to feel like a moment of relaxation…

BETH I don’t know, I think it’s supposed to be ironic. It’s grim.

BROOM I think it’s supposed to have a feeling of claustrophobic good cheer, and you see it in Joseph Cotten’s face: “I’m at the party, but…”

ADAM Oh. I thought maybe there was supposed to be some relief in that “fun,” but it didn’t really feel that fun to me. And I was going to say maybe it doesn’t feel that fun to me because seventy years have gone by. But maybe really it’s just not fun.

BETH Yeah, it’s not.

ADAM It’s fun like Edgar Bergen and that little girl.

BROOM If you take it at its word and its tone, it’s a very grim movie. It’s almost a kind of ghost story-ification of a biographical movie. It takes the idea of investigating a person and makes it gothic. It’s upsetting!

ADAM It has kind of a Masque of the Red Death quality.

BROOM Yeah! I was going to say Poe.

ADAM A room lit by horrible cross-cutting stained glass.

BROOM I think it ends on the “No Trespassing” sign at the end because —

BETH That was great; I had not made anything of that in prior viewings. Or I just didn’t remember it.

BROOM There’s no trespassing on the heart.

BETH On the soul.

ADAM So in terms of innovation: is this the first time in movies that you see a man crazily crashing around a room destroying everything?

BETH I was thinking about that too, because we just watched The Room…

BROOM When we were watching The Room and he destroyed a room badly, I thought, “I hope this doesn’t discolor our upcoming viewing of Citizen Kane. But apparently it did.

BETH I couldn’t help it!

ADAM When we saw this in college I remember talking about how when you see his first marriage dissolving, it’s the first time you have a montage of anecdote, essentially, being used to convey dramatic narrative.

BROOM Maybe. I don’t know if it’s the first time.

BETH It’s definitely referred to all the time.

BROOM It’s a very iconic sequence. I think I got this from the Roger Ebert commentary that’s on the disc — or maybe somewhere else: that Welles didn’t truly innovate a lot of this stuff, he borrowed it, but he borrowed from such widespread sources that he consolidates a lot of what had been avant-garde technique into this one movie. It showcases so much invention that had been in 20s and 30s cinema that it ends up feeling new.

ADAM Like what?

BROOM I don’t remember because I don’t remember the source of this comment. But things to do with the lighting, the staging, the extreme constrasts. The deep focus. Strange camera movements that take you from one space to another space through an intermediate space. The ghostly quality of the camera’s relationship to the subject.

ADAM I was thinking of the scene where he’s in the hall giving the speech running for governor, because of course we just saw that last year in The Great McGinty, in all those crowd scenes.

BROOM That’s true.

ADAM But here of course you’re in the back of the theater, there’s that big Hitler poster of him… it was turned up to eleven.

BROOM The elevenness of it is this Romantic, gothic tone that covers the whole thing. I know that Orson Welles generally liked that for his radio plays…

BETH He liked it for everything.

BROOM … because it’s intense. And for me it works. Maybe it’s a taste thing, but for me it goes beyond my own “taste” and self-image: I really get transfixed by that kind of intensity. The threat of it! There’s a kind of scariness to it.

ADAM I’m not saying it didn’t work; I’m just saying I wanted to get up in the middle.

BROOM Which you did. Which you were free to do. So we’re here to talk about the screenplay.

BETH I was gonna say.

ADAM It’s full of bon mots. That aren’t necessarily relevant to the story. I guess the most famous one is the woman in white on the ferry, which is, you know, a poem in six words, if you will, just sort of strewn there for no reason.

BROOM Well, I think for a very clear reason.

ADAM For atmosphere.

BROOM It’s directly related to the subject of the movie.

ADAM Well, it’s not narrative.

BETH It’s thematic.

ADAM Yes.

BROOM The screenplay is designed to be returned to and studied and seen more than once, and on a second or third viewing, that anecdote becomes one of the oblique explanations that the movie offers for Rosebud, which it never gets to address overtly: what are we really saying, for him to have been dreaming on this sled? This ferry story is an explanation of how these things can function psychologically. I mean, if you watch it from the beginning there are lines in almost every scene that turn out to sort of be coded lines for the second-time viewer about what you’re going to understand the movie really to be about.

ADAM Right, but which are also memorable and striking in their own right.

BROOM Of course potentially it all works for the first-time viewer, because you’re gathering this outlook, the philosophical perspective of the movie, and you hear people saying all these things, so that you’re suitably prepared to find out what “Rosebud” means, at the end. In the first scene, a reporter says, “Maybe it’s a horse that he bet on… that didn’t come in!” A variety of things like this are said. What does the woman say in the last scene? Someone says something at the very end…

ADAM “Something he lost…”

BROOM Right. “Maybe it was something he lost… Maybe it was something he couldn’t get.” That’s what the story about the woman on the ferry is: “you’d be surprised what sticks in a man’s mind.”

ADAM I’m not saying it’s not related to the theme, I’m just…

BROOM You’re quoting Roger Ebert, who came and made a speech about that when we were in college.

ADAM Is that why that’s stuck in my head? All right, fine.

BETH You guys saw him?

BROOM We saw Siskel and Ebert talk together, which supposedly was something of a rarity because they didn’t really like each other, and they gave sort of parallel speeches from opposite sides of a stage.

ADAM I don’t remember this. Though apparently I do remember this.

BROOM Here are a few things I remember about it. It was only a year or so before Siskel’s death. The theme they chose to talk about was scenes in movies that are not explicitly necessary.

ADAM Is this where I got the Fargo thing, from this event? It wasn’t a thing we saw on TV?

BROOM Yes. They each talked about scenes that contribute to a movie spiritually without being a plot necessity. I don’t remember exactly the thesis statement, but it was something to the effect that that’s the essence of movies, being given these moments that don’t have to happen, where you don’t know why they’re happening but in a larger sense you feel why they’re happening because you’re in movie space.

BETH I like that.

BROOM I think the woman on the ferry was Ebert’s example, and Siskel’s example was the scene from Fargo where she meets with the guy from high school…

ADAM Gordon.

BROOM … who turns out to be sort of delusional…

ADAM I think Gordon is his name. If I’m wrong you can correct me in brackets in a snotty way.

BROOM No, I won’t do any such thing. [ed: I don’t need to — readers can click this link to watch the Mike Yanagita scene and decide for themselves.] Here’s the other thing I remember from that event: Ebert said “You know, you can go across the street to the Coop and buy—” and Siskel started laughing and said, “Coop? Like a chicken coop? It’s the CO-OP, Roger!” And Ebert lit up, and turned immediately to the audience and said “What do you guys call it?” And everyone shouted “The Coop!” And Siskel was sort of shame-faced. It was like that’s what Ebert lived for.

ADAM Well, I guess that stuck with me without my knowing where it came from. But anyway, Orson Welles is sort of showing off at the end by giving everyone their best little witticism in the credits.

BROOM They seemed to be alternate takes.

ADAM And what could be showier than that last credit?

BROOM The faux modesty of putting “Kane” at the very end of the credit list?

ADAM The humblebrag.

BROOM But then he has a proper card for “Direction — Production”.

ADAM That just makes it even snottier. “Oh, well, acting, psssh.”

BROOM But the big director credit is on the same screen with the photographer, which I think is a genuine sharing of glory.

BETH Was this the first movie that did that thing with clips of each character at the end?

BROOM Oh, I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t know. It was certainly standard form for trailers.

BETH Even in the 30s?

BROOM I don’t know. I’m just so used to it.

ADAM I think Coming to America was the first.

BROOM Back to what I want to say about the screenplay. The impetus would seem to be reading about famous or powerful people like William Randolph Hearst, and speculating about them. The fun of talking about Michael Jackson and how weird he is: “what’s going on on that crazy estate he lives on?” Or Gwyneth Paltrow and her “ridiculous” divorce announcement. And then in a writerly, humanist, artist’s way, saying: “if we’re going to speculate, let’s try to be as real as possible about what’s going on behind this public figure.” And yet the brilliant thing about it is that it doesn’t answer that explicitly. It occupies itself with the business of trying to get through and be real. Beth, when you said during the opera scene that you liked that she wasn’t hilariously bad — I feel like that’s the spirit of the whole movie: we’re not going to laugh at any of this stuff. We’re going to make it gothic, and then it’s going to be up to you to feel out what’s behind it that makes it so, figure out what is the ghost in the closet.

ADAM Not that it’s subtle: three different people say “What he wanted was love.”

BROOM That’s right; it’s very direct and simple about its psychological outlook, in what it does offer. But it rings true as far as it goes. And the kernel of it, that scene with his parents, leaves a lot of questions unanswered — to me, at least; maybe I’m missing things — about why they are each behaving the way they do in that scene.

ADAM His mother is an abused wife who is cold for her son’s protection; the father is a drunken ne’er-do-well who mishandles them.

BROOM So you take the mother’s words at the end of the scene at face value: “I’m sending him away because you are likely to beat him.”

ADAM As opposed to what?

BROOM Well, I think we’re supposed to be chilled when she says “I’ve had his bags packed for a week” and is stony.

ADAM I think she is a monster, but an understandable monster.

BROOM You think she’s the victim of abuse and that has made her into stone.

ADAM That’s sort of how I read it. I’m sure there are other ways to read it.

BETH I hadn’t read it like that before, but I like that interpretation. It makes her more sympathetic and understandable.

ADAM As opposed to that she’s just a witch?

BETH It’s partially that Agnes Moorehead looks like a witch that makes it hard to sympathize with her.

ADAM In fact I can only think of her as a witch, since she played Endora.

BETH But your interpretation makes a lot more sense, actually.

BROOM But it follows on a scene of the father ineffectually pacing around and fairly sympathetically saying “Why does my son have to go away?”

BETH But he also seems a little bit drunk.

BROOM Clearly drunk.

ADAM And then when the fifty thousand dollars is mentioned, he drops his protestation and says, “Well, I hope it’s for the best.” I’m sure he’s not a bad guy, but…

BROOM I’m not saying “You guys need to be nicer to him; I love the dad,” but the movie is all about the love that Kane needs because of this separation.

BETH It’s clear that he had more of an affinity for his mother. “Mom, why aren’t you coming with me, mom?”

BROOM He loves Pop too; he runs over to him.

ADAM Leland says later, “He never loved anyone but himself. Well, I guess he loved his mother.” Are you supposed to take that at face value? That his childhood really was this halcyon place? Or is it just a fantasy, the way the woman on the ferry is a fantasy?

BETH It’s his memory, which is infused with…

ADAM But if he really was beaten… if it really was as bad as his mother implies.

BROOM I don’t get the sense that that’s the case, from that last scene. I do think it’s implied from her last line that he has beaten her and that she cannot conceive of raising her son in this environment. But there’s something darker going on with her than just a kind of beaten-down resilient pragmatism.

ADAM Oh, I agree. She’s coded as a total creep. The way she stares out the window like death. It’s super-creepy.

BROOM And yet he as a child seems basically cheery. I guess maybe you could read into the fact that his make-believe in the snow is some sort of battle. But we don’t really know. And that’s what the “No Trespassing” of the whole screenplay is.

ADAM They seem to be a darker version of Scarlett O’Hara’s parents.

BROOM I don’t remember how Scarlett O’Hara’s parents are portrayed.

ADAM Her father is sort of a drunken, sentimental Irishman, and her mother is a chilly, elegant Charleston dame.

BROOM Do we see them for more than one scene?

ADAM You see the father a lot. Maybe it’s just me, but to me this movie has strong impressions of Gone With the Wind.

BROOM I haven’t seen that at all since I was a teenager.

ADAM It also has strong Gatsby qualities. But it’s sort of a haunted house Gatsby, as you said.

BROOM Yes, it’s related, but in Gatsby the presentation is different because the audience and the narrator are somewhat drawn into the potential glamour of this way of life, whereas here the entire pageant is about how he’s trying too hard and protesting too much.

ADAM Yeah, you’re right. The subject matter is the same but the psychological outlook is different.

BROOM This time while watching, I was thinking: “And why shouldn’t he want to be loved? Who in this story does love him? He is very lonely.” I guess this is where the Orson Welles parallels become complex.

BETH They’re all over this movie.

BROOM Because the movie has a very scolding, cautionary-tale attitude toward the impulse to try to buy love. But it doesn’t present an image of what he could have done instead. It sort of says that having been set on this path, this emotional need inside him was always going to express itself this way, which wasn’t going to work.

ADAM Well, Susan seemed like she could legitimately love him; she was very nice to him in the first scene, even though she didn’t know who he was. That was sort of the sweetest scene between any two people in the whole movie. And when she turns into a harridan, it’s disappointing.

BROOM She only shrieks like that in the stress of having been made into an opera star, which is artificial for her. But that “sweet” scene when they’re in her apartment together: the scene doesn’t miss an opportunity to have her say something really stupid.

ADAM Oh yeah, she’s clearly a moron.

BETH “Is it an elephant?”

BROOM Or later when they’re at Xanadu and she says “What time is it in New York?” and he says “11:30” and she says “At night?”

ADAM When he’s dressing her as the opera star, it felt like Vertigo to me.

BROOM But that scene in the apartment is a sweet scene, because he says he was on his way to a warehouse of his mother’s stuff, looking to recapture his own actual emotional life, and so her childlike simplicity feels to him like a connection… and then he immediately invests it with “what will I buy you? How will I give you fame and glory?” And poisons it. The script is very determinist about that. It doesn’t say “here’s where he could have gone right; here’s where he made a mistake.” It’s all imposed on him at the beginning. Although when she says “you never gave me anything that I actually wanted” — when he does tricks to cheer her up in her apartment, it is sort of an actual act of generosity. Although maybe we’re supposed to see that as trickery; he’s just trying to impress.

BETH To seduce.

BROOM Trying to get another person to think he’s cool.

ADAM I felt pained watching this thinking that we’ll never get to see a remake starring Philip Seymour Hoffman. It struck me overwhelmingly, at the end, that this would have been quite a role for him.

BROOM I don’t think this needs to be remade. You saw that April Fools’ joke about Keanu Reeves.

ADAM I didn’t see The Master, but you did, right?

BROOM Yes, and I guess it did have some connections. There Will Be Blood, actually, had more in common with Citizen Kane, though.

ADAM That was another movie that I felt was so hard to actually sit through because it was so gnarled with style. But that’s not as good as this.

BROOM That’s a movie that I found harder to take than this — though I really liked it and admired it and was glad to sit through it — but I found that harder to take because it depended less on tricks: it spent longer periods letting us just soak in the uncomfortable atmosphere of a particular moment. Whereas Citizen Kane is such a screenplay movie; watching it feels like reading a screenplay, in some ways. And that’s what’s exciting about it: this unfettered freedom to have whatever next thought it wants.

BETH That’s interesting though, because it’s so directed. I didn’t feel at all like I was reading a screenplay, because it’s so visual.

BROOM I didn’t mean it feels like reading in that it’s as colorless as words on a page; I mean it moves around conceptually in a way I associate with reading.

ADAM You mean because it’s choppy, and it cuts back and forth between past and future?

BROOM Yeah, and I feel like its attention generally moves with a very advanced kind of freedom that I associate with the printed word. It’s creatively exciting to watch because it feels unfettered.

BETH That’s not really done now.

BROOM I don’t think it’s been done in very many movies. I mean, there’s a structure to it; obviously the script has been carefully worked through many times: they knew there would be sequences about his love life, his political career, the newspaper, Xanadu — and then they divided them up, and chose which order, and who’s going to talk about what, and which parts are going to be repeated… But still the flavor of how it’s constructed is that the mind skips around, through time and thematically.

ADAM I like that you’re introduced to him through a newsreel. I remember when I read American Pastoral, the structure was very striking. The first third of it is the main character as observed by Zuckerman. And he seems super-shallow, and he doesn’t understand why he’s supposed to think that this guy is so profound. It’s all the main character seen from the surface. And it’s only then that you pivot into the story and see him through his own eyes. It has this coiled structure, where the surface is first and then you come into the inside. I mention that not because I think there’s anything related here, but because that observation was a touchstone for me when I read it. Here, first you see him through the newsreel, which is this sort of impassive quote-unquote “objective” picture of his life.

BROOM And there’s nothing gothic or Romantic about the visual style or presentation.

BETH Although I think those handheld shots of him being wheeled around are pretty innovative and genuinely feel invasive.

BROOM Because it’s directly implied that these are paparazzi shots stolen from outside his gates.

ADAM “No trespassing”!

BROOM Watching that sequence, right at the beginning, I thought, “This screenplay is already more sophisticated than almost any other,” because it’s about how we think about people, and it starts by showing us a way of talking about people that we’re all familiar with, which the point of the movie is to improve upon — but it doesn’t write off the newsreel a joke; it’s densely full of information. By the time you get to the end of the newsreel, not only has it mapped out the whole story, but it’s told you a whole lot of genuinely interesting stuff.

ADAM That’s the only reference in the whole movie to his son’s death.

BROOM And to the source of his money, essentially. The newsreel is already exciting in that the movie is declaring that it’s going to be about a made-up major public figure, and filling in that outline. That the game of the movie is to hypothesize a “Citizen Kane” of great fame and influence. If I had lived in the time of William Randolph Hearst, some of what is impressive to me about this movie might not be, because I would really get that it’s a thinly veiled speculative biography of Hearst, whereas to me now it feels like a pure display of invention. And what a canvas to be painting on! It’s not a zone in which fiction is usually made. It’s like fictional news; it addresses itself to whole idea of public figures and makes up this stuff. It’s already exciting, just to be told a story that way. And then the newsreel projector runs down and suddenly we’re in this world of shadows where the real movie is going to take place. And I just now had the thought that maybe the haunted house shadowy quality is a visual analogue to what the movie is about, that everybody carries this shadow reality, their emotional self, while they’re going about their business.

ADAM Behind their newsreel self.

BROOM Yeah.

BETH Well, isn’t this kind of the first movie about Twitter? When he said “News never stops, it’s 24 hours,” I was like, “Yeah, you just invented Twitter.”

BROOM I don’t know what you mean.

BETH That instant information, and branding, were represented here.

BROOM The connection is that people on Twitter are fake versions of themselves?

BETH Yeah, that it’s self-representation.

BROOM I see, self-branding. I wasn’t sure if you were talking about the media itself. Since the movie is about newspapers.

BETH Well, and the drive to be the first person to share information.

ADAM Also it’s like Twitter in that it has a mosaic quality; that everybody has a different story about him, and none of them is the right story but they all overlap to form pieces of this larger whole.

BROOM This is what I was leading to: the movie by its style feels haunted by something, and that something is his emotional life, this inner life. Which we are sort of told we haven’t seen anything of, that these stories are just surface stories, though that’s not entirely true: we glean and get a sense, and, as you said, there are several scenes where people are very explicit about how what he really needs is love. But that too is their interpretation. The inner reality is always behind what we’re seeing, it’s implied, it’s like the atmosphere that lets you know that a house is haunted. So that atmosphere infuses the whole thing because he’s the haunted house, and his feelings, that he doesn’t actually say out loud — we don’t really know what he feels like, even though we can speculate.

ADAM Or if he knows what he feels.

BROOM Yeah: he doesn’t know what he feels like. That’s the meaning of the scene at the end where he pathetically trashes the room, because he knows he’s having some feeling and thinks that maybe he’s supposed to wreck all this stuff. It has that pathetic quality of trying to perform something for himself. But it just seems spectacularly bold to put that on paper and then try to put it on screen. And be effective! So that I can I sit here and watch and pick up on all this and know what they intended. You have to have…

BETH Conviction!

BROOM Yeah, to just do it and not stop.

ADAM To be clear: I think we could talk about this for another hour. Not that we will, Emma.

BROOM She’s not reading these anymore.

ADAM That’s a testament to the density and quality of the material. But ugh, I’m ready for a caper. A sorbet.

BROOM Next up is Woman of the Year, which I think ought to suit you.

BETH We’ve already got it. You can watch it right now.

BROOM There are just very few movies that try to be so…

ADAM So literary.

BROOM That so baldly try to say something true about life, on this scale. It’s an anti-genre movie. You were talking earlier about how writers begin by depending on genre stuff in their heads, to get themselves going, which reminds me of something else I wanted to say — I know I’m talking seven times as much as you guys are, but you should just cut in if you want to say something! —

ADAM That’s okay. We’re used to it.

BROOM You should have cut in then, too!

ADAM No, we just don’t have as many thoughts as you do.

BROOM When I was a kid, I understood Citizen Kane to be this mystery movie about a man who says a word at the beginning, and you don’t find out what it meant until the end, and it’s not what anyone thought! It’s a thing you’d never have guessed, even though it was there on the first page all along. And that was it. And that was plenty: it’s a great form, it’s very satisfying. And it was almost satisfying enough for me to enjoy watching the whole movie — even though it was a bit long and I might get bored in the middle, when we’re dealing with Boss Gettys or something, which really doesn’t have anything to do with Rosebud. But really, it was just like a children’s book about “The elephant’s been with us all along! Did you spot him on page 2?” And what’s wonderful about the screenplay’s use of that structure is that what I just described is a completely cohesive understanding of the movie; it is not at all a misunderstanding of the movie. On the first page when he’s a kid and he just has his feelings as a kid: that was the secret of his whole life all along, and nobody noticed it…

ADAM You should put a spoiler alert at the beginning of this entry.

BROOM I had it spoiled for me by a Peanuts cartoon.

BETH It was referenced a lot when we were kids. Rosebud was everywhere.

ADAM I agree. It was spoiled for me long before I’d seen the movie.

BROOM In some ways — in most ways — it’s not really a spoiler. You like the movie better if you know what it is. Because if you didn’t know that it was going to be a sled, when you found out, you’d probably go, “Oh… Why was it a sled?” And then be like, “Hm, I guess because when he was a kid was the purest time in his life, and he felt nostalgic for that; whatever.” Whereas if you know at the outset that that is the entire point of the movie, you’re able to enjoy it.

ADAM Probably, but it would be interesting to actually see the whole movie without knowing it. Because the question is: is anyone actually invested in the mystery of “what is Rosebud”? Obviously we’re not.

BROOM I’m saying, for a kid, that was a totally legitimate way to watch the movie. And it’s exciting! To see the lips saying the word, and nobody knows what it means, and the glass ball breaks — it’s all very spooky and expressionistic; and then we have those shadowy guys in that room saying, “Rosebud, his last word: what does it mean?” Of course you’re invested in the mystery.

ADAM And it has a noir quality, that they don’t find out but you do. “The truth can never be told.”

BROOM And in this respect too, the movie is like a ghost story. It’s like The Ring or something: they have to go to the haunted island to interview the last person who saw the ghost. And right before he kills himself he says two words: what was he hinting at? And the old lady in the shack in the woods: what did she see?

ADAM “Redrum!”

BROOM There was an Indian burial ground here!

BETH “Pay me a thousand dollars and I’ll tell you.”

BROOM You feel almost worried; it’s scary: when is the revelation going to come? And then it’s a worthy revelation: it’s the thing from the beginning, and he’s already dead, and it goes up in black smoke. So it’s great that that is legitimately how this movie works; that is right. And all this sophisticated stuff about marriages, about journalism, and friendships, about real politics, and fake politics, and crazy people who build estates for themselves — Michael Jackson, and George Lucas — is the distraction from the real thing, which is that everybody is a kid inside, everybody’s got feelings. And there’s no way for him to get back to that at the end; he’s too old and too isolated, and he’s about to die. That’s why I get chills now: because the thing that I thought as a kid is still right. The paradigm of “But no it’s a twist ending!” is still correct. And I don’t think the cinematic device of the twist, the cheap ghost-story twist, as a kid understands it, could be used for a more profound purpose than this. Where the twist is that your life is not about the thing that you think it’s about; it’s about the other thing, the thing that nobody is talking about because it was too mundane, the thing on the first page.

BETH So do you think this will become the number one movie again?

BROOM After Vertigo?

BETH Because really, Vertigo is not about life the way this is. This is definitely a better movie.

ADAM I haven’t seen Vertigo in a long time.

BROOM Well, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t win Best Screenplay.

ADAM I don’t think any Hitchcock movie is going to win.

BROOM Yeah, I guess this is better, but the total unreality of Vertigo can serve a purpose in talking about real life. I guess what’s thrilling about Citizen Kane is that it contains both. Vertigo is just the psychodrama, just the nightmare version of things.

BETH And our culture is pretty consumed with the appeal of the nightmare right now.

ADAM Wouldn’t it be interesting to see a remake of this where you could see it with all of the lavish spectacle that presumably audiences saw in 1941? This would have seemed like really crazy special effects.

BROOM It doesn’t feel like that to you now? It’s visually very exciting.

BETH It still feels like that to me.

ADAM Yeah, but it still feels old-timey, because it’s an old-timey movie.

BETH Do you think if we’d made it fill the whole width of the TV that would have helped you?

ADAM I don’t know.

BROOM I think this Blu-ray image looks so crisp and fresh, and the photography is so stylized, that I don’t have a sense of it being old. I mean, obviously I do, of course, in a way that I’ve forgotten about. I just don’t think about it anymore. Yeah, this is from the past. But I’m so comfortable with it. And I feel spoken to very directly by it. So I’m not at all attracted to the idea that anyone should do it again. But someone could do a close equivalent. The material of “a big man’s life” — you could do anything with that.

ADAM You’re not interested in seeing it done by Baz Luhrmann? With rap music?

BROOM I’m not much of a fan of Baz.

ADAM I’m genuinely curious to see what the New York Times has to say.

[we read the review]

BROOM I always like Bosley Crowther. I know that he wasn’t very well liked in his time or by other critics.

ADAM Yeah, that was a review you can be proud of.

BROOM Yes, he “got it right.” His quibble is with whether the film should have told us more about Kane.

BETH I think the fact that it didn’t tell us more is powerful.

BROOM So I really don’t know anything about Herman J. Mankiewicz. Do you, Beth, reading that biography? Not yet?

BETH No.

BROOM What I’ve heard is that Welles didn’t really write it; Mankiewicz did.

BETH That’s interesting to me because there are many parallels with Orson’s life. So my impression is that he at least tinkered with whatever was written.

BROOM Well, maybe I’m wrong about that.

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Last line in film:

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This is the only video footage I can find that seems to be from the Academy Awards ceremony. Selections from the radio broadcast audio are available on this page, but the presentation of Best Original Screenplay is not among them.

The acceptance speech (winners not present; accepted by George Schaefer, President of RKO Radio):

GEORGE SCHAEFER: Mr. Herman Mankiewicz called me today and asked if I would be good enough to step up here tonight and receive this in his behalf. I’m flattered, of course. I’d be happier if he were here personally to receive it. Thank you very much.

Here is a photo of the moment. Preston Sturges, last year’s winner, is presenting.