FileTitle: Prose35.html
Category: Humor
Type: Prose
Description: History lesson, Citizen Kane, Unverified
Citizen Kane --With the Naughty Bits

by Jim Mica

You must have heard of the movie Citizen Kane.  It shows up on
most of the "Best US Films of All Time" lists.  If you are one of
those who can't figure out why Star Wars doesn't show up on such
lists, you might as well skip the rest of this.

OK, so everybody knows that Citizen Kane was the first film
masterpiece of the young Orson Welles.  Everybody also knows that
the word "Rosebud," the word Charles Kane utters as he dies,
plays an important part in the film.  After Kane's death a
reporter researches his life in an effort to understand this once
powerful man and the audience follows his investigation to find
out why Kane said, "Rosebud."

Beyond this, most people have heard that Charles Kane is loosely
based on the person of William Randolph Hearst, a powerful
newspaper magnate who was well known to the audiences first
viewing the film.

The U.S. Public Broadcasting System recently presented a detailed
documentary (The Battle Over Citizen Kane) on the making of the
film and Hearst's successful effort to suppress it when it was
first released in the 1940s.  Hearst managed to bury the film
until after his death in the early 1950s.

According to the documentary, Hearst was incensed about the way
he was portrayed in the film, but he was even more angry at the
way his mistress, a movie starlet named Marion Davies, was
portrayed.

According to the documentary, "rosebud" was Hearst's pet name for
Ms. Davies' genitalia.  And here we thought the movie was about
political and economic power struggles!