Word: hearsts
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Welles was just 25 when he directed, produced, co-wrote and starred in his first film, a veiled biography of newspaper potentate William Randolph Hearst. Yet so controversial was Kane before its release in 1941, and so overwhelming its pressure on Welles' reputation, that it can be seen as the apex of his career, perhaps of Hollywood's Golden Age. It surely makes the man worth one more biography, Simon Callow's Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (Viking; $29.95), and the film worth a long documentary look, The Battle over Citizen Kane by Thomas Lennon and Michael Epstein...
...which the WPA shut down and Welles reopened the same night, marching his cast and audience from the original Broadway house to another, empty one for the triumphant outlaw premiere. There were riots outside Welles' shows--to get in. His work was denounced by the Communist Party and the Hearst papers, proving he had done something right. Under his spell, theater was not just dynamic; it was dynamite...
Callow draws telling word pictures of Welles' early years. But to evoke a film, it helps to have moving pictures, and The Battle over Citizen Kane, which runs the lives of Welles and Hearst on parallel tracks until they collide in 1941, is a two-hour tornado of a documentary, with rare clips of the 1936 Macbeth, some quaint home movies of Hearst's costume parties, reminiscences by such Welles colleagues as lighting designer Abe Feder (still jazzy after all these years) and William Alland (who played the reporter in Kane). Best is the cogent narration, written by Lennon...
Ayau said his group had a dispute with the Hearst Museum at the University of California at Berkeley...
...Federal Repatriatism Process requires an identification of the human remains. The Hearst Museum did not believe the two sets of remains were native Hawalian and therefore refused to return them," the said...