Word: rko
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Maybe the Depression made Hollywood do it. Most of the studios were losing money by 1932 (RKO declared bankruptcy), and racy films brought in the money. But they also fanned the ire of state and local censorship boards. In 1934 the new Production Code had teeth, and under Joseph I. Breen, a former newspaperman, it bit hard. Dialogue was denatured from snappy to sappy; gowns hid what they once revealed; evil lost a lot of its seductive plausibility. And as studios sought to rerelease their pre-Code films, Breen insisted that cuts be made in the master negative, thus censoring...
...year later, Welles arrived in Hollywood with a fussy, je-suis-l'artiste beard and an RKO contract giving him total control over his films. To an industry in robust middle age, Welles was a pampered brat. They called him Little Orson Annie, the Christ Child. One local wit said, "There, but for the grace of God, goes...
Welles, thrilled by Mankiewicz's idea for a Hearst film, was also desperate. His first RKO project--Heart of Darkness, which would be told with a subjective camera and would star Welles as Marlow and Kurtz--was deemed too pricey. Now, with Mank's unbilled help (the deal specified no screen credit for his script), Welles hoped to turn a jolly plutocrat into a tragic figure, swathe the San Simeon Sun King in the menacing shadows of movie melodrama. Kane would be Welles' Hearst of Darkness...
...Hearst. Mank couldn't, anyway. He handed the script to Charles Lederer, who was both Davies' nephew and the new husband of Welles' ex-wife. It came back annotated by Hearst's lawyers. And that was just a hello. Soon the old man was promising scandal and lawsuits against RKO and any theater chain that dared exhibit the film...
...long run, of course, Hearst lost. What people know of him today is what they remember from the movie; the definitive biography, by W.A. Swanberg, is titled Citizen Hearst. But Welles lost too. His next film, The Magnificent Ambersons, is a magnificent shard in its surviving form; RKO pulled Welles off the film, cut it by a third, hired a hack to shoot a new ending. He was now "Hollywood's youngest has-been," condemned to haunt Hollywood and other film capitals till he died looking for work. People knew him only as the fat man, a butt of lame...