“Forgotten Hollywood”- The Show Must Go On…

Posted on March 14, 2015 by raideoman1 | No Comments

Manny P. here…

   Fifty fans of classic cinema had the opportunity to watch Orson Welles’ 1941 groundbreaking film, Citizen Kane, partly based on the late William Randolph Hearst at the media tycoon’s own private theater at Hearst Castle, a concession the magnate would probably not have made.

   The screening Friday with a price tag of $1,000 was part of the San Luis Obispo Film Festival. This included an exclusive tour of the estate, which is now a state park, and a reception on the mansion’s patio overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It will benefit the nonprofit Friends of Hearst Castle, a preservation group.

   Welles’ cinema classic was shown before in the Hearst Castle’s visitor center in 2010, but this was the first time the movie was screened in the opulent, 50-seat theater at the hilltop estate. Great-grandson Stephen Hearst, the vice president and general manager of Hearst Corp.’s Western Properties, gave his blessing to the festival to screen the film both times. He didn’t attend, but said he saw it as an opportunity to show the differences between his great-grandfather and Charles Foster Kane, the character played by Welles.

Orson_Welles-Citizen_Kane1 

                           ORSON WELLES          WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST

   William Randolph Hearst sought to derail the movie, which portrayed the rise and fall of an obsessively controlling media mogul, but the film went on to win an Oscar in 1942 for Best Original Screenplay and is now considered one of the greatest American films. The film, a searing critique of a newspaper magnate, has many similarities to Hearst’s life.

   But, Hearst said the screening, which was hosted by TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz, the grandson of Herman Mankiewicz, who co-wrote the Citizen Kane screenplay, was an opportunity to draw the distinctions between William Randolph Hearst’s life and Welles’ fiction.

   On my Facebook page, I mentioned that this is like the Richard Nixon Library having a Watergate exhibit… which it does!

   And, so it goes…

Until next time>                               “never forget”

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 14th, 2015 at 3:08 am and is filed under Blog by Manny Pacheco. You can follow any comments to this post through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.


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