The Scripts of Citizen Kane

Abstract The Best-Known controversy in film criticism of recent years has been over the authorship of the Citizen Kane script. Pauline Kael first raised the issue in a flamboyant piece in the New Yorker in 1971. Contrary to what Orson Welles would like us to believe, Kael charged, the script for the film was actually not his work but almost wholly the work of an all-but-forgotten figure, one of Hollywood ‘s veteran screenwriters, Herman J. Mankiewicz: Welles probably made suggestions in his early conversations with Mankiewicz, and since he received copies of the work weekly while it was in progress . . . may have given advice by phone or letter. Later, he almost certainly made suggestions for cuts that helped Mankiewicz hammer the script into tighter form, and he is known to have made a few changes on the set.