Coming to Hollywood as a celebrated boy genius featuring a spectacular career arc in New York including his "War of the Worlds" radio hoax, Orson Welles is stymied on the subject for his first film. After a dinner party at Hearst Castle, during which he has a verbal altercation with Hearst, Welles decides to do a movie about Hearst. It takes him some time to convince co-writer Herman Mankiewicz and the studio, but Welles eventually gets the script and the green light, keeping the subject very hush-hush with the press. When a rough cut is screened, Hearst gets wind of the movie's theme and begins a campaign to see that it is not only never publicly screened, but destroyed.
Written by Greg Bulmash <greg@imdb.com>
The title refers to the production number given by RKO to Citzen Kane.
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Goofs
Factual errors:
During a meeting of the "big studio heads," which probably never happened in the first place, one of the participants is Walt Disney, and special attention is paid to him at one point. Were a meeting like that to have taken place, Disney would certainly have not been invited because he was, at the time, considered a small independent producer, not a major studio leader. Furthermore, his distributor in the 1940's was RKO, so he would not have been in a meeting called to denounce that very studio.
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