![]() ![]() Kael’s essay, among other things, was a kind of backhanded meditation on the inner meaning of what a screenplay is. Because even once you accept that Orson Welles did deserve the co-screenplay credit for “Citizen Kane,” there’s a question that lingers, and it’s the mystery that I think Kael tried (unsuccessfully) to poke at. Carringer in his 1978 article “The Scripts of Citizen Kane” (which became absorbed into his riveting book “The Making of Citizen Kane,” published in 1985) and by sources like Peter Bogdanovich in his eye-opening 1972 Esquire magazine piece “The Kane Mutiny.” Both offer definitive evidence that Welles was intimately involved in the writing of “Citizen Kane.” And both serve as a rebuke to the writer who first lit the controversy on fire: Pauline Kael, the great film critic - to me, she’ll always be the greatest film critic - who in her 50,000-word essay “Raising Kane,” originally published in The New Yorker in 1971, made a rare fatal blunder by fudging facts and systematically overstating Mankiewicz’s contribution to the movie. In fact, the answers to all this were nailed down long ago, by Robert L. ![]()
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