Film history has traditionally assigned credit for the expressionistic lighting of the Great Hall and other sets almost exclusively to Toland. Actually ... the lighting program originates in the design of the sets. This is not to deny that Ferguson and Toland may have worked these things out together with Welles. But at the very least, the credit will have to be shared.
Fair enough, but I'll wager that Orson contributed both the general Black Art concept and the specific suggestion of black “velvet" (technically cotton velveteen, which is cheaper and less shiny than silk). Ferguson and Toland only had to make it work as convincingly on film as Orson had already done three years earlier on stage in Doctor Faustus and Caesar. A few quick experiments would then have told them that the camera lens and film could be as easily tricked as the human eye and brain.
{SIDEBAR:} Cinematic Precedents for Black Art
Before Kane, movie technicians had used black velvet in only four ways:105 First, as background for the intertitles in silent films. These “title cards” were being used regularly during the Nickelodeon era before 1910.
Second, in 1912 in Santa Claus, art director Edgar Charles Rogers used a huge black velvet sheet, not as Black Art, but to simulate outer space as the background against which Santa seemingly flew in his sled.
102 McBride (2001), 219-220.
103Carringer (1985), 66.
104Carringer (1985), 66.
105John Brosnan, Movie Magic: The story of special effects in the cinema (Revised ed, New York: New American Library, 1976), 20, 71-75; Todd Rainsberger, James Wong Howe: Cinematographer (San Diego: A.S. Barnes & Company, 1981), 16-18; and Gene Wright, Masters of Magic (New York: Pyramid Books, 1976), 104-105.
Third, in 1922, cinematographer James Wong Howe surrounded his still-camera lens with the black fabric so that close-up stills of Mary Miles Minter's pale blue eyes reflected as dark rather than as a disturbing glassy white. He’d discovered this effect by accident.
Fourth, Black Art in fully-fledged form had been first used in the 1933 film The Invisible Man with Claude Rains in the title role. There Universal's photographic effects expert, John P. Fulton, reportedly borrowed directly from magicians to get realistic moving shots of the invisible figure when dressed. Fulton used the black-clad Invisible Assistant method with the actor moving within a set walled and floored with black velvet. Then after considerable camera lab processing this image was superimposed on a real background. Fulton repeated this method in several subsequent films: The Invisible Man Returns (1939), The Invisible Woman (1941), and The Invisible Agent (1942). And producer Hal Roach's effects chief copied Fulton's method in Topper (1937) and Topper Takes a Trip (1939).
After Kane a new use was found by director Max Ophüls when making Lola Montez (1956). Hating the then fashionable “letter-box" wide-screen format of CinemaScope, he gleefully sabotaged it by hanging a piece of black velvet at each side of the camera lens.106
{END SIDEBAR}
The Black Art panels of Welles, Ferguson, and Toland became one of the many technical elements in Citizen Kane that would change filmmaking forever. It’s assistant art director, Hilyard Brown, had been working in movies only a year when he learned this cost-effective method on the Kane set from his boss, Perry Ferguson. Brown (who never discussed technical matters directly with either Orson or Toland) understood from Ferguson only that this technique wasn't original with him. But, like Professor Carringer, Brown just assumed it was an old trick, particularly with cameramen. However, when Brown made B.A. a standard part of his own repertoire in working on later films, he was surprised again and again to find that so few other set designers used it and that it was “hard to convince directors and cameramen to accept." Their eyes would see obtrusive curtains and Brown had to tell them their own business by explaining that with proper lighting and lens settings the camera would record these curtains as empty spaces.107 Black velveteen (or, now more often, cheaper black cotton scrim)108 is still used to get this effect, now known among movie special effects technicians by the evocative term Black Limbo (or Blue Screen) rather than Black Art, which remains exclusively magicians' jargon.
* * * Even Orson's own acting style used one technique of body language well-known to magi. Exmagician Professor Naremore remarks that “A masterful stealer of scenes, Welles also knows that if he glances away from the person to whom he is speaking he will capture the audience's attention."109 This standard conjuror's technique is summed up in the oft-quoted maxim of Scottish sleight-of-hand artist John Ramsay:110
If you want somebody to look at something, look at it yourself.
If you want somebody to look at you, look at them.
106 Ustinov (1977), 278, quoting Ophüls.
107Hilyard Brown telephone interview, 7 Mar 92. See also Carringer (1985), 66, based on his 17 Jul 78 interview with Brown; and Carringer telephone interview with Whaley, 28 Oct 91.
108Interview with long-time Hollywood lighting engineer John Shuman, 1 Aug 91.
109Naremore (1978/1989), 46.
110As quoted in Andrew Galloway, The Ramsay Legend (England: Goodliffe, 1969), 1. A slightly different version, from a 1955 Ramsay lecture, is quoted in The New Phoenix, No.328 (1955), 121.
Ramsay's first sentence is a non-verbal technique to either direct or misdirect attention, his second purely for misdirection. Both work because everyone with eyesight is unconsciously conditioned since childhood to follow these two cues, ones that even few magicians can resist, and then only those (like Orson) with much rehearsal and discipline.
Because Orson had flat feet, one bit of body language he couldn't suppress was his gait, which made him walk like an elderly man. This had worked to his advantage on the stage where he'd always played older men. But now he had to disguise this infirmity when playing Kane as a buoyant twentysomething. He solved this with the simple ruse of setting up the early scenes so he wouldn't be filmed walking. As Kane aged throughout the rest of the movie, Orson's natural shuffle became appropriate.
Kane's final 156-page “shooting script" (of July 16th) had only one scene that refers to conjuring but it's oddly revealing. Kane is in Susan's room trying to make her laugh:111
Close-up of a duck, camera pulls back, showing it to be a shadowgraph on the wall, made by Kane, who is now in his shirt-sleeves. SUSAN: (Hesitatingly) A chicken?
KANE: No. But you're close.
SUSAN: A rooster?
KANE: You're getting further away all the time. It's a duck. SUSAN: A duck. You're not a professional magician, are you?
Movie critic Pauline Kael assures us that “Lines like [this] may have made Welles flinch" and assumes it was written by Mankiewicz who deliberately “played games on" Orson.112 Neither her assurance nor its underlying assumption are likely. Mank's first rough draft (a bloated 266 pages in midApril) had one big 58-page gap in the story—all of Susan's early relationship with Kane including the above scene.113 Even if Mank later wrote this scene into the second draft (May 9th), Orson changed it at least twice, once in the Revised Final script of June 19th and then for the final Shooting Script of July 16th. Both these revisions enhanced the scene's humor, as we see in the final post-production “cutting continuity" script:114
Reflection on walls of hands making shadow of rooster—Susan and Kane heard laughing, talking
SUSAN (Off): Is it a giraffe? KANE (Off): No, not a giraffe.
Susan and Kane laughing—Kane making shadowgraphs with hands. SUSAN: Oh, I bet it's—
KANE: What?
SUSAN: Well, then it's an elephant. KANE: It's supposed to be a rooster.
111 The Citizen Kane Book (New York: Limelight Edition, 1984), 205, quoting Scene 62 from the shooting script.
112Kael (1971), 55.
113Carringer (1985), 18, 19, 23-26; Lebo (1990), 18.
114The Citizen Kane Book (1971/1984), 373.
SUSAN: Gee, you know an awful lot of tricks. You're not a professional magician, are you?
KANE: No, I'm not a magician.
&n
bsp; Obviously Susan's “professional magician" line hadn't made Orson “flinch", otherwise he would have simply axed it on the set. Instead he reinforced it with “No, I'm not a magician." And where did the June 19th and July 16th scripts' stage directions get that unusual word “shadowgraph", particularly in its then very rare secondary meaning of a hand-shadow? Even the largest American unabridged desk dictionary available to Mank in Victorville would have informed him only that it was “a shadow play", that is, "a drama exhibited by throwing the shadows of invisible puppets, sometimes of living actors, on a screen."115 But magicians know that a shadowgraph is also a hand-shadow because shadowgraphy is one of the “allied arts" of magic.116 Indeed, Orson's dear friend Max Holden,a master of that art in his vaudeville magic days, had just published a 31-page textbook on the subject when Orson first met him. But, unwilling to learn some elementary shadowgraphy himself, Orson hired an expert, Major McBride, as his body-part double to do the rooster.
Kael, like Mank and unlike Orson, had little familiarity with Elizabethan theater. Otherwise she might have recognized Orson's likely hand in this flagrant adaptation of Shakespeare's Rorschach test in Hamlet, Act III, scene ii:
Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel? Polonius: By th' mass and 'tis, like a camel indeed.
Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius: It is back'd like a weasel.
Hamlet: Or like a whale?
Polonius: Very like a whale.
* * * Citizen Kane is a monument to cinematic “special effects", those visual illusions that take place mainly in the photo lab. More than half of its film footage contains special effects of one sort or another. And some reels comprise 80%-90% of optical print work alone. Orson took readily to special effects; but he did so precisely because he was a mage. Carringer should once more be read literally in writing metaphorically that “special effects must have seemed to him a veritable magician's bag of tricks."117
Luckily for Orson, RKO was the only Hollywood studio at the time that combined almost all their various types of effects experts in one production unit. Its Camera Effects Department comprised 35 techs headed by background-projection expert Vernon Walker. To an unprecedented degree for a director or producer Orson personally involved himself in that department's many specialties. Demanding the best possible effort, he sent inferior work back again and again—once as many as eight times. Walker formally memoed the head office about the delays and costs arising from Orson's insistence on perfection and his constant demands for new requirements after everything had been agreed.118 If his boss was issuing complaints, there were none from Linwood Dunn, the already legendary optical printing master, famed for his innovative work seven years earlier on both King Kong and Flying Down to Rio (and decades later for the TV Star Trek series). He was “happy" working closely with Orson and even declared he'd “learned a lot" from this young artist who used film “like a paint brush."119 Dunn recalled that when Orson would explain the precise effects he wanted:120
115Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition (1934), entries for "shadowgraph" and "shadow play".
116For definitions and history of "hand shadow", "shadowgraph", "shadowgraphist", "shadowgraphy", and "shadowist" see Whaley (1989), 328, 597-598. A prior appreance of shadowgraphy in films was by Gloria Stuart in James Whale’s The Old Dark House (1932). 117Carringer (1985), 99.
118Carringer (1985), 88; Kael (1971/1984), 75.
I would sometimes say, “No, we can't do that," because I really didn't think it was practical from the cost standpoint. He'd be very polite and return the next day and say, "What do you mean, it's not possible?" I'd say, "No, nothing's impossible. It's just a matter of time and money." Then he'd come back again and say, "You've got the time and the money's okay." So then I'd go up to the front office for a confirmation of this. "Yes, he has complete autonomy on the show — up to a certain point." So then we did many unusual and difficult shots.
Dunn gives several examples of these "unusual and difficult" effects for Welles and Toland that he achieved on his optical printer. Most memorable were panning up in the library scene from the pedestal (real) to the giant statue (actually a miniature), some of the depth-of-focus shots, the shot moving outward from the glass ball's interior at Kane's death, some views of the warehouse, and that gradual creep of the camera into the furnace to disclose the word "Rosebud" on the burning sled.121
These fiddling impositions by Orson doubled Kane's original puny effects budget (from $2,700 to $5,500).122 But the result was a special-effects state-of-the-art masterpiece for well under 1% of the movie's total cost. By contrast, George Pal's War of the Worlds (1953) would gobble up 70% of its $2 million budget in special effects.
One overlooked fact of cinema history is that a very large proportion, perhaps most, of the earliest turn-of-the century movie makers had begun as professional conjurors.123 Although most of these conjurors-become-filmmakers featured magic acts in their first flicks, they soon replaced real conjuring, although betraying its connection to magic, with what was then called “trick photography". This was the origin of special effects or “FX" as it's now abbreviated.124
{SIDEBAR:} Conjurors as the Pioneers of Movie Special Effects
Way back in February 1896, less than two months after non-magician Louis Lumière had premiered the world's first public film show in Paris, French magician Félicien Trewey premiered Lumière's films in London. Then, in quick succession: In March English illusionist David Devant introduced British-made films in London at the Egyptian Hall (Britain's main theater of magic). In April magician Georges Méliès showed the British films between conjuring acts at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in Paris. Four days later the Isola brothers began screening films at their magic theater in Paris. Then American wizard Carl Hertz, as part of his world touring sorcery act, showed the first movies on shipboard and in South Africa and Australia.
All that just in the first year of public cinema. The next magus to join the movie world was Leopoldo Fregoli, making comic short films and showing them between his live magic and quick-change acts in Italy. Then came Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton in 1898 when their year-old American Vitagraph Company made its first movies and Blackton sketched the world's first animated cartoon at the turn of the century. In 1900 German-American magician Jules Greenbaum dropped his stage career to make films. In France Gaston Velle became director of special effects for Pathé studios around 1900 and Claude Grivolas helped build the Pathé empire. Emil Gottlieb pioneered film exhibitions in Vienna. Walter R. Booth had been chief director-cinematographer for the first British filmmaker for nine years when in 1906 he made Britain's first animated cartoon. Next year Billy Bitzer became D. W. Griffith's chief cameraman. E. Cooper Taylor Jr. became an actor and director with Edison and Griffith. In 1907 Victor Ponrepo became a pioneer of Czech cinema by opening Prague's first movie house. In 1910 Alexander Victor marketed the first home movie cameras and projectors, designed and built by himself in the USA. Three years later Dadasaheb Phalke made the first movie in India.
119 Dunn interview in Tales from Hollywood (1987) TV special.
120Dunn interview in Chase (1975), 295. Similarly Dunn's later and more concise interview in Christopher Finch, Special Effects (New York: Abbeville Press, 1984), 69.
121Dunn interview in Chase (1975), 297-299.
122Lebo (1990), 204.
123Barnouw (1981). Additional detail in Bart Whaley, Who's Who in Magic (Oakland, CA: Jeff Busby Magic, Inc., 1990), 420-421, for the introduction to my appendix on "Motion Pictures — A Filmography".
124Barnouw (1981), 87-105.
Among the above-named ex-magicians the major FX innovators were Méliès, Fregoli, Smith, Blackton, Booth, Bitzer, Velle, and Phalke.
Orson had become the most recent magician in this history of FX. Appropriately therefore, ten years after making Kane, he would contribute the preface to the world's first general textbook on the subject. There, in his fri
end Maurice Bessy's Les truquages au cinéma (The Tricks of Cinema), Orson stated his philosophy of how and why movie special effects differ from the live effects of the conjuror."125 {END SIDEBAR}
“A TOUCH OF RHINESTONES”
Citizen Kane was still in production when Dolores del Río's legal separation from husband Cyril Gibbons had been granted and her affair with Orson became semi-public. On Tuesday, September 17th, Orson joined her at a restaurant where she introduced him to Clifford Odets who was in Hollywood as a contract scriptwriter. Only nine years Orson's senior, this stellar young American playwright of the Left, with six highly successful plays written and premiered in the four-year period 1935 through 1938 behind him, was already two years past his peak powers. Too optimistic to realize this, he'd mistakenly labelled that prolific and promising product his “first-period". But there would be no “second", much less a “third", before his death nearly a quarter century later. His biographer, psychoanalyst Margaret Brenman-Gibson, sees him and Orson as two Wunderkind “devoured" by the movie industry.126 She is wise not to expand this simplistic parallel analysis, because Odets had become less creative and hence proportionately unsuccessful while Orson remained creative but was denied success.
Odets had met Dolores del Río, Orson's current love, through his own, Fay Wray, the intelligent actress forever remembered as King Kong's beloved. His diary records that he and Fay and Dolores had driven to a restaurant where:127
Orson joined us later, tired with work. He was very gracious and articulate, as usual, in fact articulate enough to be very glib. I did not mind this. He is sort of a biological sport, stemming out of Lord Byron through Oscar Wilde, I should say. But he has a peculiarly American audacity. Of other people he said just what he thought of them, with scorn and derision; with us he was deferential, once referring to me as “in the foremost ranks of the talents of the world"!
Orson Welles - The Man Who Was Magic: Part 1 Page 17