Hollywood (1942)

The Greate§t Snubbing in Oicar History By EDWARD MARTIN ■ The Man With No Dull Moments, Orson Welles, knows now that the best places for him to win Hollywood honors are New York, Cuba, Mexico and Brazil. Ten thousand of his Hollywood neighbors, the members of the movie industry who cast their ballots in the annual Academy Awards, handed him the greatest snubbing in Oscar history. They passed him up as a duly nominated candidate in eight different departments of movie arts and sciences, all based on the various excellences of Citizen Kane, and let him down with one split credit for the year's best original screenplay, the other half going to Herman J. Mankiewicz, his collaborator. When the smoke cleared away from the Academy's adding machines, Orson had been beaten in most events more soundly than any prize contender since Montenegro had the crust to enter the Olympic Games in 1912. For the next few days Welles' wellwishers (and they are none too numerous even at his own studio) scanned the papers anxiously, fearful lest they encounter news of the boy wonder's suicide. Little did they know their man and the frigidly realistic summary he had made of his chances in the annual Oscar sweepstakes. When the ballots were first made up, listing Welles as a candidate in nine events, Orson himself thought the whole thing was a typographical error. He thought so little of his chances to win anything that he bet his right hand man S10 he'd be out of the money in every individual contest. The categories in which he and Kane had been entered were: best production, best actor, best director, best art direction, best photography, best recording, film editing, scoring, screenplay and original screenplay. In earlier national ballots conducted from other cities and in other countries, he had won first place in most of the major classifications. Even as the Academy votes were being counted, Orson was in Rio de Janeiro directing a good-will movie and accepting scrolls, plaques, medals and loving cups as the greatest guy Hollywood had ever given to the world. His biography was running simultaneously in five papers; the Brazilian Army was providing him with its anti-aircraft searchlights for use as sun-arcs; and the whole republic had been turned over for his personal use as a property, wardrobe and talent department. Overnight the unpredictable prodigy banished the feeling of ill-will engendered by previous South American junketeers from Hollywood and by the well-meant but infuriating "Rio" pictures turned out in Hollywood studios. Washington tingled at the reception accorded Orson by LatinAmerica. 26 4F* Here, then, was a situation in which the United States (except Hollywood) and Pan-America (except Hollywood) was lionizing a Johnny-Come-Lately in the film business. How come — this circumstance in which the new master-mind of the movies received top recognition everywhere on two continents except from his colleagues in the business, the people who normally would be the first to discover and applaud a new talent in their midst? The simple truth is that Hollywood hasn't had a chance to know Welles nor a chance to see Citizen Kane, the only Welles picture yet released. The goodsized segment of upper-crust Hollywood that envies, fears and hates him has seen to it that everything favorable about the boy and his works has been suppressed or distorted. Of the four daily newspapers in the great metropolis of Los Angeles, two — the first and third in point of circulation — are forbidden by their publisher to print the words "Citizen Kane" in their columns, even in advertisements. On a single day recently, the notices of Citizen Kane in the movie columns of these two great journals of opinion referred to the Welles movie as "Big Screen Attraction," "It's Terrific" and "Voted Best Picture of 1941" but without any further clue to its identity. Thus half the newspaper readers of Hollywood, which is part of Los Angeles, are theoretically unaware that there ever was any such film as Citizen Kane. Inasmuch as the 6,000 extras whose vote swings the Academy Awards are little better than outsiders in the movie business it can safely be assumed that they never had the privilege of discussing that extraordinary film with the great Hollywood directors and producers who acclaimed it in extravagant terms. When the Hearst press began to bedevil Kane, presumably because its founder detected in its yarn of a press baron of the '90's some disparagement of himself, the studio that imported Welles from New York to Hollywood began to have misgivings about the wisdom of releasing the picture. Its opening date was postponed from winter to spring. Meanwhile, some private screenings were held for selected Hollywood personalities. Of these, Charles Chaplin and Sam Goldwyn, among dozens of top-flight picture people, gave Citizen Kane an unqualified "rave." Universal, among other studios, offered [Continued on page 55] The greatest snubbing in movie history took place when Orson Welles, nominee for nine individual awards, won a lone Oscar. Welles' new film, released through R-K-O, is The Magnificent Ambersons