‘Citizen Kane’--Play It Again, Ted

As a practicing student of human behavior and modern capitalism, Ted Turner has worked hard at keeping people off the streets and on their couches.

Occasionally Turner slips up and tempts viewers away from their small screens, if only for a couple of hours. He did it a couple of years ago with restored theatrical and home video versions of “Gone With the Wind” and “The Wizard of Oz,” after spending $1.3 billion for the MGM film library.

Now Citizen Turner meets “Citizen Kane.”

Kane may have died with “Rosebud” on his lips but Turner is about to smell the roses.

The May 1 rerelease of “Citizen Kane,” emerging from the RKO vaults 50 years afters its New York premiere and 25 years after its last big-screen showing, is another example of how nothing in Hollywood gets wasted. It’s filmmaking’s form of social responsibility--recycle and conserve the past for the enrichment of the present. Next week it’s “Spartacus” in a dressed-up version. Next month “Kane.” “Casablanca” and “King Kong” can’t be far behind.

As one Turner executive puts it, bringing out classics is “a nice business. The movie is finished, everyone has been paid. There are no agents and stars to deal with. You own the whole thing. You just have to sell it.”

For the people at Paramount Pictures who two years ago won the lucky assignment from Turner Entertainment to distribute Welles’ first and least forgettable film along with 764 other movies left over from its former Melrose Avenue neighbor, RKO, “Citizen Kane” does pose a major selling hurdle:

Is there anyone who hasn’t already seen the movie, either on television, cable, laser disc, videocassette or on 16-millimeter school editions?

Turner’s technicians think they’ve got one part of the answer. They’ve done some serious touching up of the film.

Claims of enhancing old films are almost a given in Hollywood as more and more studios go to their vaults for quick bursts of cash from box offices and home-video outlets. No one brings out old movies anymore without discovering lost footage, restoring chopped-off portions, adding a score or adapting it to new screens.

In “Kane’s” case, the entire film was redone from a fine-grain master positive. Original negatives were destroyed in a New Jersey film vault fire in the ‘70s. Director Robert Wise, the film’s original editor, volunteered to supervise the technical enhancements for the 1991 version, balancing the lighting to Welles’s specifications and replenishing the soundtrack.

(When Turner bought the RKO film library five years ago there was talk of colorizing “Kane.” But the Welles-RKO contract prevents that from happening.)

After you’ve done the clean-up how then do you sell a movie most people have seen? Paramount will do the expected and muster a campaign based on “Kane” as a 50-year-old classic, but more importantly it will try to get people away from their VCRs and television sets by selling “Kane” as a moviegoing experience. It has to be seen in the dark, projected through proper lenses and on a large, proportionally right screen. See it as it was. And that can only happen in a real theater and not in a multiplex shopping mall.

So the Welles film will be taken on the repertory theater circuit, movie houses that specialize in art films and revivals. Only 14 theaters (the 550-seat, 60-year-old Nuart in West Los Angeles, the Ken in San Diego) in major American cities will show the movie. Most are in “calendared” theaters, those with a limited number of exhibition dates. The Nuart will run it only for 11 days. If “Kane” draws the audience the Paramount people are expecting it will be moved around to other appropriate, available theaters.

Even if that doesn’t happen there’s still more “Kane” to sell. Turner has ordered up a batch of 50th-anniversary “Citizen Kane” videocassettes, ranging from a basic $20 tape to a $100 luxury model with a book, script and related materials.

The selling of “Citizen Kane” follows other recent revivals. “Gone With the Wind” celebrated its 50th birthday by bringing in more than $2 million at 200 theaters, returning $800,000 in rental fees to the Turner bookkeepers. “The Wizard of Oz,” however, struggled in theatrical release but its home-video sales caused smiles all over Atlanta and Kansas.

Despite its status now as a classic, “Citizen Kane” has traveled third-class during most of its history. RKO, fearful that the movie was too similar to the life of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, publicized the movie as a love story about a man caught between two women. It cost under $1 million to make and brought in $2 million in ticket sales after its release in 1941, barely netting a profit. (RKO usually killed off movie projects if estimated budgets went over $1 million. The first “Kane” budget came in slightly over that and the 25-year-old Welles, who was making his first movie after a publicized radio and Broadway career, had to cut back. RKO wanted to spend only $500,000 but the final approved budget was slightly over $700,000.) The movie faded away as the world went to war in 1941. After the war, the movie enjoyed a brief revival of interest only in Europe.

Always desperate for cash, RKO sold American rights to its movies, including “Kane,” to television networks in 1956. While considered a major film by some scholars and critics, the Welles film failed to get on most lists of major movies until the early ‘60s when Sight and Sound magazine put it on its Top 10 list. Ironically, television had helped expand its audience and fame.

On May 1, on Paramount’s Sound Stage 32, the old RKO Stage 10 where parts of “Citizen Kane” were shot, a kick-off celebration for this year’s “Kane” will be held amid some of the original sets and props.

Meanwhile, the search for gold in the vaults continues.

Doesn’t the original RKO “King Kong” have a birthday in 1993? The big 6-0? Paramount and Turner may already be thinking party.

And then there’s “Casablanca,” which has its 50th next year. No doubt, somewhere, someone is planning a packaged evening at the movies. That evening would include “Casablanca,” the newsreels, cartoons and shorts of the time, original screen tests (actor Ronald Reagan unsuccessfully trying out for the lead) and Woody Allen’s “Play It Again, Sam.”

What was it that Welles said, years after his so-early fame at the movies? Wasn’t it something about not selling wine . . . before its time?