SOURCE: A review of The Shooting Script, in The New York Review of Books, Vol. 20, November 29, 1973, pp. 6-10.

In the following omnibus review of several books on film, including Pauline Kael's essay excerpted above and the published screenplay for Citizen Kane, Wood identifies the contradictory nature of Charles Foster. Kane as the source of the film's greatness.

Broken empires, scattered dynasties. Hollywood always loved nostalgia, and Gone With The Wind was a better title than anyone knew. Early Egypt, ancient Rome, the gracious old American South cropped up so often and so appealingly in Hollywood movies because they were all gone, taken by Time's fell hand. The flashback in the Forties and Fifties was not really a narrative device at all but a compulsion, the instrument of a constant, eager plunging into the past. A slow, misty dissolve, and off we went into the day before yesterday, when...