SOURCE: "Citizen Kane," in The Magic World of Orson Welles, Southern Methodist University Press, 1989, pp. 52-83.

In the following excerpt originally published in 1978, Naremore sides with Carringer as to the authorship of Citizen Kane, and suggests the script was as much concerned with Mankiewicz's and John Houseman's perception of Orson Welles as it was based on the life of William Randolph Hearst.

Citizen Kane is the product of an individual artist (and a company of his associates) working at a particular movie studio at a particular historical moment. This fact ought to be self-evident, but one needs to state it because the question of the "authorship" of Kane has become the oldest, worst-tempered, and most confused argument in movie history. The debate has been revived in recent years by Pauline Kael, whose long essay for The Citizen Kane Book forced numerous angry replies from movie historians eager to...