I've just finished Citizen Kane (still AFI's #1 movie of all time) for the first time in my life (my previous attempt secured a great nap after only making it through the first few minutes in my dad's lazyboy recliner).
Perhaps just as good as the movie was the accompanying second disc, which details the momentous battle between Orson Welles and William Randolph Hearst - Godzilla and King Kong egos at war.
The lesson learned: beware the appetite of ambition. It ultimately consumes the consumer.
Welles prodigious will catapulted him into fame, fame he created in radio and theatre. But, he was always living on the tight-wire of genius, running from place to place and project to project as a way to keep his attention off of the shadow and faults that lay at his feet. With youth, he could do so. His enormous energy kept his identity glamorous, but it was an identity like a stage set - thin behind the show. He devoured life, plowing through meals (two steaks, two baked potatoes, a pineapple and a bottle of whiskey for dinner every night), dominating rooms, overwhelming nay-sayers, bewildering critics.
Two generations before him, though, Hearst had fashioned himself in similar manner - using his inherited wealth, which his father secured from mining in California, to launch a whole new way of seeing the world: print journalism that captured the fantastic, the strange, the nitty-gritty, and thus the common man's attention.
In Citizen Kane, Welles launched himself at Hearst, seizing hold of a man that would give Welles what had always brought fortune to him earlier: adversity. Only this time that is exactly what he got.
Welles' refusal to back down from Hearst, and his own drive to make himself a great man eventually brought his own life into the arc of tragedy that was the fictional Citizen Kane. It is harrowing to watch an aged Welles before the camera confessing that 2% of his life after Citizen Kane was about making movies. The other 98%: "hustling," trying to live a lie which was his life, trying to let his image outpace his reality.
So, let the words of the Beastie Boys stand as the last voice of reason: "Be true to yourself and you will never fall."
Wes
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