Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows I love the idea
of crappy sequels to great classic movies. I mean, not real sequels, but joke sequels that could be sketch
comedy pieces, so people wouldn’t have to watch a whole crappy movie, but they’d
still get the idea of how the original (and people’s hopes) could be ruined.
(After all, there are already too many lame sequels trying to cash in on great
classic films. But I like the idea of it.) And what better film to make a bad
sequel of than Citizen Kane, one
of the greatest and most respected movies of all time?
Now, making a sequel to Citizen Kane would not be easy to do well, which is perfect for
this idea. With its comprehensive storyline, complex narrative of interviews
and flashbacks from different people’s memory/point of view, it’s a hard act to
follow for sure, and equally difficult to even know where to begin with a
story. But considering how the story is told in Citizen Kane, perhaps this is the key to devising an appropriate
sequel. So while Citizen Kane
spent its time with people who knew the Kane character best for newspaper
stores, perhaps Citizen Kane 2
could follow the exploits of sensationalist scandal rag “journalists” in their
attempts to get the scoop on Citizen Kane. And since nobody wants to talk to these hatchet job character
assassins, they don’t get to talk to anyone who knew Kane really well, so they
get a lot of vague stories from people who only bumped into Kane once, or else
who “knows someone who knew him”, so they recount the badly-remembered, mostly
fictional accounts of what supposedly happened to someone else at some
completely benign and uninspiring occasion.
So the story would unfold like the original movie, but, you
know, worse (a lot worse!), opening with
the penultimate scene in the original, where all the journalists are talking
about how nobody really knew him, yadda yadda, and then cutting to the scene
with the burning of the “Rosebud” sled. So we cut back to the scene with the
reporters, and just as these reporters are leaving, the scandal rag guys show
up, and they try to finagle some information out of everybody there, but they
all say they have to go, etc., and the muck rakers get tossed out by the
movers, etc. So now we focus on one scandal rag reporter, and we find out
through clumsy exposition how he really needs this story because of whatever
hardship, and how he’ll lose his job if he doesn’t get some real dirt on this
Kane guy, because his boss’s boss was a rival of Kane’s in the newspaper business,
and he wants to embarrass Kane posthumously.
So this reporter, the hero of our movie, chases around
raking muck for this article he’s writing, interviewing the sleaziest
characters imaginable for these mostly non-sequitur type stories that don’t
even make a cohesive narrative for a movie: dribs and drabs of useless and
scurrilous information here and there, all adding up to not much content-wise
(like Kane buying bread next to someone at a supermarket, or Kane walking past
some guy at a boxing match, rumors about Kane dating someone in high school,
what kind of socks he wore, invented stories of him being a cad and a hedonist,
etc., and all bouncing all over the place in terms of dates and topics, until
we’re all completely confused and bored silly). And just to be pretentious, the
events of the film would make an effort to ape Orson Welles’s experiences in
making and then being ostracized for having made Citizen Kane, but with this scandal rag reporter having the
experiences, as in newspaper moguls try to silence him, then blackball him from
working in journalism, etc. So after all of this work, he’s told that if it’s
published, he’ll be ruined, but his newspaper backs him anyway, until the
article is published, at which point the piece gets them in so much hot water
that he’s shuffled to the mail room and has to forever do jobs he doesn’t want
to, scraping and saving to put out his own self-funded yellow-journalism books
(like Hollywood Babylon-type
tomes) from time to time until his death, even making ads for Paul Masson wine
toward the end. Oh, but after his death he is hailed as an auteur of scandal
journalism, and his books become treasured by gossip-mongers and endlessly
gushed about by literary critics.
Sound good? No? Well then aren’t you glad nobody even made Citizen
Kane 2?
(Actually, it might be fun if someone made a serious attempt
to make either Citizen Kane 2, or a
remake of Citizen Kane, but base
it on Rupert Murdoch instead of William Randolph Hearst. And in this case,
Hollywood would likely gladly support and perhaps even ballyhoo it, rather than
trying to bury it {except at Fox}!)
BTW: Apparently SNL did a sketch of Citizen Kane II, but
it’s different. Here’s a link to a transcript of that sketch:
