Citizen Kane - Carringer

I found Carringer's research on Citizen Kane to be very interesting. There were many things about it that I would not have guessed, particularly how many rewrites and changes the script went through. This seemed quite surprising in contrast to the Billy Wilder interview we read last week, in which he talks about making certain films in under 50 days from start to finish. I also thought it was interesting how the drafts went back and forth between the idea of each narrator relating only what he could have known firsthand, and the idea of assigning bits of one person's story to a different narrator in order to make the film flow more smoothly. I also had never heard about the controversy over the screenwriting credit, which I found intriguing having just read about auteur theory.
The chapter about Art Direction was my favorite, probably because my goal is to work in the art department on either films or television shows someday. The chapter about Toland's cinematographic work was also very interesting, as it seems he had quite a lot to do with the feel of the movie, from the way it was shot. The section on special effects was also quite interesting. I found it fascinating to read about the way effects were produced before computers.