act3 is a communication strategy and design firm that specializes in telling stories.

This blog is our story laboratory, a way to poke, prod, and take a closer look at the stories we see, the stories we tell, and our own assumptions and knowledge about why stories work (or don't). The goal is to better understand what makes a story connect with people, and how to tell better stories.

Like any blog, it's an evolving concept. We hope you'll follow along.

August 14

When CITIZEN KANE was simply Citizen Kane

Was Citizen Kane always CITIZEN KANE?

Because we tend to look at the pillars of modern culture — the music, paintings, and films we exhalt as “classics” — through our present-day lens, we often assume the mythology surrounding them was a foregone conclusion, that they were widely acknowledged as classics from the start. But all classics were once notions sketched on napkins, single notes plucked on guitars, or screen tests long buried in a vault somewhere.

Which is to say, there was a time, long ago, when Citizen Kane wasn’t CITIZEN KANE.

That’s not to say it was just another movie — it won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and was a critic’s favorite for many of its technical merits. But the mythology we now assign to Citizen Kane (which, as Eric points out, has become something of a burden) didn’t really evolve until years after the film had been released.

When Citizen Kane came out in 1941, it faced two major obstacles to its success: a little conflict we like to call World War II, and William Randolph Hearst and his Hearst media machine. The film actually disappeared quite quickly from theaters after its release. (Hearst, the factual basis for the fictitious Charles Foster Kane, was not exactly pleased with the depiction.)

It wasn’t until a number of French filmmakers and critics, such as Andre Bazin, began discussing the film and elevating its artistry, that post-WWII European audiences began to take notice. The film’s reputation began to snowball, and by the late 1940s and early 1950s it was already being described as the greatest film ever made.

Many of us never knew a time when Citizen Kane wasn’t considered great — and the intimidating benchmark for ambitious, cinematic achievement. But there was a moment in history when it was just a movie, not a film — when it was just Citizen Kane, not CITIZEN KANE.

To me, that seems worth remembering. Mythology, like any part of a story’s DNA, is fluid, always changing and growing to incorporate new experiences and create new associations with an audience that’s ever-evolving. So if you don’t like the mythology your story has today, you aren’t stuck with it. But you do need to figure out how to change it.

:: Posted by Ben Kaplan ::