Orson Welles' controversial masterpiece Citizen Kane will be screened at 2 and 7 pm on Thursday, January 18, at the historic Edmond Town Hall Theatre, 45 Main Street.

Tickets are $3, and for those with hearing impairment, the matinee will be captioned.

Director Welles also starred as deceased newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane. For the story, a reporter investigates Kane's life, interviewing his significant others in order to decipher his enigmatic last word, "rosebud."

The reporter interviews Kane's college friend Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten), who recounts Kane's marriage to Emily Norton (Ruth Warrick), "He married for love - that's why he did everything," Leland tells the reporter. "That's why he went into politics. It seems we weren't enough. He wanted all the voters to love him, too."

Leland goes on to observe: "He never believed in anything except Charlie Kane." Kane believed so much in himself, he decided to run for governor, running on a platform of anti-corruption, promising to investigate and bring down his formidable opponent.

In 1941, the character of Charles Foster Kane seemed to be drawn on real-life newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Welles insisted that Kane was a fictional character, a composite of titans from that era.

Hearst, however, who reportedly never saw Citizen Kane himself, was so incensed by what he heard that he refused to run ads for the film in his publications, and even accused Orson Welles of being a Communist.

Hearst had many friends in high places who supported him. Three major theater chains initially refused to distribute the film, and Louis B. Mayer of MGM even offered a large sum of money to the president of RKO to destroy the master negative and all prints, which thankfully did not work.

Despite the negative pressure to pan the film, Citizen Kane won the 1942 Academy Award for Best Writing of an Original Screenplay (Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz), and was nominated for eight other categories.

Shockingly, the film was booed whenever Citizen Kane was announced as a nominee. By the time the film was shelved in the RKO vaults, the film barely broke even, though it received glowing reviews from several New York critics.

Mary Fellows is sponsoring this film "to support one the best movies ever made that never made any money for the first 55 years, on this, my 55th birthday!" The public is invited to join Mary for the screening, and have a slice of her birthday cake, too.

Additional films in the 2018 Someday Cinema Series, presented by Newtown Cultural Arts Commission, will be offered almost monthly through the end of the year. For all the details, visit tiny.cc/SomedayCinema2018 and/or Someday Cinema Series on Facebook.

Those wishing to sponsor a screening are invited to contact series coordinator Jen Rogers at somedaycinemaseries@gmail.com.

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