RKO No He Didn’t.

For reasons that are none of your business I was just now reading about the movie RKO 281 which was made about 700 years ago and/or in 1999, which is basically the same thing.

I have both seen and enjoyed this movie. It is about the making of Citizen Kane. The movie is basically about Orson Welles (played by a dynamite and youthful Liev Shreiber) as he is lured from the NYC theatre and radio scene by Hollywood and how he then proceeds to (due to a petty personal gripe) decide to make a movie excoriating William Randolph Hearst whose nickname at the time was “Literally the Only Dude You Don’t Want to Piss Off”.

I have not watched RKO 281 in more than a decade, but it made a big impression on me when I did watch it. I have a distinct memory of Liev Shreiber shouting - about the art and industry of making movies - “It is the most powerful storytelling medium in the history of mankind and it is controlled by bankers!”

I can find no place on the internet willing to confirm the existence of this dialogue, so I guess I should go watch the movie again.

The point is salient though, right?

My BFF Mike The Director is constantly annoyed by the fact that I like to play at both writer and producer and so I will write things like, “And then the moon EXPLODED and melted all the buildings on Earth, but then EVERYONE REALIZED that buildings were not important and so over the next 300 YEARS they developed an agrarian society based on simple trade and which focused on meeting the emotional needs of human beings rather than on the erstwhile construct of “personal successes” or EXISTENTIAL VALIDATION” and then MTD is all like, “How the fuck am I supposed to make a movie out of that?” and then I am all like, “I don’t know, but we seriously do not have the budget for an exploding moon.”

RKO 281 is a fantastic movie because the actors in it are good (did I mention John Malkovich plays the writer?), the script is great (written by a dude named John Logan, based on a documentary by Richard Ben Cramer and Thomas Lennon), the subject matter is fascinating, and because it traffics in the creative process itself which we all experience in our lives, be it in the form of writing shit down the way I do, visualizing it the way my friend Mike does, or simply settling into bed at the end of the day and plotting out a series of events for the next day. We tend to mitigate the importance of creativity in our lives, but without it we would be worse off. Without it we would be in the weeds.

At one point in the movie RKO 281 - if I recall correctly - a cinematographer shows up and says something along the lines of, “Hey, I wanta work with you” and when Welles asks after the guy’s credentials he removes from his duffel an Oscar for cinematography. That is the dream for all of us auteurs. Talent and skill all coming together in the service of something good.

There is always a struggle between the effort of making and the product of that making. As a simple, lowly writer I rely only on the reader to be my partner, but even that is more complicated than I am acknowledging.

If I have to sum all of this up, I would say that there is a difference between the initial creative impulse (think: an exploding moon) and the exercise of the creative muscle (think: a short film about exploding moons). And, I guess, I think that you should get on Hulu right now and actually watch Citizen Kane 70 times and actually watch RKO 281 35 times and then let me know how transformed you are by this experience I advised you to have. Though I suppose it is possible I’m just bored and trying to Rick-Roll you into watching better movies than you normally do because, let’s be honest here, your Netflix history is pretty embarrassing.

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