Looks at the lives and careers of Orson Welles and William Randolph Hearst, and how Hearst tried to suppress the 1941 film Citizen Kane and destroy Welles.

In the 1930s, William Randolph Hearst's media empire included 28 newspapers, a movie studio, a syndicated wire service, radio stations and 13 magazines. Nearly one in four American families read a Hearst publication. His newspapers were so influential that Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Winston Churchill all wrote for him. The first practitioner of what is now known as 'synergy,' Hearst used his media stronghold to achieve unprecedented political...

In the most dazzling debut feature in cinema history, twenty-five-year-old writer-producer-director-star Orson Welles synthesized the possibilities of sound-era filmmaking into what could be called the first truly modern movie. In telling the story of the meteoric rise and precipitous fall of a William Randolph Hearst-like newspaper magnate named Charles Foster Kane, Welles not only created the definitive portrait of American megalomania, he also...