Over the past year, I've used Chat GPT 4o for many fake movie treatments. Here, for the first time we try the new Chat GPT 5. For this parody purpose, seems as good as 4o or better.
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In 1941, Citizen Kane was Heralded as a great cinema success. Meanwhile, Eugene, O’Neill is struggling to produce a new play, and is stuck with his efforts on Long days journey into night. In this context, (in an alternative universe ripe for satire), the nobel laureate O’Neill accepts a commission from RKO pictures to ... write a sequel to Citizen Kane. Write up a (humorous) treatment or pitch as a four part Netflix series. But take the ridiculous scenario seriously.
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Here’s how I’d frame it so it’s absurd in premise but presented with the deadly earnestness of a real prestige pitch — exactly the way Netflix would package such a fever dream:
Pitch: Citizen Kane II: The Long Day’s Journey to Xanadu
A Four-Part Netflix Limited Series
Written by Eugene O’Neill (Nobel Laureate, Pulitzer winner, playwright of harrowing family dramas — now in a surprising partnership with RKO Pictures)
Logline
In this alternate 1941, Eugene O’Neill, paralyzed by writer’s block on Long Day’s Journey Into Night, accepts an unthinkable commission from RKO: to pen a sequel to Citizen Kane. The result? A sprawling, four-part family tragedy in which the grandeur of Xanadu collides with the claustrophobic despair of an O’Neill living room. The snow globe is dropped… again.
Tone & Style
Think Succession by way of Mourning Becomes Electra, shot with Gregg Toland’s deep-focus cinematography, but paced like a slow-burn four-act tragedy in which every emotional revelation lands like a foghorn. The satirical absurdity comes from the fact that nobody — least of all O’Neill — treats this project as a joke.
Episode Guide
Episode 1: “Rosebud Revisited”
We open in a dim, maritime-fog Xanadu, years after Kane’s death. The estate is in legal limbo, inhabited by a dwindling circle of hangers-on: Susan Alexander, now a faded contralto who sings Irish laments to empty halls; Mr. Bernstein, who acts as a mordant Greek chorus; and Jed Leland, whose mind is slipping into a half-dream state. O’Neill introduces the Kane siblings — invented whole cloth — who’ve arrived to fight over the estate:
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James Tyrone Kane (eldest son, failed Broadway actor)
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Edmund Kane (consumptive poet, always swaddled in a blanket)
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Mary Kane Jr. (brooding, piano-playing alcoholic)
Everyone drinks too much, blames each other, and delivers 14-minute monologues about childhood sleds and the inexorable decline of American empire.
Episode 2: “The Glass Globe”
O’Neill welds his own obsessions onto the Kane mythos. A family meal in Xanadu’s cavernous dining hall becomes an epic, hour-long scene in which:
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Susan tries to explain the difference between love and pity.
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James accuses Edmund of stealing a rare Portuguese schooner model from the library.
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Bernstein, from the shadows, tells an allegorical parable about a man who saw a girl in a white dress once, and how it ruined him.
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Mary Jr. breaks down, clutching a snow globe, confessing that she once met “Rosebud” — not a sled, but a stable boy — in the stables during a Connecticut summer.
The episode ends with the butler muttering, “Rosebud was a person,” and everyone shouting him down for ruining the mystery.
Episode 3: “The Funeral That Lasted Three Days”
O’Neill stages a wake for Kane’s fortune itself. Guests — Hearst-like moguls, vaudeville comedians, striking newspapermen — wander in and out of long, whiskey-soaked tableaux. A foghorn moans whenever someone says “American Dream.”
Flashbacks, Toland-style, reveal new truths: Kane did not die entirely alone; Edmund was in the next room, reading him The Iceman Cometh. Kane wept — not for his lost sled, but because the play was still in its third act.
Episode 4: “The Long Day’s Journey Into Xanadu”
The final episode compresses one 24-hour period in which the Kane heirs must decide whether to sell Xanadu. The vote never happens; each character retreats deeper into confession, recrimination, and half-remembered childhoods.
By the closing minutes:
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Edmund walks into the sea, never to return.
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Mary Jr. sits alone at the piano, playing the theme from Kane’s newsreel obituary.
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James finds a note from Kane’s mother, written decades earlier: “Don’t let them take the sled.”
The screen fades to black on a snow globe rolling down Xanadu’s marble steps.
Why Netflix Will Bite
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Prestige Name Recognition: O’Neill + Citizen Kane = irresistible to the awards committees.
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Cinematic Heritage: Uses deep-focus visuals, chiaroscuro lighting, and O’Neill’s searing dialogue to create something that feels historically authentic yet hilariously ill-conceived.
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Binge-worthy Gravitas: Each episode feels like a complete one-act tragedy; viewers will emerge emotionally drained yet inexplicably amused.
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Satire in Disguise: The more seriously the production takes itself, the funnier the concept becomes.
If you’d like, I can also create a mock 1941 RKO press release announcing this collaboration — written in period studio hype language that tries to sell the public on the idea of “Eugene O’Neill’s thrilling follow-up to the motion picture masterpiece Citizen Kane.” That could make the satire even richer.
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Here’s the mock 1941 RKO press release — done with the puffed-up grandeur of the era, earnestly trying to convince the public that this is the greatest idea in motion picture history:
RKO RADIO PICTURES — PRESS ANNOUNCEMENT
For Immediate Release — October 3, 1941
RKO RADIO PICTURES ANNOUNCES HISTORIC COLLABORATION:
Nobel Prize-Winning Playwright Eugene O’Neill to Pen Stirring Sequel to CITIZEN KANE!
Hollywood, Calif. — In a bold union of the stage’s most distinguished voice and the screen’s most talked-about triumph, RKO Radio Pictures proudly announces that Nobel laureate Eugene O’Neill will write the official continuation of Orson Welles’ sensational motion picture achievement, CITIZEN KANE.
Tentatively titled CITIZEN KANE II: The Long Day’s Journey to Xanadu, this unprecedented four-part screen epic will unite the penetrating psychological insight of America’s foremost dramatist with the sweeping visual power of the motion picture event hailed around the globe as “the greatest ever made.”
Mr. O’Neill, celebrated author of Mourning Becomes Electra, Strange Interlude, and the forthcoming Long Day’s Journey Into Night, will bring to life the untold saga of the Kane family. Set in the vast, mysterious halls of Xanadu following Charles Foster Kane’s death, the story will explore themes of ambition, memory, and the restless American spirit, rendered with the uncompromising emotional truth for which Mr. O’Neill is world-renowned.
“It is not enough to know the man,” Mr. O’Neill declared to assembled reporters. “We must know the family who bore him, and the dream that outlived him — or failed to.”
The production, under the banner of RKO’s “Pictures of Distinction” series, will be directed with multiple lenses and deep-focus wizardry, preserving the groundbreaking style pioneered by Mr. Welles while imbuing the work with the intimate, stage-born intensity of Mr. O’Neill’s drama.
The film will be presented in four full-length chapters, released sequentially to theaters before uniting in a special engagement marathon presentation. An ensemble cast of Hollywood’s finest — and a few surprises from Broadway — will bring O’Neill’s layered characters to vivid life.
RKO Studio Head George Schaefer commented: “The cinema has given audiences spectacle. The theater has given them truth. With Eugene O’Neill’s pen guiding the sequel to Citizen Kane, RKO will give them both.”
Production is slated to begin early next year, with location shooting in Florida, California, and the rocky coast of New England. Release is anticipated for the Christmas season, 1942 — the perfect gift for audiences eager to return to the world of Kane.
Press Contact:
Louella Parsons, RKO Radio Pictures
Hollywood 9-4733
If you like, I can also mock up a 1941 New York Times review of this imagined sequel, written as if it actually premiered — with the critic gamely trying to parse what the hell O’Neill has done to Welles’ world. That would be the next hilarious layer.
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Here’s the imagined December 1942 New York Times review — written in the sober, slightly formal style of Bosley Crowther, with just enough bafflement peeking through to make it funny:
The New York Times
December 19, 1942
‘Citizen Kane II: The Long Day’s Journey to Xanadu’ — Eugene O’Neill’s Monumental Sequel to Welles’ Masterpiece Opens at the Roxy
By BOSLEY CROWTHER
Hollywood has this week delivered to New York audiences one of the most unusual — and, it must be said, most exhausting — film experiences in memory: Eugene O’Neill’s Citizen Kane II: The Long Day’s Journey to Xanadu, the official four-part sequel to Orson Welles’ 1941 masterpiece. Running to an unprecedented seven hours (with intermissions for dinner, coffee, and — mercifully — air), this RKO super-production reunites us with the world of Charles Foster Kane, not to revisit his rise and fall, but to sit with his surviving kin and acquaintances in rooms so large and yet so airless that one feels the temperature drop.
Where Welles gave us motion, O’Neill gives us stillness. The camera, in Gregg Toland’s familiar deep focus, now lingers for whole reels upon the Kane heirs — invented for this sequel — as they drink whiskey, accuse one another of ancient crimes, and stare into middle distance while the Florida surf batters unseen rocks.
James Tyrone Kane, the eldest, is played with such brooding intensity by Paul Muni that one almost forgets he has no connection to the original film. Edmund Kane, a poet with a cough (John Garfield), speaks largely in fevered metaphors about the sea. Mary Kane Jr., portrayed by Katharine Hepburn, seems perpetually on the verge of either playing the piano or hurling herself into it. And Susan Alexander Kane (Dorothy Comingore), now a tragic hostess in her own decaying palace, drifts through scenes in sequined gowns that glimmer like frost on the wreckage of the American Dream.
The celebrated “Rosebud” mystery is neither resolved nor deepened; instead, it is reinterpreted in a twenty-minute monologue by Mr. Garfield, in which he suggests it was not a sled at all but “the eternal ache of man for what he cannot return to.” The scene concludes with a foghorn blast and a slow dolly in on Hepburn’s gloved hands, trembling over a snow globe.
Technically, the film is magnificent — the vast interiors of Xanadu captured in chiaroscuro splendor, the sound of echoing footsteps rendered so vividly one could count the seconds before they fade. Yet, dramatically, this is a curious hybrid: a motion picture that seems determined, for long stretches, not to move at all.
And yet — it is not without a strange majesty. For those prepared to surrender themselves to its glacial pace and funereal mood, O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey to Xanadu offers a meditation on wealth, memory, and the slow corrosion of love that is as bleak as it is, at moments, beautiful.
Still, a word of caution: audiences expecting a lively follow-up to Citizen Kane may find themselves — somewhere around Hour Five — longing for the brisk relief of a newsreel.
If you want, I can also mock up the Variety review, which would be much more blunt — all “stark drama, heavy box office risk, slow as molasses” — which could be even funnier as the industry’s reaction. That would make this alternate-universe roll-out feel complete.
[stop]
CONTINUATION. Let's remind and this time the playwright is none other than Tennesee Williams.
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Alright — here’s the pitch in the same “absurd premise taken with dead-serious prestige” mode, but now filtered through Tennessee Williams’ humid, swooning, moth-eaten Southern Gothic sensibility.
Pitch: Citizen Kane: The Glass Palace
A Four-Part Netflix Limited Series
Written by Tennessee Williams (in his first screenwriting venture, immediately following the triumphant debut of The Glass Menagerie)
Logline
It is the sweltering summer after Charles Foster Kane’s death. In the crumbling Xanadu estate, a strange, languorous drama unfolds among the people left behind — ex-lovers, half-forgotten relatives, and spectral strangers — each determined to keep the past alive long after the ice in their highball glasses has melted.
Tone & Style
Take Kane’s towering marble corridors and drench them in Gulf Coast humidity. Light them through torn lace curtains. Everyone is either barefoot on cold tile floors or dressed in evening clothes at noon. The camera will linger on beads of sweat, moths around candelabras, and whispered confessions at the edge of verandas. This is Citizen Kane rewritten as a memory play — with all the memory’s distortions, fever dreams, and dangerous charms.
Episode Guide
Episode 1: “Summer Guests”
It’s August at Xanadu. The air is heavy. Susan Alexander, abandoned and embittered, has opened the mansion to paying “guests” — faded actresses, penniless cousins, and out-of-town newspapermen — to fund her gin habit. Among them is a fragile young man named Chance Kane, who claims to be Kane’s illegitimate son. He wears a white suit, never takes off his sunglasses, and drifts through rooms like he’s afraid to touch the furniture.
A great deal of the hour is spent in sweltering drawing rooms with the guests talking about what they’ve “heard” about Kane — none of it lining up with the original film.
Episode 2: “The Aviary”
Williams introduces Lavinia Kane, a pale, birdlike woman who says she was Kane’s sister but can produce no proof. She lives in the old rooftop aviary, feeding doves and delivering long monologues about her youth in St. Louis. Chance listens to her stories, which shift with each telling, while Susan plots to evict her.
In the episode’s centerpiece scene, a tropical storm batters the aviary glass while Lavinia, Susan, and Chance drink together, revealing more about themselves than they intend. Everyone ends the night barefoot and soaked, the lights flickering.
Episode 3: “The Birthday Waltz”
Chance turns 25, and Susan throws a lavish, decaying Southern-style party in the Xanadu ballroom. No one is certain if it’s really his birthday. A small orchestra plays waltzes under a dripping chandelier. Lavinia gifts Chance a miniature snow globe; Susan gives him a cigarette case engraved “To C.F.K.”
Midway through, an unexpected guest arrives — Thomas Leland, the son of Jed Leland — carrying a bundle of Kane’s old love letters. He intends to sell them, but as they’re read aloud, they begin to dissolve everyone’s version of the man. The party dissolves into drunken arguments, whispered confessions, and one slow, tragic dance between Susan and Chance.
Episode 4: “The Glass Palace”
As summer ends, so does Xanadu’s fragile society. The roof leaks, the doves escape, and the guests leave one by one. Chance decides to go south “where the air doesn’t choke you.” Lavinia insists she will stay until the glass finally shatters.
In the final scenes:
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Susan smashes the snow globe in a fit of rage, then weeps as the shards cut her hand.
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Chance and Thomas leave in the same car, neither speaking.
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Lavinia sits alone in the aviary, fanning herself, murmuring “Rosebud” as if it were a person she once knew.
The last shot is through the warped glass of the aviary, the world outside melting in the heat.
Why This Works (on Paper)
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Tennessee Williams’ Signature Atmosphere: Memory, faded beauty, and oppressive heat transform Citizen Kane’s sharp angles into a dreamscape.
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Character Over Plot: Kane remains an absence — his shadow is the real protagonist.
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Visual Splendor: Toland’s deep focus paired with Williams’ imagery — sweat, lace, moths, and glass — creates a sumptuous contradiction.
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Prestige Bait: In 1941, critics will call it “bold” and “audacious”; in 2025, it will be meme-worthy.
If you want, I can now mock up a 1941 RKO press release announcing this Tennessee Williams sequel — written with maximum studio hype (“the velvet glove around the iron fist of a man’s life story”) — which would make the satire even sharper. That could be the perfect companion to the treatment.
(NEW YORKER INTERVIEW)
Here’s how I’d imagine a 1941 New Yorker profile/interview — urbane, slightly wry, with that mix of reverence and gentle needling the magazine was so good at — catching Tennessee Williams on the cusp of his oddest career move.
The Talk of the Town
November 29, 1941
The Hot Young Playwright and the Boy from Xanadu
By Our Staff
In a small, faintly overheated hotel room off Gramercy Park, Tennessee Williams sits cross-legged on a divan in his shirtsleeves, drinking coffee from a chipped teacup and trying to explain why, fresh off the smash Broadway debut of The Glass Menagerie, he has agreed to write the sequel to Citizen Kane.
“It’s a little like asking a man who’s just built a birdcage to design the Empire State Building,” he says, in his soft Mississippi voice, “but the gentlemen from RKO seemed to think I was the man to do it. And in a way, they were right. I don’t know a thing about empire-building, but I know something about cages.”
Williams, thirty, looks boyish and tired. A battered spiral notebook, bulging with paper scraps, sits on the table beside him. He flips through it, revealing fragments — a girl in a yellow dress by a streetlamp, a mother feeding doves in a broken aviary, a man in a white suit smoking on a balcony. “These were meant for other plays,” he admits. “I’ve been blocked for weeks — maybe months — so I thought, why not let Mr. Kane’s ghost haunt them instead? If you can’t find your own house, move into someone else’s.”
In Citizen Kane: The Glass Palace, Williams is less interested in newspaper tycoons than in the people who linger in their houses after they’re gone. “I think Kane’s story isn’t finished just because he’s dead,” he says. “A house like Xanadu — it soaks up secrets like humidity in the walls. I want to write about the damp.”
The studio has promised to preserve the famous deep-focus look of Orson Welles’ film, though Williams says he’s more concerned with lace curtains and bare feet on cold floors. “You can have a whole plot in the way a woman opens a window,” he says. “Mr. Welles might disagree, but then, Mr. Welles made a picture about a man. I’m making one about his absence.”
Asked whether he’s daunted by following what’s been called the greatest film ever made, Williams grins. “Well, when you can’t top something, you might as well tilt it on its side and see what rolls out. I think of my work as — what’s the word? — counterpoint. Or maybe embroidery. Or maybe just a long, slow exhale after all that shouting.”
When the interview ends, Williams shows us to the door. On the way out, we notice a snow globe on the mantel. Inside: not a sled, but a tiny glass veranda, complete with a white rocking chair.
If you want, I could also do a mock Orson Welles rebuttal in The New Yorker letters section, where Welles praises Williams’ “poetic gifts” but grumbles that Kane’s heirs “do not and have never worn white suits.” That would add an extra layer of comic realism to this alternate timeline.
(STOP)
