Perry Ferguson shrewdly suggested that since they were attempting so many new things, it might be a good idea to shoot the first few scenes under the guise of screen tests. Welles can only have been relieved by the suggestion; RKO were planning to make a great to-do about the first day of shooting. So, three days earlier, the crew and Welles, with a couple of actors piled into a screening room on the RKO lot, and attempted to shoot the scene immediately following the NEWS ON THE MARCH newsreel: the crucial scene in which the editor sends Thompson out to discover the meaning of Rosebud. (Welles was always rather sniffy about Rosebud, attributing it and everything to do with it to Mankiewicz; it is, in fact, an almost perfect McGuffin in the classic definition of Hitchcock: something which greatly exercises the characters but is not crucial to the plot.) It was an ideal scene for their purposes: it tested Toland’s experiment with both very low and very high light, it enabled Welles (who was not in it, another advantage) to stage a group scene of no psychological complexity but some physical difficulty, it challenged the sound department to deal with the for the most part overlapping dialogue.
