The Battle Over Citizen Kane Mercury Theatre (such as an adaptation of William Shakespeare's "Macbeth", which featured an all-black cast and was set in the jungle), and the infamy of his October 30, 1938, radio broadcast of H. G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds", which sent residents of Grover's Mill, New Jersey into a panic, Orson Welles was able to negotiate a virtually unheard-of two-picture deal with RKO Pictures, the smallest of the 'big five' major studios in this era. The deal gave him creative control under a budget limit. "The Battle Over Citizen Kane" also details the lives of Orson Welles and William
Orson Welles on an idea by Orson Welles". Welles spent around nine months around 1947–48 co-writing the screenplay for "Cyrano de Bergerac" along with Ben Hecht, a project Welles was assigned to direct for Alexander Korda. He began scouting for locations in Europe whilst filming "Black Magic", but Korda was short of money, so sold the rights to Columbia pictures, who eventually dismissed Welles from the project, and then sold the rights to United Artists, who in turn made a film version in 1950, which was not based on Welles's script. After Welles's elaborate musical stage version of this Jules Verne novel,