81), 1989's "Do the Right Thing" (No. 96) and 1995's "Toy Story" (No. Some silent-era classics and other old films may have fared better this time because they are more readily available in good quality restorations in today's DVD age as opposed to the VHS days.
Films that dropped out of the top-100 this time included 1965's "Doctor Zhivago," which had been No. 39 on the 1998 list; 1984's "Amadeus," which had been No. 53; 1977's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," which had been No.
64; 1990's "Dances With Wolves," which had been No. 75; and 1927's "The Jazz Singer," which had been No. "Close Encounters" director Steven Spielberg had the most films on the list with five, while Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Billy Wilder each had James Stewart and Robert De Niro were the most-represented actors with five films apiece.
In interviews for Wednesday's special, filmmakers and others in Hollywood told AFI they loved the behind-the-scenes story of "Citizen Kane" as much as the film itself, said Bob Gazzale, who produced the AFI show. It was the first movie by Welles, who bucked studio and storytelling conventions to craft a landmark film about the rise and fall of a William Randolph Hearst-like newspaper publisher. The film was ahead of its time, a dark tale whose brooding design, murky lighting, overlapping dialogue and ripped-from-true-life Hearst connection created an unnerving sense of realism.
"No one disputes it's a great American film, but what you hear from the great artists of our day is the love they have for this ideal of a young maverick making a movie like this, that a 25-year-old Orson Welles changed the fabric of cinema, and that that ideal still holds today of this jewel everybody reaches for," Gazzale said. "It's not only the movie, but the embodiment of the man who broke all the rules to tell his story." While AFI officials have not decided if they will continue the annual lists in coming years, Firstenberg said the institute will do a new list of all-time best American films every 10 years as a guide to changing tastes in future decades.
"With this new list, it became clearer the value of this program was to have five lists to chart rather than one 50-year-old list," Gazzale said. "It's not only celebrating the films again and driving people to see them again, but we get to see what's gone up, what's gone down." On the Net: Copyright 2007 by the Associated Press.
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