EXCLUSIVE: The hammer just went down over the weekend on the one and only Oscar win for Citizen Kane, a 1941 movie many still consider the crown jewel of Hollywood, the greatest ever made.
In a Heritage Auctioneers “Hollywood Entertainment” auction that among many other items featured several from the career of Kane’s star, director and co-writer Orson Welles, the prize get was his 1941 Oscar for Original Screenplay that he shared with Herman Mankiewicz. Of the film’s nine nominations including Picture, Director and Actor for Welles, it was the single victory for the movie (How Green Was My Valley won Best Picture). The Welles statuette had a starting bid of $250,000 and sold to an unknown bidder for $645,000 (inclusive of buyer’s premium).
It, uh, gets a little complicated from there.
This is not the original Oscar statuette that Welles — who didn’t even attend the actual ceremony — won. It is instead a replacement that Welles’ daughter Beatrice asked the Academy for in 1988 since she claimed she couldn’t find the original in any of her father’s belongings. He died in 1985. The Academy complied and offered up the new statuette, but she was required to sign a release that stipulated it could not be sold without first offering it back to the Academy for one dollar. That has been the standard agreement implemented after 1950 that all Oscar winners must sign. It does not cover any Oscars won before then, and many have been sold or auctioned off.
It, uh, gets even more complicated from there.
In 1994 somehow the “lost” original Welles Oscar turned up for auction at London’s Sothebys. This was traced to Gary Graver a cinematographer who was working on Welles’ famously unfinished (until a restoration four decades later) 1974 film, The Other Side of the Wind and claimed Welles gave it to him for payment on the financially strapped project. He later sold it for a reported $50,000 to a company that eventually put it up for auction at Sotheby’s with a reserve of $250,000 (ironically the exact same reserve for the replacement on this weekend’s Heritage auction). After Sotheby’s notified Beatrice Welles in order to verify this was all legitimate before proceeding further, she sued. The court ruled in her favor that it wasn’t for “payment,” and the Oscar was given to Beatrice Welles — who, in 2003, attempted to sell it herself since she was forbidden by AMPAS from selling the 1988 replacement.
Enter the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
This historic attempted sale of a legacy Oscar caught the eye of the Academy’s legal team, who tried to stop the auction of the original by claiming the 1988 replacement agreement she signed would in effect forbid selling either statuette. She pointed out she was not the original winner of that actual 1941 award because it went to dear old dad and therefore it should not be lumped in with the 1988 replacement statuette. A judge ruled in her favor, not the Academy’s. She sold it for an unspecified sum, and for several years the buyer tried to auction it off, but their desired reserve price was never met. Finally, in 2011, the Nate D. Sanders auction house famously succeeded by selling it to an unknown buyer for $871,542. Seeing those kinds of prices realized, the other winning Citizen Kane statuette belonging to Mankiewicz was auctioned off a year later for $588,455.
Now it really gets complicated. Maybe.
Although many items clearly listed in the Heritage catalog as from the Welles Estate were also auctioned off — three Spoken Word Grammys collected nearly $45,000 combined, Welles’ typewriter sold for $81,250, three separate Citizen Kane Oscar Nomination certificates got $105,000 total — the infamous replacement Oscar was not listed as coming from the Estate or any specific consignor, just that it would have a Certificate of Authenticity. Heritage, however, guarantees, as Sotheby’s had attempted to do with the original, that every consignor must be legitimately and legally able to do so. I am well acquainted with this practice because as a collector myself, and I deal with Heritage and their rules all the time. The auction house has a policy of not revealing its consignors unless the name is specified in the individual auctions.
Everett
So the mystery remains: Just who decided they could sell this 1988 replacement Citizen Kane Oscar, which clearly was subject to the AMPAS stipulation that it couldn’t be publicly sold or auctioned without first offering it back to the Academy. If it had come directly from Beatrice Welles and the Estate, wouldn’t Heritage had printed that? And why would she even attempt it? After all, it listed the Estate on so many of the other items up for auction. Did she privately give it or sell it to someone else over the years, well out of the public-auction eye? It is intriguing since it would seem that whoever sold it and whoever now has bought it would be subject to the same agreement that it could not be sold that Beatrice Welles signed in 1988 with the Academy in order to get it replaced.
Right?
And the plot thickens.
Heritage has a policy that a winning bidder of any auction can immediately offer it up for sale through them as soon as the auction ends. Whoever was the winning bidder of this Citizen Kane replacement Oscar that sold for $645,000 is trying to unload it quickly and now is offering anyone else the chance to own it for $967,000 or “more” in Heritage’s “make offer to owner” feature. That markup is even before the buyer has paid for it themselves or it has even been shipped by Heritage.
By the way, the Kane Oscar was not the only Oscar statuette offered here. A 1944 “unattributed” statuette with no name plate also went on the block with a starting bid of $15,000. It went for only $21,250 but now also is subject of an “offer to owner” immediate deal for $31,875. And you thought inflation was crazy.
The “three” Citizen Kane screenplay Oscars all might be out there somewhere in possession of people who had nothing to do with its writing or the movie itself, but Orson Welles did receive one other Academy Award in his career, an Honorary Oscar in 1971 (for which he sent in a taped acceptance). As far as I know, there has been no attempt to sell that one since Welles would have been required to sign the Academy’s agreement to offer it back to them and his Estate would have to abide by it. At least that is what the Academy hopes they would do.
Deadline contacted AMPAS today to ask whether it might try to take action on this particular auction and the sale of the replacement Oscar. An Academy Spokesperson said, “They will be looking into this.”
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