Looking for the ultimate Christmas gift for the movie lover in your life? How about the Best Screenplay Academy Award statue that Orson Welles won for writing the classic Citizen Kane. The Oscar will be going up for auction on December 20th at Los Angeles auction house Nate D. Sanders. This is the same Oscar statue that was up for auction in 2007, but didn’t sell then. This time around, it is hoped that the statue will sale for anywhere between $60,000 and $1 million. This is down considerably from the $800,000 to $1.2 million it was expected to earn the last time it had been placed up for auction.
Long thought lost, Welles’s Oscar was revealed to be in the possession of cinematographer Gary Graver, who stated that the director had given him the statue as payment for working on Welles’s unfinished 1974 film The Other Side Of The Wind. Graver tried to auction the Oscar through Sotheby’s, but was sued by Welles’ daughter Beatrice Welles, who was eventually awarded ownership of the Academy Award by a California court.
Beatrice Welles put the Oscar up for auction herself, but was sued by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences. The Academy had enacted a stipulation that the Oscar statues could not be resold without first offering to sell them back to the Academy for the nominal sum of $1.00. However, a California court ruled that as this rule was enacted in 1950, the Citizen Kane Oscar was not covered by the policy. The auction went ahead in 2003, with the Oscar being acquired by the Dax Foundation, who has decided to resale the statue and use the proceeds to help fund the non-profit organization’s charitable works. However, the statue failed to move at the 2007 auction and it appears that the Dax Foundation has sold the Oscar privately, as the reported current owner of the statue is wishing to remain anonymous.
Via Hollywood Reporter.
