Orson Welles' Lone Oscar Could Be Yours!

By Katey Rich

With the New York Film Festival finished and much of the Nielsen Film Group out of the office for the ShowEast convention, there's time to get around to discussing the really important stuff: namely, just how much people are willing to sell at auction.

This time the object in question is the Oscar Orson Welles won as the screenwriter of Citizen Kane, which, remarkably, is the only Oscar the film received (somewhere Gregg Toland is still shaking his fist in frustration). Sotheby's is responsible for flogging the priceless item-- literally priceless, thanks to the strange rules set up by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and how long it took them to set them up.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the Academy established a condition in 1950 that Oscar winners must give the Academy a "first right of refusal" for statuettes offered for sale, which means they get first dibs on buying it and will put up a token $1 for it. This keeps hard-on-their-luck winners from auctioning off their statues, or as Academy representative David Quinto put it, to prevent Oscar from being "cheapened or tarnished by being made into articles of commerce."

Quinto's quote can be found in this article by the Australian paper The Age, which sums up a fight that took place over this very same Welles statuette a few years back. Welles' daughter Beatrice has been in charge of his awards since his death in 1985, and petitioned for a replacement Oscar 1988 when she believed the original to be lost. When the first one miraculously showed up at Sotheby's in 1994, Beatrice sued the auction house for it, and then turned around to sell it herself. When the matter went to court, they decided that awards given out before 1950-- before each winner was required to sign the "first right of refusal" contract--were fair game. Beatrice successfully sold it to the non-profit Dax Foundation, which is now putting it on the block again.

Got that? You can see why the Academy created the "right of refusal" clause, to prevent this kind of hubbub from  happening every time someone's divorce proceedings get particularly expensive. The pre-1950 Oscars that do get auctioned are incredibly rare, and few are as historic as Welles'. The most recent auction that's remotely similar was in 1999, when the Best Picture Oscar for Gone with the Wind went for $1.5 million. You can bet there will be some Xanadu-worthy figures rolling in this time too.

You have to imagine ol' Charles Foster Kane would be fine with this auction, really, since everyone trying to sell the statuette is doing basically exactly what he would have done. There's a buck to be made here, and if Kane needed the cash, you know he would have sold one of those priceless Xanadu artifacts. Or maybe, even better, one of the opera houses.