Citizen Kane is regularly cited as the greatest film of all time. But the Oscar its director, star and co-writer received for the 1941 epic didn’t prove so popular at an auction held in New York on Tuesday.
The statuette presented to Orson Welles for Citizen Kane at the 1942 Oscar ceremony was expected to fetch up to $1,2-million for the charitable foundation that owns it. But it was withdrawn from the auction when bidding failed to meet the undisclosed reserve price. The seller immediately said it had received inquiries and may consider selling it privately.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which presents the awards each year, is highly protective of its cachet, and requires nominees to sign an agreement ”not to sell or otherwise dispose of” the statuette, should they win.
Welles received his Oscar for the film in 1942, nine years before the ruling took effect. He did not join the Academy, so was not subject to its regulations.
Hollywood figures have sought to keep statuettes in the hands of the Academy. Steven Spielberg bought at auction on behalf of the Academy statuettes awarded to Clark Gable and Bette Davis.
”We’ve had a tremendous amount of interest from very high-profile individuals who have said that they would like to see this on their mantel or back in the Academy’s hands,” Dave Weisman, executive director of the Dax Foundation, which owns the statuette, said.
But the history of this statuette makes it special, and suggests that Welles had little truck with the decorum demanded by the guardians of Hollywood history.
While the film was nominated for nine Academy Awards, it won just one, for best original screenplay, shared by Welles and Herman Mankiewicz. Welles, who had fallen out with the Academy, did not attend the ceremony, and each time his name was read out it was greeted with boos and hisses.
At some point, Welles lost the statuette, probably during his later life when he spent years living as a house guest of various Hollywood acquaintances. After his death in 1985, his daughter, Beatrice, obtained a replacement from the Academy. But in 1994 the original surfaced at an auction at Sotheby’s, which handled this week’s sale. The statuette had been in the possession of Welles’s cinematographer, Gary Graver, who said the director had given it to him as a gift.
Welles’s daughter sued to stop the sale, pledging to place it in a permanent memorial to her father. Instead she sold the Oscar three years later, fending off a lawsuit from the Academy. The statuette was bought in 2003 by the Dax Foundation.
Wednesday night’s sale also featured the Oscar-winning script by Welles and Mankiewicz. The 156-page script sold for $97 000. – Guardian Unlimited Â