The Heritage Auctioneers “Hollywood Entertainment” auctioned items from the career of Orson Welles, the director and co-writer of Citizen Kane. The film allowed Welles to win his 1941 Oscar for Original Screenplay alongside nine nominations including Pictures, Director, and Best Actor. The starting bid for the statuette was $250,000 and the statuette was sold to an unknown bidder for $645,000.
The statuette that was sold wasn’t the original Oscar statuette that Welles won at the ceremony. The sold statuette was a replacement Welles’s daughter, Beatrice, requested from the Academy in 1988. The Academy gave her a new statuette, but she did have to sign a release that specified that it could not be sold without offering it back to the Academy for one dollar. This standard agreement has been implemented since 1950, which all Oscar winners must sign.
In 1994, the “lost” original Welles Oscar went up for auction at London’s Sothebys. The cinematographer, Gary Graver, who worked with Welles on the 1974 film, The Other Side of the Wind, claimed that Welles gave the statuette to him for payment. Then, Graver later sold it for $50,000 to a company that ended up putting the statuette up for auction at Sotheby’s for $250,000.
The auction house alerted Beatrice to verify that the transaction was legitimate before proceeding further, and Beatrice sued. The court ruled in her favor that it wasn’t for “payment” and the Oscar statuette was given back to Beatrice. In 2023, Beatrice tried to sell the statuette herself but she was prohibited due to AMPAS from selling the 1988 replacement.
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