Welles' Oscar Up for Grabs

Orson Welles is long gone, but now's your chance to pick up a little something to remember him by—if the price is right.

Sotheby's New York has revealed plans to auction off Welles' one and only Oscar, for cowriting 1941's Citizen Kane, the consensus pick of  film critics and historians as the greatest film ever made.

Sotheby's predicts the Dec. 11 auction will fetch anywhere from $800,000 to $1.2 million, putting Welles' Oscar in the same league as the Best Picture trophy for Gone with the Wind ($1.5 million) or its star Vivien Leigh's Best Actress Academy Award ($550,000).

"Citizen Kane is Welles at genius level," says Lelia Dunbar, director of Sotheby's Collectibles Department.

Indeed, the film regularly tops best-of lists, including both times the American Film Institute counted down the top 100 movies of all time.

Welles' Academy Award not only represents the pinnacle of the famed auteur's career but proved to be the only Oscar he would win before his death in 1985 at the age of 70.

Welles began work on Citizen Kane, his feature-film debut, when he was just 25. Nominally a biopic of the fictional media mogul Charles Foster Kane, loosely based on William Randolph Hearst, Citizen Kane broke several longstanding rules of filmmaking—using nonlinear narrative, deep-focus photography and innovative editing and sound techniques—and in the process established Welles as both a maverick and pioneer.

"Welles was fearless in writing and presenting the story of a powerful mogul such as William Randolph Hearst despite the consequences," says Dunbar. "Citizen Kane is probably the world's most famous film and for the past six decades has and continues to influence generations of filmmakers."

Despite a marvelous critical reception, the movie saw only a limited release thanks in part to the strong-arm tactics of Hearst, who felt the film slighted him.

Nonetheless, Citizen Kane was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Welles personally accounted for three nods, Best Director, Actor and Original Screenplay. The film lost out to John Ford's How Green Was My Valley, and Welles only made good on the Best Screenplay Oscar, which he shared with cowriter Herman J. Mankiewicz.

Welles' Oscar was believed lost for many years before surfacing in the possession of noted cinematographer and longtime Welles' collaborator Gary Graver, who claimed Welles gave him the statuette as a gift in lieu of money after working on Welles' unfinished 1974 film, The Other Side of the Wind.

Welles' daughter Beatrice successfully sued to prevent Graver and Sotheby's from auctioning the Oscar; a California court eventually awarded her full ownership.

When she turned around and put it up for auction, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which frowns on such commercial sales, filed its own lawsuit attempting to stop her. The Academy claimed Oscar winners agreed to give the organization first right of refusal to buy back any statuette for $1.

But the younger Welles prevailed after a court ruled that the policy had only been in effect since 1950, long after Citizen Kane was made.

The statuette was put under the hammer in 2003 and acquired by the Dax Foundation. The foundation decided to auction the Oscar and use the proceeds to help fund the nonprofit's charitable works, including aiding disabled children and supporting educational initiatives.

No word on whether the Academy would seek to purchase Welles' Oscar for its massive collection. Leslie Unger, the Academy's communications director, did not immediately respond to calls seeking comment.

However, based on recent history, the Academy might not have to make an offer. On several occasions, Academy benefactors have helped rescue Oscars, most notably Steven Spielberg.

The E.T. director, who once ponied up $60,000 in 1980s auction for the Rosebud sled from Citizen Kane, paid six figures apiece for Oscars belonging to Clark Gable and Bette Davis and donated them to the Academy in perpetuity.

There was no word from Spielberg's camp whether the director would be pulling out his checkbook come December.