Welles Oscar for sale - Christies to auction July 25th

[Oscar Christie]

http://www.calendarlive.com/templat....calwknd

estimated sale price = $ 300,000

[Jeff Wilson]

Moving this to News. In future, such obvious joke names will be deleted immediately. Either post under a legit log-in or don't bother.

[Peter Tonguette]

This is kind of surprising news to me given the report a while back about how Beatrice was suing Gary Graver, to whom the statuette was given by Welles. It was one of the most depressing things I'd read in a while, given how loyal a collaborator GG was to Welles.

So does anyone know who is in possession of the Oscar now?

Peter

[Cole]

I was checking California federal dockets today and noticed that our good friend Beatrice has filed another suit in federal court. This latest one was filed a couple weeks ago against the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Another named defendant is David Quinto who has represented the Academy in the past regarding the Oscar trademark. Could this latest suit have anything to do with the auction that’s scheduled later this month for the Oscar that Welles won for Citizen Kane? Don't know if that's the case, but I’m sure that wouldn’t surprise anyone here.

[ToddBaesen]

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Very interesting news, Cole. This is complete conjucture on my part, but the Academy loathes the auctioning off of Oscar statuettes, and usually takes whatever legal steps it can to prevent such auctions. My guest is that after Beatrice gained possession of the KANE Oscar from Gary Graver, she is now attempting to sell it for $300,000.

The Academy most likely threatened to file an injunction of some sort to stop the sale, and Beatrice's attorneys, in an attempt to head off any such attempts to thwart her sale, probably decided it was a good idea to sue the Academy first... just to be on the safe side.

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[Jeff Wilson]

One can view the page for the Oscar auction at Christie's web site, along with numerous other Welles items, most related to Kane, although none with the cachet of the Oscar. The auction is slated for July 25, which explains the timing of the lawsuit, if it is indeed related. Do you have any further info on it, Cole?

I don't imagine that the Academy has any hold over this item; I believe they later made it mandatory that they have right of first refusal to buy any Oscar a winner wants to sell, but that didn't apply to those of Kane's period. Unfortunately, the Christie's listing makes no mention of the seller.



Edited By Jeff Wilson on July 02 2003 at 10:55

[Cole]

I wish I had more information regarding this latest lawsuit, but I only have the ability to pull the docket sheet which just has the brief entries made by the clerk of court. If I could get my hands on the complaint that she filed, I'd know the basic facts surrounding the lawsuit. The complaint is available to the public for inspection, but I don't live in California where the courthouse is located. My guess is that it's somehow related to the sale of the Oscar, but it's just a guess due to the Academy being a party to the suit and the timing of the suit in relation to the scheduled auction. If Beatrice is actually the one planning to sell the Oscar, I don't know what this suit is about. I doubt her suing the Academy would have any affect on its decision to sue her, assuming the Academy has some reason to sue Beatrice.

As an aside, I discovered an amusing tidbit of information today while trying to find reported case law in the US involving Orson Welles. I'm surprised I didn't find this before, but sometime in the late 1990's actress Joan Fontaine sued Blockbusters, the retailer of rental videos, for the way they advertised the rental tape of the movie Othello. Evidently the rental box used by Blockbusters at the time indicated that the movie "featured" Joan Fontaine, and since she only made a brief appearance in the movie, she sued Blockbusters for misappropriating her name for commercial purposes. Blockbusters defended its actions on First Amendment (i.e., free speech) grounds, and summarily won for that reason at the trial court level which was subsequently affirmed by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in an unpublished decision dated April 2000.

Odd that Fontaine would get so irate over the fact that her name was used in association with an obscure Welles film since I doubt Blockbusters made much if any profit in renting it to the public. I guess Beatrice Welles isn't the only "Beatrice" on the planet. And when does Fontaine appear in Othello anyway, or Joseph Cotten whose name also appears in the credits? The heck if I've ever spotted them in the movie.

[Jeff Wilson]

From the New York Times:

A standoff over one of the most illustrious artifacts of American film, the Oscar won by Orson Welles in 1942 as the co-writer of "Citizen Kane," ended yesterday when Christie's withdrew it from sale. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Hollywood trade group that sponsors the Oscars, had objected to its sale, claiming the right to buy back the statue for $1.

The Oscar was to have been the centerpiece of Christie's "Entertainment Memorabilia" auction on Friday and was highlighted on the catalog cover. It was among a large selection of Welles-related material and had carried an estimate of $300,000 to $400,000. The rest of the sale is to continue as planned.

"The Oscar has been withdrawn," a Christie's spokeswoman said late yesterday afternoon, "so we will not be able to offer it in the sale."

Although several major Oscars have reached the market in recent years, including Ronald Colman's best-acting award for "A Double Life" (1947), which sold at Christie's last year for $174,500, the academy has long imposed restrictions on how and where Oscars can be sold.

Bruce Davis, the academy's executive director, had said he was surprised that the Welles Oscar had been scheduled for sale because "we have a letter from Christie's general counsel assuring us that the Oscar would not be offered for sale until the legal issues are resolved." He continued, "We were extremely puzzled to hear on Friday that they intended to go ahead and put it on the block."

Since 1950 the academy has asked all Oscar recipients to sign an agreement stipulating that should the owner ever offer the Oscar for sale, the academy has the first right of purchase, at the nominal cost of $1. Mr. Davis said the agreement was evoked to stop the sale of the Kane Oscar, even though it was won eight years before the agreement came into being.

The Oscar was being sold by Beatrice Welles, the youngest of Orson Welles's three daughters and the sole heir of his estate. She inherited the estate from her mother, Paola Mori, the last of Welles's three wives, who died in 1986. Orson Welles died in 1985.

Knowing of the buy-back rule, auction houses frequently call the academy to check on the status of Oscars offered to them. "Christie's is pretty good about this kind of thing," Mr. Davis said. "They in fact called us, as they normally do when an Oscar statuette is involved, and asked is this one that we would object to or not." It was.

This is not the first time that Welles's "Kane" Oscar has surfaced for sale. The statue has a history murky and complex enough to compare with the famous jewel-encrusted bird of John Huston's 1941 film "The Maltese Falcon," the original "stuff that dreams are made of."

For many years the Welles Oscar was believed to be lost, a victim of Welles's life of upheaval and frequent trans-Atlantic trips after he first left Hollywood in 1948. In 1988 Beatrice Welles wrote to Robert Wise, who was then president of the academy, requesting a duplicate.

"That's a little unusual for us to do," Mr. Davis said. "But that's what we did. We gave her a duplicate, and fortunately we also had her sign a version of the winner's agreement at that time, which also covered the original, should it ever surface."

In 1994 the original statue did appear, at Sotheby's auction house in London. It had been in the collection of Gary Graver, a cinematographer (and occasional director of low-budget movies), who had worked, reportedly unpaid, on several of Welles's final projects.

Welles left a tangled legacy of rights, both full and partial, to films both finished and unfinished. During the shooting of one of the unfinished ones, "The Other Side of the Wind" in 1974, Welles used the statue as a prop for his main character, a Welles-like Hollywood maverick played by John Huston. When the scene was finished, according to court papers filed later, Welles handed the Oscar to Mr. Graver and said, "Here, keep this."

Mr. Graver said he interpreted Welles's words as a bequest. But Beatrice Welles and her advisers have contended that the words were a simple instruction to place the valuable item out of harm's way.

"He gave it to me and told me to keep it," Mr. Graver said in a recent interview from his home in Los Angeles. "She never saw it before in her life. Orson had given it to me, and she went to court and said, `I want it.' That's like me taking you to court and saying I want to take your car."

The Oscar, Mr. Graver said, was one of the many gifts Mr. Welles offered in lieu of cash: "Just like he gave me posters. You never knew what he was going to do. I had prints of films and posters, but I was afraid if I said I had anything, they'd try to grab it from me. Which is ridiculous, because Orson was not commercial. He's an artist, and there's not a lot of money to be made off of him."

In 1994 a financially strapped Mr. Graver sold the Oscar to a company called Bay Holdings for $50,000 and "other considerations," he said, declining to specify those considerations. Bay Holdings offered the piece to Sotheby's in London; news reports at the time said a minimum bid was set at $250,000.

When Beatrice Welles learned of the Oscar's existence, she filed a suit in California Superior Court against Mr. Graver and Bay Holdings. She won the case, stopping the sale. The statue, after spending some time in the care of the California judicial system, was eventually turned over to her. Ms. Welles now has two Oscars, the original and the replacement. Attempts to reach Ms. Welles have been unsuccessful.

There is no difficulty distinguishing the original Oscar from its substitute. "The ones given out in 1941 had a very different base," Mr. Davis said. "It was a Belgian marble base. It was during the war that they began to use the higher sprung-aluminum base. It's also easy because, beginning in 1950, we began putting serial numbers on them. From that point on, each statuette bears a unique number."

Mr. Davis said the original Welles Oscar was on display at the academy headquarters in March for the 75th anniversary of the Oscars. "We did an exhibition in our gallery where we borrowed back one statuette from each year of Academy history," he said. "And that happened to be the one we went after for 1941. The day before the show opened, we finally got permission to include it."


So assuming the Academy's document signed by Beatrice Welles is solid, she can either a) keep the Oscar or b) sell it to the Academy for a dollar. That is utterly hilarious. No wonder she was suing the Academy, they're cutting off her payday.

[Oscar Christie]

as a side note to the whole affair, here's a quote from Christie's description of the Oscar:

". . . One important finding, among many by Bogdanovich, was that "Kane" was the singular brainchild of Welles. While a student at the prestigious Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois from 1926 to 1930, Welles wrote a stage play called 'American.' The subject matter: a titan of industry who dramatically rises to power and then, just as dramatically, falls from it. This obviously was the genesis for "Citizen Kane." Welles, the child prodigy, conceived this story a full ten years before he and Mankiewicz wrote their Academy Award-winning screenplay, which, not coincidentally, was first titled "American...."

[ToddBaesen]

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What delightful news - to see somebody finally stand up to Orson Welles money-grubbing daughter at last...

Poor Beatrice is probably kicking herself for ever having been stupid enough to request a duplicate Oscar from the Academy in the first place, but at least now she can have the futile satisfaction of suing the AMPAS even though she doesn't have any legal case, since she foolishly signed the Academy's re-sale contract.

And without her big payday from Daddy's Oscar, maybe that's what's forcing her back to the bargining table to talk with Showtime about accepting a reasonable offer to finally let them show THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND.

[Jeff Wilson]

And without her big payday from Daddy's Oscar, maybe that's what's forcing her back to the bargining table to talk with Showtime about accepting a reasonable offer to finally let them show THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND.

Apparently so; from a wire article on the affair:

"According to AP, the academy learned in June that Beatrice Welles had placed the Oscar up for auction in June, citing financial difficulties.

The academy proceed to block the sale because "Oscar is not an article of commerce," said academy lawyer David Quinto. However, the organization offered financial help to her in exchange for selling the original and duplicate Oscars back. "

And from another:

""She submitted a declaration about how much it meant to her," Quinto said, "that she wanted to start a museum dedicated to her father's work."

She refused to hand over the Oscars and sued the academy "because it advised Christie's that there was a right-of-first-refusal agreement," Quinto said.

He said Welles now has threatened to declare bankruptcy unless the academy agrees to allow the auction to proceed."



Edited By Jeff Wilson on July 23 2003 at 09:50

[ToddBaesen]

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Below is the entire AP story with some additonal telling details culled from Variety: Namely Beatrice may have no choice about returning the Oscars to the Academy - Apparently once she violated the terms of her agreement by placing the original Citizen Kane Oscar up for sale, the Academy could claim them both back from her. Hey, at least she'll get $2.00 for them, and what a shame we won't be able to see them in Beatrice's planned Orson Welles museum.

*********

NEW YORK (AP) -- Orson Welles' Academy Award for "Citizen Kane'' won't be auctioned because of a legal dispute between the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the legendary filmmaker's sole heir. "We were told the dispute would be settled before the sale date, and since that did not happen, we decided to withdraw the Oscar,'' Christie's said Tuesday. ``It's a dispute between the consignor and the Academy.'' The consignor is Beatrice Welles, the youngest of Orson Welles' three daughters. The auction of entertainment memorabilia, scheduled for Friday, will go on without the Welles' Oscar.

The dispute centers on a right-of-first-refusal agreement that the Academy adopted in 1950 -- and which extends to all Oscars before and after that date. The agreement stipulates that if an Oscar winner, or the winner's heirs, ever offers the statuette for sale, it first has to be offered to the academy for $1, David Quinto, a lawyer for the academy, said Tuesday. Orson Welles died in 1985, leaving behind a complicated estate which was divided between his third wife, Palo Mori, and his longtime companion, Oja Kodar. When Palo Mori died in 1986, Beatrice, Mr. Welles and Ms. Mori's only child, inherited half of Mr. Welles estate.

Steven Ames Brown, Beatrice Welles' lawyer, said his client sued the Academy "for interfering with her right to do with her property as she wishes.'' Ms. Welles, who lives in Las Vegas, has declined to comment publicly. "When it's over, then we'll comment,'' Brown said. Recently Ms. Welles also sued AOL Time-Warner, the currently rights owner of "Citizen Kane," claiming that she is either entitled to receive a share of the profits from "Kane" or else owns the film outright.

This is not the first time that the Academy has invoked it's agreement to prevent the sale of an Oscar. The academy has successfully blocked the sale of Clark Gable's 1934 Oscar for "It Happened One Night," among others.

The Oscar for best original screenplay for "Citizen Kane," was the only competitive Oscar that Mr. Welles ever won. That year, Mr. Welles was also nominated for best actor, director and producer of "Citizen Kane, but lost in all three categories. In 1971, the Academy gave Mr. Welles an honorary Oscar for his "superlative artistry and versatility in the creation of motion pictures." For many years, Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane'' Oscar was presumed to have been lost, and in 1988 Beatrice Welles requested a duplicate from the Academy. "She submitted a declaration about how much it meant to her,'' Quinto said, "and said that she wanted to start a museum dedicated to her father's work.'' The Academy agreed to a replace it, but also asked her to sign the re-sale agreement.

In 1994 the original "Citizen Kane" Oscar surfaced at a Sotheby's auction in London. At that time, it belonged to Gary Graver, a longtime friend and cinematographer of Welles, who received the statuette as a gift while he was working with Welles on his last uncompleted film "The Other Side of the Wind." Graver had sold the Oscar for $50,000 to Bay Holdings, which then offered it for sale to Sotheby's. But when Beatrice Welles learned of its existence, she sued Graver and Bay Holdings, and when she won her case in court, the Oscar was returned to her.

In June, the Academy learned that Ms. Welles had placed the Oscar up for auction, citing financial difficulties. It informed her that the "Oscar is not an article of commerce" and that she was obligated to return it, as well as the duplicate, as specified in the terms of the agreement she signed in 1988. Additionally, the Academy offered to aid Ms. Welles financially. In reply, Ms. Welles not only refused to hand over the two Oscars, but instead sued the Academy and Mr. Quinto, "because it had advised Christie's that there was a right-of-first-refusal agreement,'' Quinto said.

Ms. Welles then threatened to declare bankruptcy unless the Academy would allow the auction to proceed as scheduled. Apparently, Ms. Welles has been borrowing heavily against the presumed proceeds from the "Kane" Oscar - which Christie's estimated would bring in between $300,000. and $400,000. Talks are still ongoing between lawyers for the Academy and Ms. Welles' attorney about whether she can now completely withdraw the trophy or, if, once it was announced for sale, both statuettes must be returned to the Academy - for the nominal fee of two dollars.

As late as Tuesday morning, Quinto said, "the Academy renewed its offer to try to so something to assist Ms. Welles financially, if she will deliver the original and replacement Oscars back to the Academy.''

[Fredric]

CITIZEN BEA

Fade in: to a dark room where the dying Bea lies on a bed.

Cut to: an oscar statuette in her hands.

Cut to: her lips saying "Daddy."

Cut to: The oscar falling and breaking on the floor.

-------

I think this play has finally come to an end.

[Harvey Chartrand]

We can all now sit back and look forward to hours of newly released and restored Welles footage.
The Dark Ages have passed. It's time for unrestricted, unimpeded viewing pleasure.
Someone who did bad, bad things will be more concerned with bankruptcy proceedings than nuisance suits.

[Fat Annie]

I've never understood.
There's all this money for Welles memorabilia. Yet no one has any money for what counts, ending Beatrice's jihad against Welles reconstructions and research projects.
If Beatrice is near bankruptcy, and if there were any money from people who actually support the legacy of Orson Welles,
then the thing to do is to buy her out.
How much would it cost to buy all her claimed rights etc. and send her home? The new owner of the Welles rights should be a non-profit sponsored by a major university (UCLA, USC or IU). Future funding from the legitimate Welles projects that have been held up by Beatrice's threatened litigation could finance new restorations and related public interest efforts that lack a market.