Updated on March 7, 2014: The draft Citizen Kane script sold for 98,500 pounds, or $164,797 at auction, according to Sotheby’s. The auction house had estimated it would sell for $25,000 to $33,500.
A New York Times report noted that the 229-page second draft script had markings and deletions in pencil and pink crayon. “They are canceling passages, for the most part,” said Gabriel Heaton, Sotheby’s manuscript specialist. “We do not know whether Welles actually did them or whether he dictated them to a secretary. He was probably drafting a memorandum to send back to (Herman) Mankiewicz.”
The cover (seen at right) bears the underscored notation “Mr. Welles’ Working Copy.” The same words appear, more faintly and with the director’s named misspelled as “Wells,” in the upper right corner of the cover.
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Sotheby’s in London will auction off Orson Welles’ copy of the second draft of the script to his landmark film Citizen Kane on March 5-6.
The script is Item No. 766 in the lot “1,000 Ways of Seeing: The Private Collection of the late Stanley J. Seeger.” The nearly 74-year-old script is expected to fetch between 15,000 and 20,000 GBP (approximately $25,000 to $33,500).
Scrawled across the yellowed cover page are the words “Mr. Welles working copy.” The first page of the script is dated 5/4/40 and bears the film’s working title, American.
Citizen Kane items have proved popular for action houses. In December 2013, a three-piece suit worn by Welles in one of the 1941 film’s final scenes was sold for $132,000 by the California-based Profiles in History. It had been expected to sell for $60,000 to $80,000.
Sotheby’s description of the Citizen Kane script reads:
WORKING DRAFT SCRIPT FOR CITIZEN KANE, HERE WITH ITS ORIGINAL TITLE “AMERICAN”
mimeograph typescript of the second draft of the script, mostly on white paper but with a 32 page insert (“News Digest”) on yellow paper, occasional scattered deletions and markings in pencil and pink crayon to about nine pages, 229 pages, folio, paginated and dated throughout but pages numbered to p.321 (of 325) to match the first draft, with additions on lettered pages (e.g. p.”98-b”) and cuts shown through the use of pages numbered as sequences (e.g. p. “270-291”), dated 30 April to 9 May 1940, cream cover inscribed twice “Mr Welles’ working copy”, three brass split pins, cover creased, stained, and nearly detached, script lacking final four pages, in a blue collector’s box; together with a modern photocopy of the fourth draft, marked “final”, dated 18 June 1940
Seeger, a Milwaukee native and heir to a timber and oil fortune, was described by the New Work Times at the time of his death in 2011 at the age of 81 as a “reclusive, idiosyncratic art collector who disposed of Picassos, Beckmanns and Bacons nearly as fast as he bought them.”
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