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Exclusive: The hammer just went down over the weekend on the one and only Oscar win for Citizen Kane, a 1941 movie many still consider the crown jewel of Hollywood, the greatest ever made.

In a Heritage Auctioneers “Hollywood Entertainment” auction that among many other items featured several from the career of Kane’s star, director and co-writer Orson Welles, the prize get was his 1941 Oscar for Original Screenplay that he shared with Herman Mankiewicz. Of the film’s nine nominations including Picture, Director and Actor for Welles, it was the single victory for the movie (How Green Was My Valley won Best Picture). The Welles statuette had a starting bid of $250,000 and sold to an unknown bidder for $645,000 (inclusive of buyer’s premium).

It, uh, gets a little complicated from there.

Heritage Auctions

This is not the original Oscar statuette that Welles — who didn’t even attend the actual ceremony — won.

Sometime during the rickety, rollicking production of Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind in 1974, the 1942 Oscar statuette for Best Original Screenplay (which Welles had won for Citizen Kane) disappeared. Only three decades later did cinematographer Gary Graver reveal that he’d placed the Oscar, blasphemously used as a prop for The Other Side of the Wind, in his storage. “Here, keep this,” Welles had told him. And so he did. The filmmaker’s daughter, Beatrice Welles, then sued Graver, and sold the statue herself. Because her father had “loathed everything that [the Citizen Kane] Oscar represented,” she argued, “To sell the one thing that had no value to him, but was of great value to others, perhaps was not so bad after all.”This award, however, held immense value for the other winner, the screenwriter and producer Herman J. Mankiewicz (nicknamed “Mank”), who threatened Orson Welles—with rumors and...

A new six-part doc series is set to pull back the curtain on the life of iconic director Orson Welles. Life With Orson Welles: The Man Behind the Legend comes from his daughter, Beatrice Welles, and director Dax Phelan, and is repped to buyers in Berlin by Lon Haber & Co.

The series is being styled as a collection of casual but revealing dinner conversations, during which Welles, Phelan and a revolving door of special guests will discuss the late filmmaker, his work and the private life few got to see.

“Much is known about my father as this legendary ...

A new six-part doc series is set to pull back the curtain on the life of iconic director Orson Welles. Life With Orson Welles: The Man Behind the Legend comes from his daughter, Beatrice Welles, and director Dax Phelan, and is repped to buyers in Berlin by Lon Haber & Co.

The series is being styled as a collection of casual but revealing dinner conversations, during which Welles, Phelan and a revolving door of special guests will discuss the late filmmaker, his work and the private life few got to see.

“Much is known about my father as this legendary ...

Morgan Neville's Won’t You Be My Neighbor? on the legacy of Fred Rogers at the Angelika Film Center Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

John Chester's The Biggest Little Farm, the Opening Night 2018 Doc NYC selection; Mark Cousins' The Eyes Of Orson Welles with Beatrice Welles and executive produced by Michael Moore; Pope Francis: A Man Of His Word directed by Wim Wenders with an original song by Patti Smith, and Morgan Neville's Won’t You Be My Neighbor? on the legacy of Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks is set to star in Marielle Heller's take on Rogers) are four of the early bird highlights.

Tom Hanks is set to star in Marielle Heller's take on Fred Rogers Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Ben Niles's The 5 Browns: Digging Through The Darkness and Jeremy Workman's The World Before Your Feet on Matt Green's feat of attempting to walk every block of New York City,...

In an era of dime-a-dozen remakes and sequels, it’s a miracle that Netflix would gift to the world a lost Orson Welles film. Rest assured, 137 million-plus Netflix subscribers, reruns of The Office have not prepared you for the experience that is The Other Side of the Wind.

Wind follows director Jake Hannaford’s (John Huston) last night on Earth, and he snarks at anyone who dares speak his name. With whip-speed editing and Welles’ kinetic eye, we follow Jake from the studio to his 70th birthday party, where he attempts to show the latest cut of his latest film. Featuring a film within a film, with long takes inspired by Antonioni, Wind contrasts the laborious art of filmmaking with the high-stakes grifting of Hannaford and his long-suffering crew.

The Film Stage spoke with the team behind The Other Side of the Wind’s resurrection. Producers Frank Marshall–who was...

Forty years in the making, Orson Welles’ long-awaited, excellent The Other Side of the Wind is finally arriving this fall. As with most productions from the director, the behind-the-scenes story of its shoot and the aftermath is more fascinating than most films themselves, so a documentary was also commissioned. Coming from Won’t You Be My Neighbor? director Morgan Neville, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead tracks the tumultuous journey of the recently-completed feature and now Netflix has released the first trailer.

Dan Schindel said in his review, “If The Other Side of the Wind is autobiographical, and They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead seeks to imitate it formally, then wouldn’t the optimal version of this biography really be… The Other Side of the Wind? Given that these two movies will be dropping on Netflix the same day, the choice seems obvious. That said, there...

It’s a very exciting year for Orson Welles fans. Not only will cinephiles the world over soon be treated to a never-before-seen, brand spanking new Orson Welles film, “The Other Side of the Wind,” but this monumental cinematic event will be accompanied by a fascinating behind-the-scenes documentary. Directed by Oscar winner Morgan Neville (“20 Feet From Stardom”), “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead” follows the “Citizen Kane” filmmaker throughout the final 15 years of his life and career, as he struggles to finish his deeply personal last film.

Beginning in 1970, “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead” charts Welles’ attempt to create one last masterpiece, and the toils of making a film as a fallen darling of Hollywood. The movie takes its title from a phrase of Welles, as related by friend and collaborator Peter Bogdanovich, which bears the mark of a somewhat accusatory prescience. In addition to Bogdanovich,...

To mark the release of The Eyes of Orson Welles on 17th September, we’ve been given 3 copies to give away on DVD.

This beautifully engaging documentary represents the first time his daughter Beatrice Welles has granted Mark Cousins the exclusive right to make a film using her father’s artworks.They are a sketchbook of his life, a window into his world and a vivid illustration of his creativity and visual thinking. Cousins reveals how Welles’ graphic imagination is the key to understanding his ground-breaking work in the theatre and on film. Beatrice Welles also appears in the film to offer her personal insight into some of the drawings and paintings.

Executive produced by Michael Moore, The Eyes of Orson Welles uses these artworks to bring vividly to life the passions, politics and power of Welles, and explores how his genius still resonates today in the age of Trump.

Edited for release 50 years after it was shot, this autobiographical satire is just as wild, dated and brilliant as you’d expect

A new film by Orson Welles? Even in a vintage year like Venice 2018, that has to be something special. This is Welles’s experimental found-footage-style autobiographical movie about an unfinished movie which was ironically unfinished in Welles’s own lifetime, abandoned in financial chaos in the mid-1970s. Or perhaps this was not at all ironic. Perhaps leaving it unfinished was Welles’s ultimate, secret tribute to the central truth of The Other Side of the Wind: how the agony and the ecstasy of creative art lies in the process not the product, and how the finished work will never measure up to the ideal version in your head.

Now, under the auspices of Netflix, a 122-minute film has been retrieved from more than 100 hours of raw...

Netflix has released a chaotic trailer for Orson Welles’ unfinished final film “The Other Side of the Wind,” just before its premiere Thursday at the Venice Film Festival.

John Huston stars as a high-profile Hollywood director making a comeback, much like Welles was attempting. The trailer mixes black-and-white and color footage, and two other filmmakers of the era — Peter Bogdanovich and Dennis Hopper — appear as characters.

Several characters in the trailer offer brutal assessments of Huston’s character, saying, “What he creates, he has to wreck. It’s a compulsion,” and, “He’s just making it up as he goes along.”

Welles shot the film-within-a-film between 1970 and 1976, and then worked on it until his death in 1985, leaving behind a 45-minute work print that he had smuggled out of France. Huston portrayed a temperamental film director battling with Hollywood executives to finish a movie — just like Welles did throughout his career.

Film historian and documentarian Mark Cousins, serving on the Karlovy Vary Film Festival main jury this year, is screening his latest film “The Eyes of Orson Welles,” which considers the seminal director’s off-screen art. The doc plays in the fest’s Out of the Past section, which this year focuses as much on great filmmakers themselves rather than showcasing their work.

Showing alongside “Hal,” Amy Scott’s docu on Hal Ashby and “Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind” by Marina Zenovich, Cousins’ tribute and investigation of Welles as a graphic artist unfolds as the Irish-Scottish filmmaker treads in his subject’s footsteps – and sometimes even his boots.

One critic called your film a “wayward, very indulgent but deeply felt love letter to Orson Welles.” Does that sound like a fair description to you?

Not really. To be wayward or indulgent, the film would have to go off on tangents,...

Mark Cousins, director of Cannes Classics hit The Eyes Of Orson Welles, would be a distinctive character even if he wasn’t a respected filmmaker, writer and historian—his body is emblazoned with tattooed tributes to the artists and thinkers who have shaped his outlook on life: Paul Cézanne, Marie Curie, Albrecht Dürer, Le Corbusier and Virginia Woolf, to name but a few. Two years ago, he had another added—an homage to Citizen Kane director Orson Welles, on his arm—and after a chance meeting he began to wonder if he might regret it.

“I was in Traverse City [Michigan] for the film festival,” Cousins told me at the Deadline studio in Cannes, “which is Michael Moore’s film festival. Beatrice Welles, Orson Welles’ daughter was there, and I asked if I could meet her.” As soon as he’d asked, Cousins remembered the tattoo. “I was a bit embarrassed,...

Cannes Classics 2018’s opening nighter is Irish filmmaker Mark Cousins’ intimate documentary “The Eyes of Orson Welles,” which was invited to Cannes before Netflix pulled its own two Welles entries, the completed “The Other Side of the Wind” and Morgan Neville’s accompanying Welles documentary “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead.”

Cousins (“The Story of Film: An Odyssey”) narrates his charming love letter to the late Welles, which is the first original film backed by the Filmstruck and TCM partnership (as well as the BBC and other funders), and is for sale to Cannes buyers.

“I’m interested in a more personal voice,” he said in a phone interview from Scotland, “in what happens when you look someone in the eye, as it were, and address them directly. It’s a more intimate and emotional language.”

He first adopted letter-writing on “Eisenstein and Lawrence,” his 2016 documentary short about...

Cannes Classics 2018’s opening nighter is Irish filmmaker Mark Cousins’ intimate documentary “The Eyes of Orson Welles,” which was invited to Cannes before Netflix pulled its own two Welles entries, the completed “The Other Side of the Wind” and Morgan Neville’s accompanying Welles documentary “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead.”

Cousins (“The Story of Film: An Odyssey”) narrates his charming love letter to the late Welles, which is the first original film backed by the Filmstruck and TCM partnership (as well as the BBC and other funders), and is for sale to Cannes buyers.

“I’m interested in a more personal voice,” he said in a phone interview from Scotland, “in what happens when you look someone in the eye, as it were, and address them directly. It’s a more intimate and emotional language.”

He first adopted letter-writing on “Eisenstein and Lawrence,” his 2016 documentary short about...

Despite Netflix removing all of its films from the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, Orson Welles will still be represented on the Croisette next month. The festival has announced the official lineup for this year’s Cannes Classics sidebar, and included on the list is the FilmStruck-produced documentary “The Eyes of Orson Welles,” from British documentarian Mark Cousin.

Netflix had originally been set to bring Welles’ unfinished film, “The Other Side of the Wind,” to the festival’s Out of Competition section, but the streaming giant announced it would not be attending the festival in any capacity after Cannes reinstated a rule preventing films without French theatrical distribution from competing for the Palme d’Or. The rule would not have affected “The Other Side of the Wind,” but Netflix wasn’t going to make an exception.

“The Eyes of Orson Welles” includes access to a lifetime of private drawings and paintings by Welles,...

Orson Welles will be featured at next month’s Cannes Film Festival. It still won’t be via his previously unfinished The Other Side Of The Wind, which recently got caught in the scrum between the festival and Netflix. Rather, Welles will be represented in The Eyes Of Orson Welles, a new documentary from Mark Cousins that’s part of the Cannes Classics selection.

The festival today unveiled its full roster for the Classics sidebar which includes tributes and documentaries about film and filmmakers, and restorations presented by producers, distributors, foundations, cinemathèques and rights holders. Among the attendees this year are Martin Scorsese, Jane Fonda, Christopher Nolan and John Travolta.

The Eyes Of Orson Welles is a journey through the filmmaker’s visual process. Thanks to Welles’ daughter Beatrice, Cousins (The Story Of Film) was granted access to never-before-seen drawings, paintings and early works that form a sketchbook from his life.

Also includes Jane Fonda, Alice Guy-Blaché doc, 2001: A Space Odyssey screening.

The line-up for Cannes Classics section of the 2018 Cannes Film Festival (May 8-19) includes documentaries about Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman and Jane Fonda.

Mark Cousins will present his video essay The Eyes of Orson Welles, which examines the pictorial world of the Citizen Kane director.

Margarethe von Trotta’s Searching For Ingmar Bergman is one of three films to celebrate the centenary of the Swedish master at Cannes, alongside Jane Magnusson’s Bergman – A Year in a Life and a screening of The Seventh Seal.

Jane Fonda will...

Due to the childish spat between Cannes and Netflix, it means we won’t be seeing the most monumental release of 2018, Orson Welles’ posthumous film The Other Side of the Wind, premiere at the French film festival. However, even if the streaming giant won’t be bringing the film (nor Morgan Neville’s Welles documentary on its making), Cannes will hold the premiere of another Welles-related project.

Announced today as part of the Cannes Classics lineup, Mark Cousins’ The Eyes of Orson Welles, which explores the drawings, paintings, and early works of the Citizen Kane director, will premiere during the festival. Also amongst the lineup is two Ingmar Bergman documentaries tied to his centenary, as well as the previously-announced 70mm unrestored version of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Check out the full lineup below, which also includes new restorations of films by Jacques Rivette, Djibril Diop Mambety, Agnès Varda, Vittorio De Sica,...

Beatrice Welles, the daughter of Orson Welles, is speaking out in defense of her father following Netflix’s announcement that it won’t be submitting Welles’ final film to the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. Vanity Fair published part of an email Beatrice sent to Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s Chief Content Office, in which she urged him to “reconsider” his decision to remove “The Other Side of the Wind” from Cannes and begged Netflix not to be another studio that “destroyed” her father’s work.

“I was very upset and troubled to read in the trade papers about the conflict with the Cannes Film Festival,” Beatrice said in the email. “I have to speak out for my father. I saw how the big production companies destroyed his life, his work, and in so doing a little bit of the man I loved so much. I would so hate to see Netflix be...

When Netflix announced March 14 it would be financing and distributing a finished cut of Orson Welles’ “The Other Side of the Wind,” the company opened a new chapter in one of the wildest, most frustrating sagas of film lore.

The legendary director shot his final film between 1970 and 1976, but a series of financial setbacks kept him from realizing his vision before his death in 1985. In the 32 years since, surviving members of the production had attempted to complete the project, but for legal reasons were unable to procure the more than 1,000 reels of negatives from a vault in Paris until the streaming giant stepped in this week.

The negatives are now safely in Los Angeles, in the hands of the team that will edit the film, according to a March 14 note from producer Filip Jan Rymsza. A short video released the next day on Yahoo details the process of shipping the reels.

Fans that lament Orson Welles' many career frustrations will flip over this Spanish-filmed masterpiece. Not well distributed when new and Mia for decades, its serious audio problems have now mostly been cleared up. It's great -- right up there with Kane and Touch of Evil, and it features what is probably Welles' best acting. Chimes at Midnight Blu-ray The Criterion Collection 830 1966 / B&W / 1:66 widescreen / 116 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Falstaff, Campanadas a medianoche / Street Date August 30, 2016 / 39.95 Starring Orson Welles, Keith Baxter, Jeanne Moreau, Margaret Rutherford, John Gielgud, Norman Rodway, Marina Vlady, Walter Chiari, Michael Aldridge, Tony Beckley, Alan Webb, José Nieto, Fernando Rey, Beatrice Welles, Ralph Richardson. Cinematography Edmond Richard Film Editor Fritz Mueller Original Music Angelo Francesco Lavagnino Produced by Alessandro Tasca Directed by Orson Welles

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

It's even better than I remembered. Sometime during film school I went with UCLA friends Clark...

Note: this will all sound so much better —as would anything— if you imagine it read in Welles' mellifluous, autumnal voice: A century ago this very day, in Kenosha, Wisonsin, a mewling, puking infant was born to Richard and Beatrice Welles, and was named Orson, after his grandfather. Little Orson couldn't know it yet, but the next 70 years would see him live an astonishing life, criss-crossing continents, living high and low, skittering across theater stages and film sets, intoning into microphones and megaphones, accruing laurels and loathing, dining with kings and duelling with fickle financiers, falling in love and fathering children, ever buffeted by the fair and foul winds of fortune, but steering head-on into them, lashed to the mast of his immense self-confidence. Welles is a towering figure in cinema, and yet cinema was just a sliver of his life's work. But little Orson couldn't know that yet. It...

The biggest remaining treasure trove in the world of cinema is the long lost and destroyed ending to Orson Welles‘ The Magnificent Ambersons, his cynical director’s cut that he felt would’ve made it an even greater film than Citizen Kane. But anything having remotely to do with Welles may be just as great of a find.

In 2015, Royal Road Entertainment will release Welles’s last film The Other Side of the Wind in accordance with Welles’s 100th birthday. The New York Times reported Wednesday how Welles spent the last 15 years of his life shooting and editing the picture, a meta story about an aging, legendary director played by John Huston. The cast includes Lilli Palmer, Dennis Hopper, Susan Strasberg and Peter Bogdanovich playing an up-and-coming film director, who at the time was essentially playing himself.

The film has been blocked in legal rights battles for years, with...

In news that is both exciting and terrifying for movie lovers, Orson Welles long unfinished final film could be completed and in a theater as soon as early 2015. Production company Royal Road Entertainment has acquired the rights to The Other Side of the Wind, Welles’ tale of a filmmaker trying to finish his masterpiece while dealing with Hollywood interference. John Huston, Susan Strasberg, Lilli Palmer, Dennis Hopper and Peter Bogdanovich star in the film, which almost sounds autobiographical. Welles never finished the feature, but he did have roughly 45 minutes of edited footage at the time of his death in 1985. In the intervening decades, The Other Side of the Wind has been locked in an ownership battle, with Beatrice Welles (the filmmaker’s...

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In January 2011, word arrived that Orson Welles' final unfinished film The Other Side Of The Wind was slowly emerging from a messy rights issue and could be on its way to completion. Skip to today, and The New York Times reports that an La production company has reached a deal.Royal Road spent five years chasing down rights holders and had to negotiate a deal between the various competing parties: Welles’s long-time companion and collaborator, Oja Kodar; his daughter and sole heir, Beatrice Welles; and an Iranian-French production company, L’Astrophore.“I am going to sign the contract,” Kodar tells the Times. “The catalyst is the hundred-year anniversary and everybody is moving in a kind of wave. When I finally see it on the screen, then I will tell you that the film is done.”Wind stars John Huston as a Welles-ish, Hemingway-esque film director, throwing a party...

Orson Welles's final film could be released in 2015.

Royal Road Entertainment has secured the rights to The Other Side of the Wind and intends to release it to coincide with the centenary of Welles's birth, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The film was never completed.

It told the story of a director attempting to finish his magnum opus while struggling with the Hollywood system.

The movie stars John Huston, Susan Strasberg, Lilli Palmer, Dennis Hopper and Peter Bogdanovich.

Its release has been held up by legal battles between the legendary filmmaker's daughter Beatrice Welles, his collaborator Oja Kodar and Iranian-French production company L'Astrophore.

Welles worked on the project for the last 15 years of his life, leaving behind 45 minutes of edited footage on his death in 1985.

Royal Road plans to release The Other Side of the Wind in time for Welles's centenary on May 6, 2015.

Get your paddles ready: A Bell & Howell 16mm camera used by Orson Welles will be auctioned on April 26th. Collectors owe this good fortune to Welles's youngest daughter, Beatrice Welles, who believed her father would have preferred the memorabilia be made available to his fans rather than a museum. Totaling more than 70, the items handed over to Heritage Auctions also include two scripts for his 1942 masterwork "The Magnificent Ambersons." These confirm what has long been known--that Welles's film had been heavily edited by other hands, drastically reducing and distorting his initial vision.  The Guardian provided some nice details into Welles's experience as the daughter of one of the most celebrated directors in film history (her mother was Welles' third wife Italian actress Paolo Mori). It was only recently that she was first able to rummage through the boxes of his belongings after being devastated by the loss of both her parents within a year.

New York, April 1: Personal belongings of Orson Welles, who directed 1941's 'Citizen Kane', including his camera, scripts and photos from the set of the classic film, are due to be auctioned.

The youngest daughter of the actor-writer, Beatrice Welles, found the memorabilia in 2013 and decided to sell off the items because she believes her father would have liked film buffs to have open access to them instead of sending them to a museum, the New York Daily News reported.

Beatrice said that her father just did not believe in schooling or in academic things and museums kind of have that connotation.

More than 70.

Phoenix (AP) -- The youngest daughter of director and writer Orson Welles is giving film buffs a chance to buy some of his personal possessions, including a camera, scripts and photos from the set of Citizen Kane. Beatrice Welles discovered the relics last year in boxes and trunks and decided to put them up for auction. She said her father would have preferred making the memorabilia available to film buffs and fans as opposed to sending them to a museum. Photos: Vintage Photos of Hollywood Stars in Acapulco "It's about the last thing he would've wanted. He just did not believe in

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Orson Welles won an Oscar for Citizen Kane, but its sale at auction has opened the lid on the murky world of the trade in the famous statuettes – and questions over just who should profit from the sale

The auction sale of Orson Welles's best screenplay Oscar statuette for Citizen Kane for $861,542 (£549,721) is an intriguing insight into the strange, occult world of Oscar fetishism and the Oscar "black market". It might also open an old wound in the movie world.

Oscar statuettes are the nearest things secular showbiz has to icons or relics: a gold-standard of prestige (gold-plated, anyway). The German actor Emil Jannings became the first winner of the best actor Oscar in 1928. In the ruins of Berlin in 1945, terrified by advancing Allied troops, Jannings is said to have held it up in the street and pleadingly shouted to them: "I have Oscar!" believing the statuette would placate trigger-happy GIs.

Los Angeles — The Academy Award statuette that Orson Welles won for the original screenplay of "Citizen Kane" was auctioned for more than $861,000 Tuesday in Los Angeles.

Nate D. Sanders Auctions spokesman Sam Heller said bidders from around the world, including David Copperfield, vied for the Oscar.

The 1942 Oscar was thought to be lost for decades. It surfaced in 1994 when cinematographer Gary Graver tried to sell it. The sale was stopped by Beatrice Welles, Orson's youngest daughter and sole heir.

Copperfield, who was outbid in the auction, said he admires Welles not only for his cinematic successes, but because he, too, was a magician. Welles hosted Copperfield's first television special.

The auction house declined to release the highest bidder's name. It said only a handful of Academy Awards have sold for nearly a million dollars.

Michael Jackson paid $1.54 million in 1999 for the best picture Oscar awarded to David O. Selznick for "Gone With The Wind.

The Academy Award statuette that Orson Welles won for the original screenplay of Citizen Kane was auctioned for more than $861,000 Tuesday in Los Angeles.

Nate D. Sanders Auctions spokesman Sam Heller said bidders from around the world, including David Copperfield, vied for the Oscar.

The 1942 Oscar was thought to be lost for decades. It surfaced in 1994 when cinematographer Gary Graver tried to sell it. The sale was stopped by Beatrice Welles, Orson’s youngest daughter and sole heir.

Copperfield, who was outbid in the auction, said he admires Welles not only for his cinematic successes, but because he, too, was a magician.

In Hollywood, some dreams are for sale after all.  Legendary director Orson Welles' Academy Award for "Citizen Kane" was sold at auction on Tuesday for $861,542, according to the Nate D. Sanders auction house.   Neither the seller's nor the buyer's names were disclosed, but famed magician David Copperfield was the losing bidder to the collector willing to shell out nearly $1 million for the gold statue. The statue was originally owned by Beatrice Welles, the daughter of the famed director.   The bidding took place in Los Angeles and bids were received by...

Orson Welles, Citizen Kane

Elizabeth Taylor's jewels have just fetched a record-setting $115 million. Chances are Orson Welles' Oscar for his 1941 classic Citizen Kane won't be sold for even one hundredth of that amount next December 20. Still, Welles' golden statuette is bound to its anonymous seller much more than the $1 price tag stipulated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to all post-1950 golden statuettes.

Considered one of the masterworks of world cinema, Citizen Kane lost the Best Picture Oscar of 1941 to John Ford's family/labor relations drama How Green Was My Valley. Welles the director also lost the Oscar in that category to Ford — who by then already had two Best Director statuettes at home (for The Informer, 1935, and The Grapes of Wrath, 1940). Welles and co-screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (brother of All About Eve writer/director Joseph L. Mankiewicz) did, however, take home the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

At 25 years old, Orson Welles co-wrote, directed, and starred in "Citizen Kane," which was inspired by the life of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Despite being widely considered the greatest film of all time, "Kane" only ended up taking home a single Academy Award -- for best screenplay, in 1941.

On Monday, Nate D. Sanders auctions, a Los Angeles-based auction house, announced that it was auctioning off Welles' storied "Citizen Kane" statuette, which has passed through quite a few sets of hands over the course of its 70-year lifespan.

According to Nate D. Sanders' spokesman, Sam Heller, the statuette was originally believed to be "lost" after Welles' death in 1985, but one of Welles' cinematographer friends put it up for auction in 1994, and Welles' daughter Beatrice then retrieved it. Auction house manager Laura Yntema said that the Academy actually made a "duplicate" statuette during this time, but this could not be verified by an Academy spokesperson.

What do you get for the cinephile who has everything? Start with a six-figure loan, I guess, and then check out the ongoing auction for "[t]he finest and most desirable item in Hollywood collecting -- the original Oscar awarded to Orson Welles for best 'Original Screenplay' for Citizen Kane. This Oscar statue, awarded by The American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, is the very same statue presented to Orson Welles on 26 February 1942 at the Biltmore Hotel. [... F]or years it had gone missing and the Academy issued a replacement to Beatrice Welles, Orson's youngest daughter and sole heir. The original had all along been in the possession of cinematographer Gary Graver, who tried to sell it in 1994." [Nate D. Sanders via THR]...

Have you ever wanted to own an Academy Award? Are you a talentless hack with no shot of earning one through legitimate, artistic means? Are you also inordinately wealthy? If you've answered yes to all these questions, first of all, hello! Let's be friends. Secondly, congratulations! I, your new bestie, have a cool movie news story for you.

TheWrap reports that Orson Welles' only Oscar, given to him in 1942 for the screenplay of "Citizen Kane," is up for auction. Through December 20th at 5:00pm Pacific Time, you can bid on Welles' "Kane" Oscar at NateDSanders.com. As of this writing, the current bid is a modest $60,240.

According to TheWrap's story, Welles' Oscar has had almost as complicated a life as Charles Foster Kane himself. Welles gave the statue -- either as payment for work or as a friendly loan -- to cinematographer Gary Graver. Later, Welles' daughter Beatrice...

The daughter of Citizen Kane Oscar winner Orson Welles has vowed to sell his Best Screenplay Academy Award - after being declared the award's rightful owner by a judge. Beatrice Welles has been fighting the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences over the ownership of the award, which was presented to her late father in 1941. However, after the ruling - made in Los Angeles District Court on Monday - the Academy vowed to appeal the case, insisting that in order to prevent the statuettes becoming "articles of commerce" they must have first refusal for a mere $1 on any planned sale. But Judge Dean Pregerson told the court, "Welles has unrestricted property rights in the original Oscar, which she may dispose of however she sees fit."...

Orson Welles' 1942 best screenplay Oscar for Citizen Kane has been withdrawn from an auction - so the Academy Of Motion Pictures Arts And Sciences can buy it back for just $1. The statuette was expected to bring in more than $300,000 when it went up for sale on Friday at New York auction house Christie's. But Bruce Davis, the academy's executive director, says he is perplexed that the statuette had been scheduled for sale at all. Since 1950, all Oscar recipients have had to sign an agreement giving the academy the first right of purchase, for the nominal fee of $1, for any Oscar offered for sale by an owner. The academy evoked the agreement in the Christie's sale - even though the Welles Oscar was won eight years before the agreement came into force. The Oscar, among a large selection of Welles-related material, was being sold by Beatrice Welles, the youngest of the filmmaker's three daughters and the sole heir of his estate.