By RAY KELLY
Heritage Auction’s Hollywood/Entertainment Signature Auction, set for July 27-29, 2023, contains memorabilia spanning the first spark of cinema to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Among the 800 items on the auction block are several movie treasures related to Orson Welles’ and / or his landmark 1941 motion picture Citizen Kane.
“This is an auction filled with scripts, sketches, models and costumes that define the greatest filmmakers – the greatest writers, directors, actors, costumers and Imagineers – of every generation,” says Heritage Auctions’ Executive Vice President Joe Maddalena.
From the Estate of Orson Welles comes one of his Royal typewriters used during the period when he wrote Citizen Kane – as well as the War of the Worlds radio play in 1938, his unproduced adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness the following year and, in 1942, The Magnificent Ambersons, which received raves even after RKO butchered the film without Welles’ approval. A letter of provenance from the Welles Estate says this was one of two typewriters stored in Madrid before being returned to Welles’ youngest daughter, Beatrice. It has remained in her possession ever since.
“My father was never without a couple of typewriters. … He wrote everything with his typewriters,” Beatrice Welles stated. “This vivid memory was part of everyday life during the 28 years we spent together.”
In explaining her decision to part with various personal items and awards, she told Wellesnet: “There is a massive amount of variety, from his books as a child, to his Grammys, Academy nominations and various world awards including Cannes for Othello in 1952. I’m moving on. I had wanted the University of Michigan to have these – one place, one location for his stuff, but they have nowhere to display them. This has been in the making for over a year.”
“So, let someone else who cared about my father display something, that instead under my care have been kept in boxes,” she added.
After its release, Citizen Kane was nominated for nine Academy Awards but won just one Oscar– for Best Original Screenplay. Yet its award-winning days were far from over: Thirty-seven years later, in 1978, an audio recording of Citizen Kane won the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Recording. The Welles Estate is offering that Grammy trophy in this auction, as well as the Best Spoken Word Recording Grammy he won in 1981 for Donovan’s Brain.
Among this auction’s grails are two screenplays from Kane: the original typed-carbon “Sixth Draft” dated July 9, 1940, and, from around the same period, the original “Correction” script, with the latter the closest known screenplay that so closely hews to the finished film. Iterations of the screenplay abound in institutions, each as significant as the other for a film whose authorship became the subject of heated debate 30 years after its release.
Heritage Auctions is also offering Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz’s Best Original Screenplay Academy Award for Citizen Kane. It is a replacement trophy and not what was bestowed in 1941. The minimum bid is $250,000. The trophy sale is not affiliated with the Welles Estate. The listing offers a certificate of authenticity rather than a letter pf provenance.
To bid or learn more about the items, please visit https://entertainment.ha.com/
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