"Come on, Oscar, let's you and me get drunk," snaps Bette Davis as Margaret Elliott, a down-on-her-luck fading movie queen, in The Star, as she grabs her gold statuette, places it on the dashboard of her 1946 Mercury sedan and heads out on a bender.
In an updated version, Davis wouldn't drive to the nearest bar to drown her sorrows. She would go directly to Sotheby's, where her Oscar would net her a half-million US dollars or more -- enough to keep her in mink and martinis for the rest of her post-diva days.
An Oscar has always been as much about commerce as about art: it ups an actor's asking price and box office appeal. These days the trophy itself can mean cold cash as a collec-tible, worth up to US$50,000 for a "common Oscar," as experts call the technical and tangential awards, and from several hundred thousand dollars to US$1.5 million for those bestowed upon famous films and actors.
The trade in vintage Oscars through publicized auctions and an underground market has become a parallel universe as competitive and bitter as the annual acting derby itself.
"Someone called me up for an important Oscar for an important film, for a lot of money," said Josh Evans, chairman of Leland's, a New York-based auction house. He is not about to name names -- not because auctioneering is a business of confidentiality, but because the statuette in question was awarded after 1950, the year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences began asking winners to sign an agreement that would keep them from selling their awards for profit. (Today the academy requires this.)
Evans likens the marketing of the proffered Oscar to getting rid of stolen merchandise.
"I don't see how it's possible," he said. "It's almost like buying the Mona Lisa -- no, like that painting The Scream. There's no or little value, or even underground value. It's too famous." (The film of the Oscar in question: On the Waterfront.)
During the 1990s, prices for collectibles soared into the stratosphere. Recently, the magician David Copperfield paid just under a quarter of a million dollars for the Oscar awarded to Michael Curtiz as director of Casablanca. In 1999, Michael Jackson paid US$1.54 million for the best-picture Oscar for Gone With the Wind.
These days the academy monitors auctions and hinders questionable sales with aggressive tactics.
"This isn't the nice people you see on TV who present the awards," said Steven Ames Brown, a lawyer who fought the academy for eight years over Orson Welles' 1941 Oscar for best original screenplay (which he shared with Herman J. Mankiewicz), for Citizen Kane, which Welles' daughter, Beatrice, wanted to auction to finance animal-rights causes. "This is a business, a very ugly business. They are completely uninterested in anybody else's life or needs. I call them thugs in suits, whose job it is to put a happy face on their conduct."
It's interesting that Beatrice Welles herself obtained the stat-uette only by taking legal action against the cinematographer Gary Graver, who was in possession of it. Graver, who described the gesture as a nod to both their friendship and Welles' gratitude for the years, said: "Orson gave it to me. He said, `Here, keep this."' Graver said he worked for next to nothing for the struggling director in the 1960s and 1980s. Welles' daughter sued Graver and won.
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