The ultimate hard-luck Oscar sale was made by Harold Russell, the paraplegic World War II vet in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). The only winner to sell his own Oscar, he initially said he did it to pay his wife's medical bills. The real story, according to Bruce Davis, was decidedly less heart-tugging.
"A couple of reporters pinned him down," Davis said. "It came out that his wife wanted to take a cruise. He had a new wife who knew he had a spare Oscar. Lew Wasserman bought it and donated it back to us."
Unfortunately for Russell, his Oscar for best supporting actor in a best picture netted him only about US$50,000 in 1992. Today that would be a bare-bones minimum.
In the current marketplace, nameplates are sometimes removed from the statuettes to make them salable, even though less valuable. The owner of a statuette whose plate is lost can use the serial number on the bottom to replace the plate and thereby bump up the value.
Evans of Leland's auction house says a Paramount executive once offered him a blank statuette, claiming it was Leo McCarey's best-director Oscar for Going My Way.
"I said, `How do you know it's Leo McCarey's?"' Evans said. "He says, `I know because I got it from McCarey's son."'
Evans said he gave him US$10,000 for the anonymous statuette. "But I told him if he got the nameplate I'd give him another US$10,000."
The executive ordered the plate from the academy, and Evans paid.
"That's US$10,000 for a little piece of plastic," Evans said with a chuckle. "And if the academy had known it was going to be sold, they never would have helped him."
To claim that the Oscar's image is sullied by the auctioning of the occasional statuette is hypocrisy, said Brown, the lawyer who represented Orson Welles' daughter. "If the image of the Oscars is so sacrosanct, I posed to them through the pleadings, then why did you give an Oscar to Roman Polanski after he raped a minor? And why did you not put the Oscars on time delay two years ago and stop Michael Moore from bashing American foreign policy during active combat?"
Copperfield simply laughed when asked to comment on the academy's fear that statuette purchases threaten to turn the award into a commercial commodity.
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