Gremlins director Joe Dante has sold Rosebud – the sled from Orson Welles’ classic, Citizen Kane – at auction for over $14m.
Joe Dante, the director of Gremlins, Piranha, Matinee and too many other wonderful films to list, certainly seems like the kind of person who’d collect movie memorabilia. But did you know that, for about 30 years, he owned the famous sled, Rosebud, from Citizen Kane? This writer certainly didn’t.
The headline rather gives this away, but Dante recently sold the piece of memorabilia – first seen in Orson Welles’ 1941 classic – at auction for $14.75m.
What’s even more jaw-dropping than that huge sum of money is how Dante acquired the sled in the first place. Per The Hollywood Reporter, the filmmaker was shooting his 1985 sci-fi adventure Explorers on the Paramount lot when one of the crew members came up to him and asked if he wanted the old wooden prop. Workers at the studio – which once belonged to RKO Pictures – were having a clear-out, and were in the middle of throwing bits of film history away.
“One of the crew who knew I was a fan of vintage films came to me with a wood prop and said, ‘They’re throwing out all of this stuff. You might want this,’” Dante told Intelligent Collector. “I’m not sure he knew what the sled was, but he must have had some inkling, or why else would he have asked me? I was astonished. Since I am a huge fan of the movie, I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll be glad to take it.’”
Having owned the piece of film history for all these years, Dante decided it needed a new home, and Rosebud is now in the hands of an anonymous – and presumably very wealthy – collector.
More than one pine sled was produced for Welles’ iconic drama. There were three balsa sleds – the wood selected because it burns nicely – while two further sleds were made out of pine. The sale prices of one of them illustrates how the prices of movie memorabilia have risen over the years. Steven Spielberg bought a Citizen Kane sled for $60,500 at Sotheby’s 1982, then sold it on for $233,000 some 14 years later. Given the hammer price of Dante’s example, it’s a wonder whether Spielberg wishes he’d held onto it for a while longer.
Recent years have seen other props from classic films sell for huge sums. The ruby slippers from 1939’s The Wizard Of Oz set a new record with a sale price of $28m. But bits and pieces from more recent films are highly collectible, too: the bit of flotsam Kate Winslet clung onto in Titanic sold for over $700,000 last year.
Other items up for sale at Heritage Auctions, which sold Dante’s sled, include an original 1932 King Kong script, several works by the poster artist Bob Peak (Apocalypse Now, Excalibur, The Hunt For Red October) and a kimono which once belonged to Audrey Hepburn.
The sale will continue until Friday the 18th July, with dozens more cinema-related lots currently available to bid on via the Heritage Auctions website. Luke Skywalker’s X-wing from The Empire Strikes Back? The bidding currently sits at $220,000 at the time of writing.
