Hollywood history has gone under the hammer, with the more than $22 million sale of Citizen Kane’s famous Rosebud sled.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The once-thought-to-be-lost sled from Orson Welles’s 1941 film was sold at a Texas auction on Thursday for $US 14,750,000 ($22.8 million) \u2014 becoming the second most-valuable piece of movie memorabilia ever sold.<\/p>\n
The sled is one of only three known to survive and was miraculously saved from disposal by director Joe Dante in 1984 while filming on a Paramount set that was once a RKO lot.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Gremlins director recognised the sled’s importance, and preserved it for decades, even planting it as an Easter egg in four of his own films, including Gremlins 2: The New Batch.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Scientific testing confirmed the sled’s period authenticity, and like the others, the sled bore the signs of production use, including original paint, wear, Heritage Auctions said in a statement.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“I’ve had the honor of protecting this piece of cinematic history for decades,” Dante said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“To see Rosebud find a new home \u2014 and make history in the process \u2014 is both surreal and deeply gratifying.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“It’s a testament to the enduring power of storytelling.”<\/p>\n
The Rosebud sled was sold for more than $22 million.\u00a0 (Supplied: Heritage Auctions)<\/p>\n
Only a few versions of the sled were produced for the 1941 production \u2014 with one being sold to producer-director Steven Spielberg in 1982, and an anonymous buyer in 1996.<\/p>\n
Thursday’s buyer is unknown.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Citizen Kane is frequently cited as the greatest film ever made, and the sled symbolises the film’s theme of innocence lost.<\/p>\n
In 2024, the sale of Dorothy’s ruby red slippers from Wizard of Oz made history when they sold for $US 32.5 million ($50.3 million) at auction.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This week’s auction also boasted a slew of other infamous film props including the inscribed tablets from Cecil B DeMille’s epic The Ten Commandments, Indiana Jones’s bull whip from The Last Crusade and Luke Skywalker’s Red Five X-wing from The Empire Strikes Back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hollywood history has gone under the hammer, with the more than $22 million sale of Citizen Kane’s famous…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":620,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[64,63,1091,134,1093,1094,1092],"class_list":["post-619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-citizen-kane","tag-entertainment","tag-joe-dante","tag-orson-welles","tag-rosebud"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}