Orphan Oscars

As Hollywood’s prime Oscar season approaches, the keepers of show business’s gold-plated icon have stepped up efforts to burnish the shimmering image of their 24-karat statuette.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has launched separate court battles testing its power to control ownership of the famous Oscar figure as well as its shape and design.

Just a week before the Feb. 15 announcement of this year’s Academy Award nominations, it won a delay of Tuesday’s scheduled auction of a statuette that producer Michael Todd won for 1956 film “Around the World in 80 Days.” In a second matter, a Los Angeles federal judge is now determining whether an annual film award given in Houston violates the academy’s Oscar copyright.

Monday’s successful plea for a temporary restraining order marked the first legal action the academy has taken to prevent the auctioning of Oscars, a controversial practice that began only a year ago. A Los Angeles Superior Court trial date was set for Feb. 24.

“Our position is a simple one,” said academy President Richard Kahn. “We deplore the practice. These awards are given for individual achievement. They honor the best of the best, like a battlefield commendation, a medal of honor. I think anyone would turn aghast to see that offered for sale as a collector’s item.”

According to auctioneer Malcolm Willits, the sale of Oscars has been a shadowy business from the start, replete with secretive sellers, anonymous buyers, escalating prices and angry academy officials threatening lawsuits.

“In a sense, it’s like dealing drugs,” said Willits, 54, who retains 20% to 25% of each sale. “People call and say, ‘I’ve got an Oscar, and I want to sell it to you,’ but they won’t say who they are.”

The first Oscar auctioned was discovered by a man from Maine who stumbled across the 1951 best picture statuette for “An American in Paris” at an estate sale. He offered the piece to Willits, who conducts monthly Hollywood memorabilia auctions from his Collector’s Bookstore at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street.

Willits’ bookstore is a longtime fixture in Hollywood, and boasts one of the largest collections of show-business memorabilia in the world. Willits is an acknowledged expert on evaluating Hollywood mementos. He has performed appraisals for the IRS and the Justice Department and was asked by Disney Studios to assess Walt Disney’s belongings after he died, right down to the pencils on his desk.

Willits sold the “American in Paris” statuette last March for $15,760 to Swiss hotelier Mario Cortesi, owner of El Palacio, Hotel of the Movie Stars, on the Spanish island of Ibiza. The Oscar is on display there now alongside one of the sleds from “Citizen Kane” and Rock Hudson’s chair from “Giant.”

“Oscars have been sold in pawn shops and garage sales for years by people who don’t want them,” Willits said. “Marlon Brando used his as a doorstop before he gave it away to a friend, suggesting he make a lamp out of it. If anything, we’re restoring worth and value to Oscars by auctioning them. You know any man willing to pay $15,000 for an Oscar is going to cherish and respect it.”

Since last March, Willits has sold or auctioned five more Oscars for a total of $71,740. Last month, Thomas Little’s statuette for black-and-white interior decoration for 1941’s “How Green Was My Valley” sold for a record-high $17,715.

“When I went down to the store to pick mine up, there was a lot of adrenaline running through my body,” said one Oscar owner, a private collector from San Francisco who asked to remain anonymous. “I mean, how many people have actually held one? It’s odd--there’s something about it--the way it fits perfectly into your hand.”

Shortly after this year’s Academy Award winners walk off the stage, they will be handed a pen to sign a “receipt for Academy Award statuette.” The academy claims the receipt is actually a legal contract requiring Oscar recipients and their heirs to offer the statuette back to the academy for $1 before attempting to sell or dispose of it.

The academy is asking a court to enforce that contract for the first time in the case of Cyrus Todd, the late Michael Todd’s grandson. When Todd received his best picture Oscar in 1956, he requested duplicate copies--a practice no longer available--for four other categories the film also won in. (Todd’s then wife, Elizabeth Taylor, claimed in a published report Tuesday that she has his original statuette safely locked away in the Swiss bank vault.)

When Todd was killed in a plane crash in 1958, Michael Todd Jr. inherited the statuettes and recently handed them down to his son, Cyrus, as a wedding gift. Cyrus Todd, a 32-year-old hotel employee in Vermont, says he is selling the Oscar “out of financial need” and “to improve my son’s future.”

Despite the description of Todd’s statuette in the auction catalogue as “a bit loose at bottom, easily repaired, minor tarnishing, base could stand a little buffing,” Willits expected the 33-year-old-13 1/2-inch figure to fetch a price of $25,000 or more.

“I’m just waiting to see what happens,” Cyrus Todd said Monday night from his home in Vermont. “The motion picture business is just that, a business. If the academy is criticizing me for trying to go commercial with the award, I find that hypocritical. The Academy Awards ceremony is an extravaganza of the first order.”

Another academy hearing took place in a separate courtroom Monday. It involved a copyright infringement against Creative House Promotions in Chicago. The company manufactures gold-colored award statuettes used by the Houston International Film Festival that closely resemble Oscar’s gold-plated body.

“As far as we can tell, there’s simply no copyright on an erect, semi-nude, male figure,” said Bill Hansen, attorney for Creative House Promotions.

The federal court judge in the copyright case is expected to issue a judgment sometime in the next week or two.

“I think the academy is setting out to clear its name all at once by attacking the people it feels have wronged them,” said Chris Harris, Willits’ publicist. “It’s like a gigantic sting operation.”

If the academy successfully prohibits the Todd Oscar from being sold, Willits said he will consider leasing future Oscars for a period of 5,000 years, with an option to renew for another 5,000 years, as opposed to selling them.

In addition to the five Todd Oscars, Willits was preparing to auction five art direction statuettes awarded to Lyle Wheeler and his most recent acquisition, the Oscar received by Leo Shukin in 1939 for his musical score in “Stagecoach.”

Tuesday however, publicist Harris announced the long-planned sale of the entire contents of Willits’ extensive Hollywood memorabilia store for $5 million. If he receives his price, Willits said he would give up Oscar auctioning and take up screenwriting.

“I don’t know what I would do if I ever won an Academy Award,” he said. “Somebody told me they’d probably give me an Oscar made of ice so that it would melt before I had a chance to sell it.”