Citizen Kane

Forbes Ranks World's Most Expensive Fictional Houses

Filed under: Estates

The fellows at Forbes must be feeling a little light-headed. The magazine just came out with its first ever ranking of the most expensive houses in the world - that don't actually exist. Well, it's fun anyway. First they laid out a few ground rules: 1. "All the properties had to be primarily residences (no schools, evil lairs or Death Stars) and we excluded castles (sorry Cinderella, Dracula). 2. "In the interest of variety, we limited our selections to no more than one or two of a 'type.'" 3. "We eliminated any selections that were deemed too obscure." Other than that, the properties in question could come from everything from comic books to TV shows to movies and videogames.

The most expensive fictional house, according to Forbes, is Xanadu, the home of newspaper baron Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane, at $160 million. The house is modeled on Hearst Castle (above), the real life San Simeon, Calif., estate of media mogul William Randolph Hearst. In the #2 spot is Richie Rich's cartoon mansion, complete with diamond-walled swimming pool, at $135 million. Elsewhere on the list: Tony Stark's bachelor pad in Iron Man, at $50.8 million; Gone With the Wind's antebellum plantation Tara, at $17.2 million; Croft Manor from Tomb Raider, at $46.1 million; and Jay Gatsby's Long Island mansion from The Great Gatsby, $42.5 million. Click here for a slideshow.

Tags: Citizen Kane, CitizenKane, Forbes, Gone With the Wind, GoneWithTheWind, Hearst Castle, HearstCastle, The Great Gatsby, TheGreatGatsby

Own Orson's Oscar

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Auctions

We've seen Oscars auctioned off before and one thing is for certain, who the Oscar went to, and for what movie, has a great impact on the price of the statue. The Oscar that went to Orson Welles for the 1941 epic "Citizen Kane" is being auctioned off by Sotheby's on December 11. Welles won the Oscar for screenwriting with Herman Mankiewicz. The Oscar has quite a past. It was believed to be lost for a while but turned up in 1994 in the hands of a cinematographer who had worked with Welles tried to sell it at Sotheby's. Welles' youngest daughter, Beatrice, sued Sotheby's and the cinematographer and then tried to sell it only to be sued by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences which likes to keep Oscars off the market. In fact, since 1950, the academy has required Oscar winners to give it the first right of refusal to buy back an Oscar for $1. This Oscar was given before then and so is outside the rules. In 2003, Welles sold the Oscar to the Dax Foundation, a nonprofit group that supports various educational, health and other causes. The Dax Foundation is selling the Oscar. It is estimated that it will sell for $800,000 and $1.2 million. It has a ways to beat the number set by the best picture Oscar for "Gone With The Wind" which sold in 1999 for more than $1.5 million.

[Thanks, Lana]

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Tags: auction, charity, citizen kane, dax foundation, expire-images:2008-10-16, orson welles, OrsonWelles, oscar