A "Citizen Kane" Prop Just Sold for Almost $15 Million

Years ago, I was in a large lecture hall taking a class on film history. Appropriately enough, one of the first films we watched was director Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, a landmark in film history. In its opening moments, we watched as an ailing Charles Foster Kane (played by Welles) whispered the word “Rosebud” and died. A somber moment, right up until one of my classmates bellowed, “IT’S A SLED!”

Citizen Kane was first released over 80 years ago, but it’s remained a pop culture presence ever since — with director David Fincher’s acclaimed Mank, about the writing of the film, being the latest sign of this. But Citizen Kane‘s presence can be felt in other ways as well, including the eight-figure sum one of its key props recently fetched at auction.

The prop is one of three sleds used in the film as, well, Rosebud. This sled sold for a bit more than your average Radio Flyer, however; when it did sell, on July 16, the buyer paid $14,750,000 for a piece of cinema history.

A total of three sleds still exist from Citizen Kane, but — as Heritage Auctions’ listing for the sled shows — five were made for the film in total. Two of these were made from balsa wood and burned in one of the film’s climactic scenes. Of the remaining sleds, two of them were used in a scene of the young Kane at play in the snow.

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The prop itself wasn’t the only connection to the history of filmmaking involved in this transaction. The person selling the sled is Joe Dante, an acclaimed director in his own right, best known for the likes of Gremlins and The Howling. Dante acquired this sled when a Paramount studio employee flagged it as being slated for disposal. (Dante was making Explorers there at the time.) He wasn’t the only filmmaker to own one of these sleds; another of the three still extant was purchased at auction by Steven Spielberg in 1982.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…