Question: I've heard that Oscar winners sometimes sell their statuettes and that there's supposedly something wrong with that. What's the story, and just for the record, what is an Oscar worth?
Answer: The only Oscar winner who actually sold his own statuette was Harold Russell, who traded his best-supporting-actor statuette from The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) for $50,000 in 1992. Russell, a nonactor, played a World War II veteran who comes home a double amputee, as Russell himself had done in real life. And he actually won two Oscars for the same performance, so even after selling his acting award, he had a special Oscar "bringing aid and comfort to disabled veterans" for his mantle.
But generally when an Oscar is up for sale, it's by heirs of the person who actually won the award, and the problem
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Question: My wife and I were having dinner recently at an Italian restaurant and the background music was Dean Martin singing songs from Guys and Dolls. We agreed that Martin would have been much better than Marlon Brando in the movie — was Martin too new on the Hollywood scene to be considered, or was the studio pushing Brando?
Answer: Producer Sam Goldman wanted Gene Kelly to play Sky Masterson in the movie version of the Broadway hit Guys and Dolls (1955), but Kelly couldn't get released from his MGM contract. (Though MGM stands for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Sam Goldwyn was only part of the studio, which was formed by merging three existing companies, for a couple of years; in 1923, he formed his own Samuel Goldwyn Productions. MGM kept the
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