Adam Savage Learns How Everyday Model Kits Built Classic Star Wars Ships

Adam Savage sits down with Lorne Peterson, one of the original model makers hired at Industrial Light and Magic in 1975, and the conversation quickly turns to the practical choices that gave the ships their worn, functional look. Peterson shows off a rare Darth Vader service award he received after forty years with the company, then explains how he and a friend arrived for their interview carrying a dusty Kennedy toolbox instead of the cardboard boxes most freelancers used.

The shop was busy at the time, with roughly 20 people working on the Rebel Blockade Runner, which had already begun principal photography in England, and it just so happened that two of the senior crew members were able to negotiate a higher pay rate, which resulted in increased pay for everyone in the department. Early ship designs looked like they were lifted straight from science fiction paperbacks, but Peterson dismissed them and instead focused on making things look more like genuine equipment by adding pipes, tubes, and other details. Grant McCune, who ran the model shop, noted the difference and handed him the engines for the five-foot-long Millennium Falcon. Peterson spent some time experimenting with the parts, arranging them into what he called a mandala, a perfect, circular shape built of repeating assemblies that made the falcon’s rear engines appear to be functional rather than merely decorative.

He spent almost a month on that section alone, taking precise small pieces from Japanese Hasegawa and Bandai models containing tanks, vehicles, and rockets since those parts had lovely and sharp edges when spray painted, as opposed to the American kits. He then got creative, melting sprues over a flame and using them to build tubes and corrugated parts, while discovering that cat hairs, knitting needles, and even porcupine quills made excellent antennae and probes. After finishing with the Falcons, McCune assigned Peterson to work on the Sandcrawler engines. Peterson had a spare box for a Fiat 3000 World War I tank model laying around the store, and the side view of that little thing matched up fairly well with the crawler’s towering panels. He suspects Ralph McQuarrie’s influence, having seen the same box sitting around the business.

After word spread that the ILM crew was buying everything in sight, all of the local model retailers began selling extra kits that they had explicitly requested. Those kit bits were simply layered in and painted to create a really great look, as if the ships were still being worked on under duress, not perfectly symmetrical at all, and not quite like the idealized, utopian designs you see in sci-fi. Then Lucas relocated the company, and Peterson received a personal call inviting him and a colleague to see an empty warehouse on Kerner Boulevard. Carpenters simply lay out 12 foot two-by-fours to mark out rooms, halls, and doorways, then built the walls around them. Plumbing and electrical followed the same rough-and-ready approach.

Peterson then oversaw the shop for the next films, and he recalls weekends spent working on light-up blaster prototypes so they might be ready to show to other filmmakers by Monday. When the ships emerged on screen at the Wilshire cast and crew screening, the entire room fell silent. Despite having watched the dailies, Peterson was surprised by how effective everything was. The models had cost around a $1.5 million dollars, which is now a relatively modest part of the overall $11-million budget.