Star Wars legacy: Boulder artist designed spaceships
Boulder artist designed spaceships
Sierra Dall had been living with Colin Cantwell for more than 15 years before she finally learned his secrets.
“I knew he had some things in the basement,” said Dall, 73, seated next to Cantwell, 85, on a couch in their Boulder apartment last week. “He kept telling me it was some important things and I had no idea what they were. We never really talked about it.”
In 2014, when their landlord decided to renovate, Dall and Cantwell were given short notice to move to another apartment. They rapidly sorted through Cantwell’s basement of belongings, which was packed floor to ceiling with drawings, slides, models, scripts, computer monitors and bags of handmade clothes.
Dall was shocked.
“Colin’s girlfriend called me out of the blue,” said Jason Debord, of Culver City, Calif.’s Julien’s Auctions, which bills itself as The Auction House to the Stars. “She mentioned Colin Cantwell and I’m a big Star Wars fan, so I knew the name right away. I also knew people had been trying to find him for some time and didn’t have much luck. He’s sort of the missing link in Star Wars history.”
For most of the last three decades he has lived in Colorado, Cantwell never talked about his life as he quietly worked in computer engineering in Colorado Springs and Fort Collins.
“I was placing a lot of importance on our relationship and not overloading her,” Cantwell said of Dall.
Debord knew better. He flew to Colorado, rented “a big SUV” and stuffed it with artifacts from Cantwell’s basement for the drive back to California, where he appraised and authenticated select items for a Dec. 6, 2014, auction.
It fetched a total of $118,732.50. Cantwell, as it turned out, had designed and constructed the prototypes for all the spaceships for Star Wars in 1974 and 1975, including the very first X-wing Fighter, Y-wing Fighter, Tie Fighter, Star Destroyer, Death Star, Landspeeder, Sandcrawler, T-16 Skyhopper and the original Millennium Falcon (later repurposed as the Tantive IV).
The first item up for bid was the original “Star Wars” screenplay from January 1975, titled “Adventures of Starkiller (Episode One) ‘The Star Wars’ by George Lucas.” It was hand-notated as “Copy #4” and featured cover art never before seen in connection with Star Wars, according to Debord.
For decades, Cantwell’s basement concealed other historically significant works: original drawings and production notes from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Buck Rogers,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “War Games” — all of which Cantwell worked on, often in pivotal roles.
Born in San Francisco in 1932, Cantwell is the missing in link in more than just Star Wars history. As an engineer, designer and animator he shared his revolutionary ideas with directors Lucas, Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg, but also architect Frank Lloyd Wright and dozens of NASA scientists, even helping narrate (via Walter Cronkite) the historic moon landing in 1969.
“When they actually landed I was practically in tears,” Cantwell said, noting that Cronkite’s broadcast — on which Cantwell was nicknamed the Hal 9000 computer — was the only of the three TV networks to get the timing correct, owing to Cantwell’s live audio feed of NASA and astronaut communications. (Cantwell’s original copy of NASA’S flight plans for Apollo 11 later netted $6,400 at the Julien’s auction.)
It was that experience, and his work on Kubrick’s culture-changing “2001” — for which Cantwell designed the several scenes, as well as suggesting most of the music for the film — that landed him the Star Wars job with Lucas.
However, unlike conceptual artists such as Star Wars’ Ralph Mcquarrie, Cantwell has rarely gotten noticed for his widely influential designs.
That’s due partly to the fact that he turned down another job from Lucas to lead his burgeoning effects shop Industrial Light & Magic, following the massive success of the first “Star Wars” movie. That compelled Lucas to de-emphasize Cantwell’s role in subsequent histories of the franchise, Cantwell said.
“My sense from talking to Colin is that they had not left on positive terms, but he’s a lot more instrumental than he gets credit for,” Debord said. “He didn’t want to pigeonhole himself doing (special effects) because he’s a very gifted man and had a lot of talents and interests.”
“It was too self-defeating and they were taking the coward’s way out,” said Cantwell, who worked in imaging and communications for NASA missions to the moon and Mars. “It wasn’t fertile for me. I was taking care of much bigger advances in the projects that I did do.”
Most of Cantwell’s achievements were completed under contract, which meant he did not control copyrights to them after they were finished. It also meant missing out on the now-global, multibillion-dollar world of Star Wars merchandising — and numerous other technologies he pioneered.
“People like Colin, they’re not driven by monetary gains or recognition for their work,” Debord said. “They get their joy from creating and thinking and bringing ideas to life.”
Cantwell designed the first IMAX theater for the San Diego Hall of Science (then called OMNIMAX) and the first multicolor computer monitor for Hewlett Packard, “taking them from a few colors to 5,000 colors,” according to a biography compiled by Dall.
“Colin told me one time that this is the way he went through life, that he liked to create things that people couldn’t un-think,” Dall said. “That’s how he got into a lot of things: he would come up with such original, creative and intelligent ideas that people would look at it, and then they couldn’t go back.”
As the son of a commercial artist father and World War Iiriveter mother, Cantwell had plenty of time to develop ideas as a child after he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and partial retinal detachment. The cure “was to confine me to a dark room with a heavy vest across my chest to prevent coughing fits,” as he wrote on Reddit in September. “I spent nearly TWO YEARS of my childhood immobilized in this dark room. Suffice to say, nothing else could slow me down after that!”
Now, with Dall’s help and at the age of 85, Cantwell is hitting the comic-con scene and selling prints of his work, giving speeches and publishing the first of a two-volume sci-fi epic called “Corefires” — which Cantwell will sign at Vision Comics and Oddities in Englewood, 11 a.m.-2 p.m. on Dec. 10.
“We didn’t have the money to just go out and spend on vacations, so they’re kind of paying for themselves,” Dall said of the dozen or so comic-cons she and Cantwell have attended since February. “And I’m actually seeing that next year, we could start getting ahead financially.”
With his slight frame, long white hair and thick black glasses, Cantwell stands out in any environment. But he is frail and moves slowly, which is partly why Dall has become his manager, documentarian and publicist.
As a corporate trainer, Dall had been hanging out at Boulder Book Store’s now-defunct Bookend Café in 1998 when she spotted a man with “Lycra clothes and hair down to the middle of his back.”
“I went over and talked to him, and he said something like ‘What do you want?’ And I said, ‘Well, maybe this isn’t a good time,’ ” Dall remembered. “And he said, ‘No, no, no. That’s OK.’ So we started talking and within five minutes we had tears running down our faces. Six weeks later we started living together.”
Among the items Dall discovered in Cantwell’s basement were bags of fabric from which Cantwell made his own clothes on a serger (an overlocking sewing machine), always by hand and eye, never with a pattern.
“There were bags and bags of cloth in the basement,” Dall said, amid train sets, synthesizers and Cantwell’s original “kit-bashed” plastic models, which resembled World War II steampunk vehicles — and which Cantwell showed to Lucas as proof of concept for his miniature spaceships. (In 1979, Cantwell also developed an interactive motion control system that was used on several subsequent sci-fi films).
Whether because of modesty or age, Cantwell has been slow to promote himself in any way until the 2014 auction. Now he has 13,500 Instagram followers and recently conducted a pair of Reddit AMAS for a growing, if scattered, legion of fans encouraged by each new Star Wars film (the latest, “Star Wars: Episode VIII — The Last Jedi,” will be released Dec. 15).
The challenge is connecting Cantwell to his famous work.
“When we started at Galaxy Fest in Colorado Springs, we had these banners that people would come in and completely ignore,” Dall said. “They’re so focused on where they’re going they don’t pay any attention. So then I started saying, ‘Are you a Star Wars fan? Here’s Colin who designed the Death Star.’ And they’d go, ‘Oh, wow!’ We’ve heard from people who say he changed their lives, and he had no clue.”
“It’s always been a continuous growth,” Cantwell said of his career, in response to a question about advancing culture by standing on the shoulders of giants. “I’m the shoulders that they stand on.”