Long-lost X-wing model from original ‘Star Wars’ rakes in $3.1 million in Dallas auction
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DALLAS – A model of an X-wing fighter – used to film the final battle scene in the original “Star Wars” film – sold for more than $3.1 million in a weekend auction in Dallas.
The model belonged to Hollywood visual effects artist Greg Jein, who amassed a large collection of props, scripts, costumes and other memorabilia throughout the past several decades. Jein died last year at age 76 and left the pieces scattered at his home, garages and storage units in Los Angeles.
While sorting through his belongings, his friends came across the X-wing buried beneath packing peanuts in a cardboard box. The model was used to fight the battle scene in the 1977 film where the Rebel Alliance blows up the Death Star.
“It was like ‘Holy cow, we found an X-wing, a real, honest-to-goodness X-wing,’ ” Gene Kozicki, a visual-effects historian and archivist who worked with Jein, told the New York Times in September. “We were carrying on like kids on Christmas.”
The X-wing, which had an opening price of $400,000, set a record for a prop used onscreen in a “Star Wars” movie. A spokesman for the auction house, Heritage Auctions, said the winning bidder, who attended the event in person, asked to remain anonymous.
The two-day auction drew more than 2,200 bidders, including Hollywood model makers, collectors and science-fiction fans, making it the company’s best-attended auction in years.
Heritage Auctions said in a news release that many of the pieces “would have been lost to history had Jein not spent decades preserving and protecting them.”
More than 500 other items from Jein’s collection sold at the auction, which raked in a total of $13.6 million.
The event was the second-highest-grossing Hollywood auction in history, behind only actress Debbie Reynolds’ 2011 memorabilia sale, which brought in $22.8 million.
Other items included one of the few surviving Stormtrooper costumes from the original “Star Wars,” which sold for $645,000; a spacesuit from the 1968 Stanley Kubrick movie “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which sold for $447,000; treads once affixed to B-9, the robot from “Lost in Space,” which sold for $350,000.
Jein’s “Star Trek” collection also sparked numerous bidding wars, according to Heritage Auctions. A model of the Starfleet Galileo shuttlecraft sold for $225,000; a 3.5-foot-long SS Botany Bay model sold for $200,000, as did a collection of more than 300 scripts from Gene Roddenberry’s original series.
Jein, who grew up in Los Angeles, began his career in the mid-1970s, and over the decades worked on movies including “The Dark Knight Rises,” “The Hunt for Red October” and “Avatar.” A longtime fan of “Star Trek,” he later worked on pieces for the franchise.