Star Wars 'Red Leader' X-wing Filming Miniature

Built for the close-up

When George Lucas found that 20th Century Fox had shut down its own effects department, he founded Industrial Light & Magic on May 26, 1975, and set it up in a warehouse in Van Nuys, California. John Dykstra's team there developed motion-control photography, later called the Dykstraflex system, which made small models look enormous by moving cameras slowly past them.

The X-wing itself began with Colin Cantwell, who sketched and built the models that became the final design. ILM then built miniatures in several scales, with wing markings indicating which pilot each prop represented. Each was built around a hollow core of surgical tubing so that lighting, cooling and the wiring for the wing motors could be installed and serviced, and the cockpit windows were faceted glass so reflections would film correctly.

This model is one of four 'hero' miniatures, the label given to models detailed enough for close-up shots. At 1:24 scale it carries a helmeted pilot figure ahead of an R2 droid, electric lights in its engines and weapons, and wings that spread into attack position on a servo mechanism. ILM even fitted heat sinks and cooling ducts to keep it from overheating under the lights.

Because ILM combined shots, the same model stood in for more than one fighter. Reports of the sale say it appeared as Red Leader, Red Two and Red Five, the X-wing flown by Mark Hamill's Luke Skywalker, in the Rebel assault on the Death Star, including the trench run.

Greg Jein, the collector who kept it

Greg Jein was born in Los Angeles on October 31, 1945, grew up in the Crenshaw district and graduated from Dorsey High School and Cal State Los Angeles. After early work on Flesh Gordon and television, he was asked in 1975 to work on Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where he and his crew built the detailed mothership seen in the finale.

That work earned him an Academy Award nomination for visual effects, which he lost to the team behind Star Wars. He was nominated again for Spielberg's 1941, built planetary models for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and in 1986 helped build the original six-foot Enterprise-D model for Star Trek: The Next Generation. He died in Los Angeles on May 22, 2022, at 76.

Jein was also a relentless collector and trader who friends say rescued props from studio dumpsters. He kept no records of his collection, which was scattered across two houses, two garages and two storage units in Los Angeles. How the X-wing came to him is unknown. Visual effects historian Gene Kozicki has noted that Close Encounters and Star Wars were made at roughly the same time by an overlapping group of people, and suggested that Jein may have acquired it in that period, but nobody has documented it.

The white whale in the garage

Effects veterans had long told stories of hero models that went missing when ILM moved north from the San Fernando Valley to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1978. 'We never could confirm anything,' Kozicki said. 'It became something of a mythical white whale, the missing Star Wars X-wing.'

After Jein's death, Kozicki, ILM visual effects supervisor Bill George, modelmaker Lou Zutavern and Jein's friend Rob McFalane helped his family catalog the collection. In his garage was a cardboard box. 'I started to carefully scoop out the packaging peanuts when the nose of the X-wing showed itself,' Kozicki said. 'The four of us knew immediately that it was the actual filming model.'

Kozicki said the model had not been displayed or modified since it left ILM, and compared the find to the ruby slippers or the Maltese Falcon.

The 2023 sale

The X-wing headed a two-day sale of more than 550 items from Jein's collection in Dallas on October 14 and 15, 2023, alongside Star Trek costumes and props, a 2001: A Space Odyssey space suit and a complete Imperial Stormtrooper costume. Bidding on the X-wing opened at $400,000.

It sold on Sunday, October 15, for $3,135,000, which the seller called the record for the most expensive Star Wars screen-used prop sold at auction. Moments earlier the Stormtrooper costume had brought $645,000. The whole sale realized $13,611,406, reported as the second-highest total for a Hollywood memorabilia auction, behind the 2011 Debbie Reynolds sale. The buyer was not named.

How to know it

This model's identity rests on screen matching and on its unaltered state: the battle weathering and blast marks on its fuselage, the wing markings ILM used to tell one pilot's prop from another, and the working wing servos and lights that set the four hero models apart from simpler versions built for distant shots. The sale listing described it as screen matched.

Its size is reported inconsistently: 20 inches in some accounts and 22 inches in others. Both describe the same 1:24-scale model.

Legacy

Star Wars opened May 25, 1977, grossed $410 million worldwide in its first run and won six Academy Awards, including visual effects. The Academy also gave a technical award to John Dykstra, Alvah J. Miller and Jerry Jeffress for the Dykstraflex camera system that filmed models like this one.

The original X-wing sequences were later partly redone. In 1993 ILM's John Knoll made a test of X-wings and TIE fighters dogfighting on desktop software, which led to digital shots in the Special Edition releases. That makes the physical miniatures the record of what audiences actually saw in 1977.

The numbers

Film

Star Wars, released May 25, 1977

Call signs played

Red Leader, Red Two, Red Five

Scale

1:24

Hero miniatures built

Four

First-run gross

$410 million worldwide

Academy Awards

Six

Timeline

1. Oct 31, 1945

   Greg Jein is born in Los Angeles.

2. May 26, 1975

   George Lucas founds Industrial Light & Magic, which sets up in Van Nuys, California.

3. Mar 1976

   Principal photography on Star Wars begins in Tunisia.

4. May 25, 1977

   Star Wars opens; the hero X-wing appears in the final battle and trench run.

5. 1977

   Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with Jein's mothership model, is released the same year.

6. 1978

   ILM moves north to Marin County; stories begin of hero models unaccounted for.

7. 1978

   Star Wars wins the visual effects Oscar over Close Encounters, Jein's nominated film.

8. May 22, 2022

   Greg Jein dies in Los Angeles at 76.

9. 2022

   Friends cataloging his collection find the X-wing in a cardboard box in his garage.

10. Sep 2023

    The model is announced as the centerpiece of a sale of Jein's collection, with bidding to start at $400,000.

11. Oct 15, 2023

    The X-wing sells at auction in Dallas for $3,135,000.

The world in 1977

• Jan 20, 1977

  Jimmy Carter is sworn in as president.

• May 27, 1977

  Space Mountain opens at Disneyland, two days after Star Wars premieres.

• Jul 13, 1977

  A 25-hour blackout hits New York City.

• Aug 15, 1977

  The Big Ear radio telescope records the 'Wow!' signal.

• Aug 25, 1977

  Radio Shack's TRS-80 home computer is shown in Boston.

• Sep 5, 1977

  Voyager 1 launches toward the outer planets.

Price record

A realized auction price is what a buyer actually paid on the date shown, including the buyer's premium where the sale reported it. It is the strongest kind of reference price, and it is a record of one sale of one object on one day, not a promise of what the next example will bring.

By reference price, Star Wars 'Red Leader' X-wing Filming Miniature is number 25 of 100 in the memorabilia entries of the FLOAT 100. 100 of those 100 rest on a realized sale; the rest carry an asking price or a guide value, and each page says which. Rank within the FLOAT 100 itself (29 here) is editorial: how much an object defines its field, not price alone.

Did you know

• When ILM fell behind on X-wing shots, Lucas cut early versions of the battle using World War II dogfight footage.
• The X-wings were first scripted as 'Blue squadron'; they became Red because of bluescreen limits.
• Only one full-size X-wing was built, for the Yavin hangar; cardboard cutouts and editing made it look like a fleet.
• Jein's Close Encounters team lost the 1978 visual effects Oscar to the Star Wars team that built this model.
• Kozicki compared the find to the ruby slippers and the Maltese Falcon.
• The model's ILM builders added heat sinks and cooling ducts to keep it from overheating under the lights.