The fateful day that changed the life of Star Wars designer Colin Cantwell
It began, as grand adventures sometimes do, with a visitor at the door of the home Colin Cantwell and his long-term partner, Sierra Dall, were renting in Boulder, Colorado. It had two bedrooms and a basement. “It was a nice place,” Sierra recalls.
Then the knock on the door came in October 2014: it was their landlord, who informed Sierra that Colin hadn’t been paying his share of the rent and the two of them would have to move. Sierra was shocked to learn he was three months late on his rent, but even more shocked to discover the cause of his seeming negligence: Colin was in the beginning stages of dementia, according to the doctor who later examined him.
They ended up having to move, an arduous task made more difficult by the boxes of items in the basement. Sierra remembers: “Colin had constructed three sets of shelves, each with wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling boxes. Each set of shelves was 10 feet long and 2 shelves high.” In other words, it was a lot of stuff.
But what they found was a treasure trove of items that would set the pair off on a grand adventure occupying the final years of Colin’s life, until his passing in May 2022. Sierra offers a partial list of what those boxes contained:
- A drawer containing Colin’s original pencil drawings that he presented to George Lucas when he designed the concepts for the first Star Wars ships
- The motion control camera for the Buck Rogers TV series, the first two episodes of which were released as a theatrical film
- A model of a movie set that he created for the film WarGames
- Several NASA Apollo 11 Flight plans for the first moon landing; he used them to give Walter Cronkite information about the progress of the astronauts as Walter was broadcasting on live TV
- A script for Adventures of the Starkiller, which was eventually renamed The Star Wars and then, simply, Star Wars
- A serger sewing machine that Colin used to make his own Lycra jump suits
After Colin and Sierra dealt with everything in the basement and moved to a new home, the pair embarked on several years of adventures together, visiting comic book shops, conventions, and even making a stop at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. Along the way, they sold autographed prints of Colin’s Star Wars creations and informed the world about everything he contributed to the most popular science-fiction franchise in history.
We’ll get into more details about that on this blog in the months and years to come, but for now, here’s a glimpse at some of the treasures Colin and Sierra found in the basement:
