Star Wars got made because of a handful of paintings. Before there was a cast, a model shop or much of a budget, there was a script 20th Century Fox couldn’t quite picture, and Ralph McQuarrie’s gouache did the picturing for them. Until then he’d mostly been paid to draw things that already existed.
He was born in Gary, Indiana in 1929 and raised on a farm outside Billings, Montana. He served in Korea, where he survived being shot in the head, then studied at the Art Center School in Los Angeles. His first jobs were illustrating teeth and dental equipment for a dentistry firm, then technical drawing at Boeing, where he worked on diagrams for the 747 manual.
The poster work came next, mostly for Howco International, a New Orleans B-movie outfit. The first was The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972), a faux-documentary bigfoot film that went on to gross over $20 million. By his own account the poster and the film both did well, which brought more poster commissions from independent producers. Where the Red Fern Grows (1974) and Creature from Black Lake (made in 1976) followed. People have noticed the sasquatch on the horror posters looks a little like early Chewbacca.
The job that mattered most was the least glamorous. For CBS News’s Apollo coverage he painted and animated what the cameras couldn’t show: a capsule in transit, a spacecraft in the dark. That’s an odd apprenticeship, and a good one. He spent years making spaceflight look credible before anyone asked him to make up the rest.
The route to Lucas ran through other people. According to McQuarrie, two writers he knew showed his paintings to Lucas while Lucas was finishing THX 1138 and heading into American Graffiti. A few years later, in 1975, Lucas remembered them and handed him comic book art and pages of an early Star Wars script. McQuarrie came back with about a dozen full-colour paintings. Lucas’s one instruction was to paint the ideal version of each scene and not worry about what a film crew could build. The first one finished was C-3PO and R2-D2 walking through the Tatooine desert. The work was gouache and acrylic on illustration board, and it was what Fox executives were shown. Lucas then made a point of matching many shots to the paintings.
The designs came out of the same process. Lucas wanted Vader tall, dark and fluttering, something that arrived like it came in on the wind. McQuarrie noticed the script had him crossing between spaceships, so he gave him a breathing apparatus and a suit to survive vacuum. The helmet carried samurai influences, and his first painting of Vader sits very close to what ended up on screen. His first C-3PO leaned heavily on the Maria robot from Metropolis. He also drew Chewbacca, the Stormtroopers, and later Hoth and Cloud City. Some of it never made the film. An early painting shows Luke as a woman, and another has Vader fighting Deak Starkiller, a protagonist from a draft that got discarded.
What set the work apart was that it showed scenes, not designs. Iain McCaig has said McQuarrie never drew Vader in a neutral pose and instead painted him lashing out at Luke. At the time most science fiction art went on book covers and posters. McQuarrie painted moments with light and weather in them, which is closer to what a cinematographer does than a draughtsman.
Set next to Syd Mead, the two read as halves of the same period. Both came out of Art Center, both worked mainly in gouache, and both painted the future by hand. Mead came from industrial design, via Ford’s Advanced Styling Studio, and drew the future as engineering: vehicles, cities and interiors, each plausible down to the join. McQuarrie came from technical illustration and Apollo, and painted the same era as a place with something happening in it. One supplied the hardware, the other the scene. Between them they account for a good share of how late seventies and early eighties science fiction cinema looked, from the lived-in space opera of Star Wars to the acid colours and noir mood of Blade Runner.
Neither was born into a digital world. McQuarrie was born in 1929 and Mead in 1933, and both were established long before a computer had anything to do with illustration. Mead did later teach himself the digital airbrush, but by one account it supplemented his analogue skills and never replaced them. The films their paintings fed were analog too: ILM’s early Star Wars work was models and physical effects, and a McQuarrie painting was effectively a brief for people building things in a workshop. It shows in the futures they drew. They look mechanical and assembled, with hulls, panels and dials that seem hand-welded. Computers appear but are rarely the point. Tron is the obvious exception, a digital world designed by a man who drew everything by hand.
Star Wars was the visible part. He designed the alien ships for Spielberg’s Close Encounters and E.T., and did concept work on Raiders of the Lost Ark (the illustrated Bible page Indy consults is his), the original Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek IV and Jurassic Park. He also did the small metallic fix-it saucers in *batteries not included, a 1987 Spielberg-produced film (the asterisk is part of the title). He was on the team that won the Oscar for visual effects on Cocoon, his only one. Before that, he’d been brought onto the abandoned Star Trek: Planet of the Titans to redesign the Enterprise.
He appears in The Empire Strikes Back too, uncredited, as General Pharl McQuarrie, standing in front of one of his own matte paintings. It got an action figure. When Lucas later asked him to come back for the prequels, he reportedly said no, preferring to leave the work to a younger generation of artists.
His paintings kept working after he’d stopped. When J.J. Abrams wanted The Force Awakens to feel like the original trilogy, he went through the Lucasfilm archive for unused McQuarrie art. BB-8 came from one of those sketches.
McQuarrie died at home in Berkeley on March 3, 2012, aged 82, from complications of Parkinson’s disease. His website posted that someday, somewhere, someone will look at a spaceship or a skyline and say it looks like something Ralph McQuarrie painted. Lucas said that when words failed him, he could point to one of Ralph’s illustrations and say, “Do it like this.”
People tend to see the films first and the paintings later, and assume the paintings were of the films. It ran the other way. Everything in the frame already existed, and the film just had to catch up.
