Someone with one of the best jobs in the galaxy, Walt Disney archivist Madlyn Moskowitz was interviewed by the National Air and Space Museum, who looked at her career so far which includes years at Lucasfilm, the Lucas Museum and now Disney.
Where are the artifacts from the first three Star Wars films—Star Wars, 1977; The Empire Strikes Back, 1980; and Return of the Jedi, 1983—stored?
Lucasfilm was sold to the Walt Disney Company in 2012. I was a Lucasfilm employee at the time, and even though the company was acquired by Disney, the physical artifacts from the filmmaking career of George Lucas still belong to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles. I worked at the Lucas Museum for several years. It has a great collection, and it’s where I got invaluable experience in actually caring for and learning how to store Star Wars artifacts. It’s also the place where I learned how to physically install the artifacts in exhibit spaces.
Does Disney’s Star Wars collection include any sketches, paintings, or set backdrops?
A lot of that stuff, as you might imagine, is now digital. That’s not to say there isn’t some hand-drawn artwork. We do have some creature-concept sketches. We also have some construction set pieces—pieces of something where keeping the entire set might be prohibitive but keeping a sample or a panel that represents texture and color is doable. That is something we would absolutely want to collect, partly for historic value but also to document how it was built and what it looked like. Samples of film sets also have great value in translating the world of Star Wars films into other mediums—video games, for example.