DALLAS, Texas – A miniature model of an X-wing Starfighter, which was used to film the climactic battle scene in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977), sold at auction on Sunday for US$3.135 million (S$4.2 million), far exceeding the opening price of US$400,000.

Not bad for a model spaceship found buried in some packing peanuts in a cardboard box in a garage.

The sale also set a record for a prop used on-screen in a Star Wars movie, according to Heritage Auctions, a collectibles auction house in Dallas, Texas.

Friends of Mr Greg Jein, a Hollywood visual effects artist, discovered the 56cm X-wing prop stashed in his garage in 2022 after he died at age 76.

It was one of hundreds of props, scripts, costumes and other pieces of Hollywood memorabilia that he had collected over the decades, and had left scattered throughout two houses, two garages and two storage units in Los Angeles.

Heritage Auctions said the winning bidder did not want to be publicly identified.

The buyer had been bidding on the floor of the auction house in Dallas competing with another collector who was bidding over the telephone.

A similar model X-wing sold last year for nearly US$2.4 million.

More than 500 other items from Mr Jein’s collection also sold at the auction, for a total of US$13.6 million.

The two-day event was the second-highest-grossing Hollywood auction in history, after the 2011 sale of memorabilia from actress Debbie Reynolds, which grossed US$22.8 million, Heritage Auctions said.

Her collection included Marilyn Monroe’s billowing “subway dress” from the 1955 movie The Seven Year Itch, which sold for US$4.6 million.

Mr Jein’s collection reflected his passion for science fiction, comic books and fantasy.

It included a Stormtrooper costume from A New Hope, which sold for US$645,000.

A spacesuit from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was sold for US$447,000, while a utility belt from the 1960s Batman television series, starring Adam West, was sold for US$36,250.

Mr Jein also collected quirkier pieces, such as a lace hairpiece that was worn by actor William Shatner as Captain Kirk in the original Star Trek (1966 to 1969) television series. It sold for US$13,750.

But the X-wing drew by far the most attention.

Heritage Auctions said the prop was used in scenes involving X-wings flown by three pilots in the Rebel Alliance’s final assault on the Death Star. The characters’ call signs were Red Leader, Red Two and Luke Skywalker’s own Red Five.

It had been built by Industrial Light & Magic, the special effects studio founded by George Lucas, with motorised wings, fibre-optic lights and other features for close-up shots.

But people in the visual effects industry had not seen the model in decades, according to Mr Gene Kozicki, a visual-effects historian and archivist who worked with Mr Jein on television series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987 to 1994) and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993 to 1999).

“It was like ‘Holy cow, we found an X-wing, a real, honest-to-goodness X-wing’,” Mr Kozicki said, recalling the moment he and several others pulled the X-wing out of a box in Mr Jein’s garage. “We were like kids on Christmas.”

Mr Kozicki said the collection was a testament to Mr Jein’s love of collecting, which started with baseball cards when he was five years old.

As his collection spread to Hollywood memorabilia, he was drawn to props and costumes that were made by artisans and craftspeople before the advent of digital special effects, Mr Kozicki said.

It was an art that Mr Jein knew well.

He was nominated for an Academy Award in 1978 for his work on Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977). He led the team that built the model of the alien “mother ship” that appears in the movie.

The piece is now in the collection of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

In 1980, Mr Jein was nominated for another Academy Award in visual effects for his work on Spielberg’s 1941 (1979), which was filmed with model tanks, buildings and a runaway Ferris wheel.

“Greg famously said, ‘I have a hard time throwing anything away’, and I think he kept the collection going so the recognition of those craftspeople wouldn’t be discarded like a prop,” Mr Kozicki said in an e-mail on Monday.

“I can only hope that the new owners keep that spirit going.” NYTIMES