A warehouse in Berkeley held some of the most important physical objects in movie history for 35 years: the AT-AT model that stomped across Hoth, the chess pieces that flickered to life aboard the Millennium Falcon, the ED-209 that terrorized RoboCop‘s Detroit. This weekend, most of it went up for sale.
Phil Tippett, the two-time Oscar winner whose stop-motion and visual effects work shaped Star Wars, RoboCop and Jurassic Park, closed his namesake studio at 914 Grayson Street after a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing forced a multi-day liquidation sale. Clarity Estate Liquidation ran the event August 28 through 30, emptying a 6,200-square-foot space Tippett had occupied for 35 years.
The inventory was more or less a museum of practical effects history. Buyers could walk out with an artist-proof AT-AT model from The Empire Strikes Back, Starship Troopers miniatures, and three models connected to the Dejarik holochess sequence from the original Star Wars. Tippett was hired by George Lucas and Industrial Light and Magic in 1975 to build that sequence, and his Star Wars work continued through the AT-ATs in The Empire Strikes Back and the Rancor in Return of the Jedi.
Tippett founded the studio in 1984 with his wife, Jules Roman, after winning his first Oscar for Return of the Jedi. He won his second for Jurassic Park, a production where the plan for stop-motion dinosaurs shifted to CGI mid-shoot, leaving him with the now-famous credit “dinosaur supervisor.” The studio’s later credits span Willow, Dragonheart, the Twilight films and Starship Troopers, while Tippett spent three decades on his own stop-motion feature, Mad God, which premiered at Locarno in 2021.
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Tippett, 74, told Berkeleyside he’s “retired from the racket,” citing Hollywood consolidation and production tax incentives that pulled work away from established effects houses. He’s keeping two things off the auction block: the Oscars for Return of the Jedi and Jurassic Park. Everything else, he told CBS, comes with mixed feelings, though he added he simply has nowhere left to store it. The Tippett Studio name isn’t disappearing entirely. Indian company PhantomFX completed its acquisition of the studio in 2024, and continues to operate under that name elsewhere, even as the original Berkeley workshop closes for good. Tippett, for his part, isn’t calling this the end of his career: “I will die with my sword in my hand,” he said.
For a generation of filmmakers and fans, the Berkeley studio represented the last stretch of hands-on, pre-digital effects work that built some of cinema’s most enduring images before computers took over the craft.
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