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Return to Oz, Disney’s 1985 dark take on Dorothy Gale (played by a then-9-year-old Fairuza Balk), shares its creative DNA with Star Wars. Not only that, George Lucas saved writer-director Walter Murch’s job after Disney fired Murch from the Oz shoot.

Lucas and Murch were old friends and collaborators, having met in the film department of the University of Southern California in the mid-1960s.

“My first memory of him was a shadowy figure behind me in the photograph developing room,” says Murch about Lucas on The Hollywood Reporter’s podcast It Happened in Hollywood. “I was trying unsuccessfully to develop one of the photographs that I had taken for an exercise, and there was this voice behind me that said, ‘You’re doing it wrong.’ And I turned around and I said, ‘Who is this guy?’ Of course, it turns out he was right. I was doing it wrong.

Norman Reynolds, who won Oscars in art direction for Star Wars Episode VI: A New Hope and Raiders of the Lost Ark has died, Lucasfilm confirmed. He was 89.

The U.K. native made important creative contributions to all three movies in the original Star Wars trilogy, as an art director on A New Hope and production designer on The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. According to a biography shared by Lucasfilm, Reynolds worked closely with John Barry, A New Hope‘s overall production designer, to help establish the core design philosophy behind Star Wars architecture and construction. They joined art director Leslie Dilley and set decorator Roger Christian as winners of the Academy Award for art direction in 1978. For The Empire Strikes Back, Reynolds was named production designer as Barry pursued directing.

For Raiders, Reynolds’ first collaboration with Spielberg, he sculpted the iconic golden idol that Indy...