September 22nd, 2020
Designer Ron Cobb, responsible for the Nostromo spaceship from Alien and the time-traveling DeLorean from Back to the Future, has died at the age of 83. Cobb’s other familiar credits include Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Conan the Barbarian, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and The Last Starfighter.
Alien was Cobb’s breakthrough. Although H.R. Giger is the designer who might first come to mind, Cobb was instrumental as well, working the other side of the script. The Xenomorph and the world of the Space Jockey reflect Giger’s dark, menacingly organic style, while the Nostromo was Cobb’s project. In a 2018 Twitter thread on Cobb, Heavy Metal cover artist Pascal Blanche wrote that “Ron Cobb designs are practical and down to the little details that makes the world more believable. That was new in the industry.”
Prior to Alien, Cobb contributed at least one design for the never-made Jodorowsky’s Dune, conceived the spaceship in John Carpenter’s Dark Star, and came up with a couple of the denizens of the Mos Eisley cantina.
Cobb’s post-Alien work reads like a list of the best sci-fi and fantasy films of the ’80s. He did the Nazis’ flying wing for Raiders of the Lost Ark; the stranded tanker and interior of the mothership for Close Encounters of the Third Kind; armor, weapons and architecture in Conan the Barbarian; the Delorean in Back to the Future; and various things in Aliens, Leviathan, The Running Man and The Abyss.
Before working in film, Cobb was a successful editorial cartoonist, creating darkly humorous single-panel gags on countercultural themes. His work was carried in over 90 college newspapers and a number of big-city alternative news weeklies.
“I’ve been told all my life, I’m an artist, an inattentive student, a frustrated writer, a nerd, even, a know-it-all,” Cobb said in an interview with Art of Wa. “Truthfully I was never very good at anything except drawing. So I found myself posing as an artist for most of my life.” After that modest assessment, he spoke about his film career:
“I had always been thrilled by motion pictures. When opportunities to be involved in filmmaking begin to appear I couldn’t believe my luck. Could I possibly write, direct or invent my own films? As it turned out, over the nest two decades, I contributed a great deal of design, a bit of writing and some directing to a stream of major and minor features. With film, the blend of art and science was unavoidable and my obsession became how to infuse believability into even my most fantastic designs. By now I’m an advocate of secular rationalism and a skeptic of all unwarranted belief and revealed certitudes.”
Cobb died in his adopted home of Sydney, Australia, of Lewy body dementia, on September 21. It was his 83rd birthday.
Cobb died in his adopted home of Sydney, Australia, of Lewy body dementia, on September 21. It was his 83rd birthday.
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