Robert Watts, ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Indiana Jones’ Producer, Dies at 86
Robert Watts, the British producer and production manager who collaborated with George Lucas on the first three Star Wars films and the first three Indiana Jones movies, has died. He was 86.
Watts died Monday in his sleep at his home in East Sussex, England, his rep, Julian Owen at Alliance Agents, told The Hollywood Reporter. “We were with him for a decade taking him to conventions all over the world, where he could connect with fans and talk about his career,” Owen said.
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Watts also worked alongside Indiana Jones director Steven Spielberg on the Spielberg-produced Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991).
For the extremely challenging first Star Wars film, Watts served as production supervisor under production designer John Barry, and the two traveled to Morocco and Tunisia to scout locations. He then did some third-unit directing.
“We were under a great deal of pressure from 20th Century Fox,” Watts recalled in a 2011 interview. “They were under great financial problems themselves and did not believe in the movie. At the time, we were the only Fox movie then shooting anywhere in the world. Their eyes were focused on us, and George was under a great deal of pressure. As a result so were we all.”
The film became an overwhelming success, of course. Watts then graduated to associate producer on The Empire Strikes Back (1980) — he recommended that his half-brother Jeremy Bulloch portray Boba Fett in that — and was co-producer on Return of the Jedi (1983).
Watts was born in London on May 23, 1938. His grandfather Walter Meade was a screenwriter whose credits included the war film Scott of the Antarctic (1948), starring John Mills.
After two years of national service in Nigeria, Watts got into the movie business as a runner on the comedy A French Mistress (1960), then spent two years as a production manager at Shepperton Studios.
He was a second assistant director on The Man in the Middle (1964), Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), John Schlesinger’s Darling (1965) and Terence Young’s Thunderball (1965); a location manager on Lewis Gilbert’s You Only Live Twice (1967); and a production manager on Bud Yorkin’s Inspector Clouseau (1968), Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), John Guillermin’s El Condor (1970) and Franklin J. Schaffner’s Papillon (1973).
Watts was also a production manager on The Wrath of God (1972) — Rita Hayworth’s last film — when he first met producer Gary Kurtz, who at the time was preparing American Graffiti with Lucas. Three years later, Kurtz contacted him about working on Star Wars.
He said that when he started on the film in September 1976, Lucas “was paying for us all personally because Fox had still not greenlighted the film, and they didn’t do that until January.”
On Facebook, set decorator Roger Christian, who won an Oscar for his work on Star Wars, wrote that Watts “was one of the 5 people who really stood by George and our tiny art department to get Star Wars made.”
Watts’s résumé also included The Other Side of Midnight (1977), the Lucas-produced Return to Oz (1985), the Frank Marshall-directed Alive (1993) and Steven Seagal’s On Deadly Ground (1994).
Survivors include his children, Barney, Simon and Liddy, and his former wife, Julia.
Rhett Bartlett contributed to this report.
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