10Oct
Robert Watts Edutainment and Raiders of the Lost Ark at Golden Hill Fort
In the 1990s this fascinating (and beautiful to some eyes) Palmerston Fort, built from 1869 to support four of the West Wight coastal batteries (at the Needles, Hatherwood (aka Headon Warren Battery), Fort Albert & Fort Victoria) and to house their men - and originally it contained a hospital too. I was introduced to it as a youngster, growing up in nearby Freshwater Silcombe Lane, and we used to go blackberry-picking there in the autumn, carefully avoiding the Adders that would sunbathe on the sandy tracks. Seen from above it’s a very elegant brick-built hexagonal defensive fort. And I got to know it more intimately in the late 1990s, when Jean Foister and Adrian Smith invited me to work with them at their newly established Edutainment Centre - a training facility that also embraced the emerging ‘information technologies’ - created by the Internet and the recently launched World Wide Web - developed by Berners Lee in 1989-1993, and now widely used by companies, schools and colleges and individuals as a growing information resource.The Edutainment Centre was set up to provide training in desktop computing software and web browsers and other web tools (like html, web-design and desktop-publishing/graphic design) and they had one studio with 30 or so workstations, and a big adjacent studio dedicated to computer-game-playing with digital projectors displaying the gameplay on cinema-size screens Thus the name of the company embraced entertainment as well as education. (Based on Dewey’s description of learning by playing). My job was to improve the design of the courseware and to help teach the growing number of trainees from the West Island area. There was another entrepreneurial team at the Fort, developing their idea for a cutting edge Night Club, much influenced by Terence McKenna - and mentored by Robert Watts - the famous film-producer working with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg on some of the Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark blockbuster series.
“During the 1960s, Watts worked extensively as a production manager and location manager, including on Darling (1965) starring Julie Christie and Dirk Bogarde, the 1967 James Bond film You Only Live Twice and Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).[5]Watts was employed by producer Gary Kurtz as production supervisor on Star Wars. He had met Kurtz several years earlier in Los Angeles.[4][6] Watts then enjoyed a long collaboration with George Lucas and Lucasfilm,[7] working as associate producer on The Empire Strikes Back and co-producer on Return of the Jedi; and as associate producer on Raiders of the Lost Ark and producer on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. He also worked on other Steven Spielberg-presented productions, including as producer on Who Framed Roger Rabbit and An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, and with Spielberg's long-term producer Frank Marshall on Marshall's second feature as director, Alive." (wikipedia)
It was great meeting Robert Watts - I had been too busy in London as a creative-director and writer working at FITVision and AMXDigital in the previous few years, and writing two books about the new networked media-space we were now getting used to, and I had had a stroke in 1998 - and came back to live in Yarmouth again. So the freshly retired Watts was a wonderful companion to chat with on those coffee-breaks, sitting at chairs and tables in the central Fort Parade Ground, surrounded by the elegant brick frontage and Victorian military fascia inside the Fort. We talked about the Rave-Nightclub clubbing culture, about Terence McKenna - the principle intellectual evangeliser of this subculture - and Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary - and Richard Alpert (aka Baba Ram Das - of Be Here Now fame - and that whole team at Harvard University investigating hallucinogenic substances in the 1950s and 1960s. By the 1980s and 1990s this legacy + plus Dance and Techno-Music - had resulted in what was called the Rave Culture. And we talked of their ambitious plans for Golden Hill Fort, however in 2000-2002 I got a Fellowship at London College of Printing - soon to be renamed London College of Communication - and moved back peripatetically to London...and lost touch with Golden Hill...
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