(June 16, 1942–March 5, 2021): British producer and longtime associate of director Lewis Gilbert, who served as an associate producer on both The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker. Cartlidge began his career as a third assistant director on director Laslo Benedek’s Malaga (1960), a crime drama that featured among others, Thunderball’s Paul Stassino. He was later a first assistant on Born Free in 1966, the same year he went to work for Gilbert on Alfie. Prior to The Spy Who Loved Me, Cartlidge served as an assistant director on two other Lewis Gilbert films, The Adventurers (1970) and Friends (1971), and he was an associate producer on Gilbert’s Paul and Michelle (1974).
On The Spy Who Loved Me, he worked closely with Albert R. Broccoli and Michael Wilson on that film’s complicated international shooting schedule. Remembered Cartlidge, “We had found that we couldn’t get access to Sardinia until the tourist season ended in September [1976]. And we couldn’t shoot in Egypt in the summer because of the incredible heat. So we ended up starting in the studio, on the smaller sets.
“The big 007 Stage was still under construction and wasn’t going to be ready until Christmas. What we decided to do was build all the smallish sets, the ones that would require only a day’s shooting or less; and when they were finished, we could strike them down and go off to locations. This procedure gave the studio back its valuable space for other productions, and it allowed us to get rid of a lot of actors who were only scheduled for a short period.
“You can’t book supporting players for a shot in August and another shot in November. You have to take them when they’re available. So we got rid of the little scenes that take place in, say, Gogol’s office in Moscow; in the pyramid complex when M (Bernard Lee) and Gogol (Walter Gotell) supervise the search operations; the Q laboratories, and the ski chalet where you first see Bond (Roger Moore). When we came back from Egypt and Sardinia, the only things we had left to do were the Atlantis and supertanker sets, which were just about finished.”[1]
[1] William P. Cartlidge, interview by Steven Jay Rubin, London, June 2, 1977.
