He was also co-director of underwater photography for The Deep, a book and screenplay written by his close friend Peter Benchley with whom he went on to do many years of television production.Īrranged along his bookshelves are many awards and plaques, now covered in layers of dust.
It was some of the first great white shark footage ever presented and was unforgettable. His 1968 collaboration with Peter Gimbel on the extraordinary documentary epic, Blue Water, White Death, was released in 1971 after nearly two years of filming. The September 2005 issue of Sports Illustrated featured a profile of Stan, also recalling his first appearance on its January 1958 cover. It became a National Geographic favorite and later, in 1992, the Discovery Channel featured Stan and his family in a two-hour special, aptly named The Man Who Loved Sharks. When the projector on occasion stalled and his films caught fire, his skills of amusing anecdote, well-sprinkled with poetic reference, were called upon to complete the evening.Īmong his many other films, the most successful was The Call of the Running Tide in which he packed his entire family off with him to Tahiti for a year. He traveled the backroads of America on the “gumshoe circuit” - long before television - showing his early, hand-spliced films, which he narrated live while managing music on a small tape recorder. He taught himself photography and filmmaking, built his own underwater camera housings, and had the first dive boat operation in the Bahamas aboard his custom built Zingaro where he made one of diving’s earliest films, Water World, in 1954. His gift as a writer and raconteur started with his studies under poet Robert Frost at Dartmouth College. Its unlikely beginning after Naval service in WW2 was in a frigid glacial pond in Maine but one which took him eventually across most of the world’s oceans.
One of the first pioneers of diving in America, his career spanned eight decades. Stan Waterman died on Augat home in Lawrenceville, NJ, with his wife of 73 years, Susy Waterman, close by.
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