Stuntman's Photos of Long Hollywood Career on Exhibit at Pepperdine

A collection of photographs and correspondence from veteran Hollywood stuntman Chuck Waters' 40 years of work on films ranging from The Exorcist and the Indiana Jones trilogy to Pirates of the Caribbean is on display this month at Pepperdine University.

Waters, 80, donated the digital collection, which captures the stunt industry at its height, before green screens, wires and computer-generated imagery.

“It is really a wonderful glimpse into an old, but important, part of the Hollywood film making industry,” said Mark Roosa, dean of libraries at Pepperdine University.

Waters worked for some of the biggest names in Hollywood, including George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, William Friedkin and Francis Ford Coppola. He more recently performed stunts in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the
Black Pearl, Changeling and J. Edgar. Those are just a few of the 130 films on which he served a stunt performer or stunt coordinator.

Waters has been set on fire, rolled in crashing cars, clotheslined off motorcycles, driven off cliffs, dropped from helicopters and hurled down stairs.

“We, my fellow stuntmen and stuntwomen, had to figure out how to do our stunts as safe as possible so that we could live to see another day of stunts, as dangerous as they were,” Waters said. “And sometimes they did not get to see the next day.”

--City News Service