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Peter Benchley Dead at 65
From: www.writerswrite.com

" Peter Benchley, author of Jaws has died at the age of 65.

Wendy Benchley, married to the author for 41 years, said he died Saturday night at their home in Princeton, N.J. The cause of death, she said, was idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a progressive and fatal scarring of the lungs. Thanks to Benchley's 1974 novel, and Steven Spielberg's blockbuster movie of the same name, the simple pastime of ocean swimming became synonymous with fatal horror, of still water followed by ominous, pumping music, then teeth and blood and panic. "Spielberg certainly made the most superb movie; Peter was very pleased," Wendy Benchley told The Associated Press. "But Peter kept telling people the book was fiction, it was a novel, and that he no more took responsibility for the fear of sharks than Mario Puzo took responsibility for the Mafia."

Benchley, the grandson of humorist Robert Benchley and son of author Nathaniel Benchley, was born in New York City in 1940. He attended the elite Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, then graduated from Harvard University in 1961. He worked at The Washington Post and Newsweek and spent two years as a speechwriter for President Johnson, writing some "difficult" speeches about the Vietnam War, Wendy Benchley said. A 1974 article in People magazine described Benchley as "Tall, slender and movie-star handsome, with eyes like the deep blue sea." The author's interest in sharks was lifelong, beginning with childhood visits to Nantucket Island in Massachusetts and heightening in the mid-1960s when he read about a fisherman catching a 4,550-pound great white shark off Long Island, the setting for his novel.

"I thought to myself, 'What would happen if one of those came around and wouldn't go away?"' he recalled. Benchley didn't start the novel, for which he received a $7,500 advance, until 1971 because he was too busy with his day jobs. "There was no particular influence. My idea was to tell my first novel as a sort of long story ... just to see if I could do it. I had been a freelance writer since I was 16, and I sold things to various magazines and newspapers whenever I could."

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Besides his wife, Peter Benchley is survived by three children and five grandchildren. A small family service will take place next week in Princeton, Wendy Benchley said.

"On a separate note, another passenger on this same flight was Jessica Simpson. Without going into too much detail, I will say this: if you are a fan of hers who complains that the media unfairly portrays her as more obnoxious than she really is, you need to come up with a new line of defense."

The online writer was jailed for eight years in 2003, after posting comments that criticised official corruption. Last year Yahoo was accused of giving information to Beijing which led to the imprisonment of reporter Shi Tao. Reporters Without Borders called on Yahoo to release the names of all internet writers whose identities it has revealed to the Chinese authorities.

Yahoo spokeswoman Mary Osako insisted that in its dealings with China, the company "only responded with what we were legally compelled to provide, and nothing more". "We were rigorous in our procedures and made sure that only the required material was provided," she told the AFP news agency. But she added that: "The government of China is not required to inform service providers why they are seeking certain information, and typically does not do so." Reporters Without Borders said it was not acceptable for the firm to say it simply responded to requests from the authorities without knowing what the data would be used for. "This argument no longer holds water," the group said in a statement. "Yahoo certainly knew it was helping to arrest political dissidents and journalists, not just ordinary criminals."

The Chinese government enforces strict laws on internet use, blocking content it considers a threat, including references to the Tiananmen Square massacre and notable dissidents. But major international firms wanting to do business in China, the world's number two internet market, are coming under increasing pressure from rights groups not to conform to Beijing's conditions. Four major US-based companies - Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Cisco - have been accused of collaborating with China to censor the internet.

About 200 actors and writers carried picket signs and chanted outside the Beverly Hills Hotel where agents, producers and brand directors were meeting with ad executives at a conference sponsored by Advertising Age, The Hollywood Reporter said. "Where are the voices of the creative community in this debate? Out here on the street," Writers Guild of America West President Patric Verrone said. The unions want the entertainment industry to establish a code of conduct for product integration into shows, The Reporter said.

Screen Actors Guild President Alan Rosenberg said members deserve both consultation and compensation. "Whatever happened to artistic integrity?," he said. "When did we lose the right to say yes or no?"

And yet, if one idea continues to resonate, it's that the scandal could have happened to anyone in the book business. "I think the James Frey embarrassment could have occurred any time in the last 900 years of publishing, because the industry is built on trust for a writer's integrity," said Harold M. Evans, former publisher of Random House.

Publishers and editors can be deceived because they do not have the resources to verify every single fact in a book, he added. "But I only have 80% sympathy for them, because we should also be sensitive to things that ring false. If an author makes an outlandish claim, somebody has to take the time to find out if it's really true." The incentive to do that may be diminished with a writer like Frey, whose dramatic, redemption-themed memoir, suggests author David Halberstam, "is precisely the kind of book that many publishers are hungry for now."

"With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist," Halberstam said.

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"He seemed like the nicest guy I ever met in my life," recalled David Glasser, the international distributor of "Crash," who said he distributed a small movie Frey co-produced 10 years ago, adding: "He's probably ruined in Hollywood. Everybody knows everybody."

• Jyllands-Posten, a Danish newspaper, first published the cartoons in September, 2005.
• Germany's Die Welt
• Germany's Berliner Zeitung
• France Soir (details here)
• Al Fagr, an Egyptian newspaper (details here and here)
• Italy's La Stampa (details here)
• Italy's Corriere della Serra (details here)
• Spain: Barcelona's El Periodico and Madrid's El Mundo (details here)
• Courrier International in France
• New Zealand's Dominion Post (details here)
• The Courier-Mail in Brisbane, Australia (details here)
• Rockhampton's Morning Bulletin, Australia (details here)
• The Shihan in Jordan (details here)
• Philadelphia Inquirer (details here and here)
• New York Sun (details here)
• Daily Press in Victorville, California. (details here.)
• Wyoming Tribune-Eagle in Cheyenne (details here)
• French magazine Charlie Hebdo printed the cartoons along with a new original Mohammed cartoon. (details here)

So imagine the tempest ClickStar will brew. Its 10 Items or Less will be a major-league movie ? exactly the kind that would normally lure consumers to theaters its opening weekend. Except no one will have to go to a theater to see it or even drive to a Wal-Mart to buy the DVD. You could start watching it on your Internet-connected HDTV -- which, OK, you're not likely to own now but probably will in coming years -- within 30 seconds after clicking "buy" on the ClickStar site.

The movie industry makes almost all its money from theater tickets and DVD sales, and basically no money from Internet sales. So ClickStar scares Hollywood. That's why Freeman is doing it.

"This kid came up with Napster, and before that, none of us thought of content protection," Freeman says. Hollywood has a window of time to find a way to avoid getting Napstered. Pirates haven't yet succeeded in stealing movies on the scale they steal songs, because movies are such huge files. But that barrier will fall. Then the only way to get ahead of the Napstering, Morgan believes, is for the movie industry to create its own, superior marketplace first, before file-sharing of pirated movies takes hold.