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Peter Benchley

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Peter Benchley
File:Peter Benchley.jpg
Benchley being interviewed about Jaws
Born(1940-05-08)May 8, 1940
New York City
DiedFebruary 11, 2006(2006-02-11) (aged 65)
Princeton, New Jersey
OccupationAuthor
WebsiteOfficial site

Peter Bradford Benchley (May 8, 1940 – February 11, 2006) was an American author best known for writing the novel Jaws and co-writing the screenplay for its highly successful film adaptation. The success of the book led to publishers commissioning books about mutant rats, rabid dogs and the like threatening communities. The subsequent film directed by Steven Spielberg and co-written by Benchley is generally acknowledged as the first summer blockbuster. Benchley also wrote The Deep and The Island which were also adapted into films.

Early life

Benchley was from a literary family. He was the son of author Nathaniel Benchley and grandson of Algonquin Round Table founder Robert Benchley. His younger brother, Nat Benchley, is a writer and actor. Peter Benchley was an alumnus of Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard University.

After graduating from college, he worked for The Washington Post, then as an editor at Newsweek and a speechwriter in the White House. He developed the idea of a man-eating shark terrorising a community after reading of a fisherman Frank Mundus catching a 4,550 pound great white shark off the coast of Long Island in 1964.

Jaws

File:Jaws hardback.JPG
Jaws (1974), 1975 Book Club Associates hardback edition. 272 pages

Doubleday editor Tom Congdon saw some of Benchley's articles and invited Benchley to lunch to discuss some ideas for books. Congdon was not impressed by Benchley's proposals for non-fiction but was interested in his idea of a novel about a great white shark terrorizing a beach resort. Congdon offered Benchley an advance of $1,000 leading to the novelist submitting the first 100 pages. Much of the work had to be rewritten as the publisher was not happy with the initial tone.

Jaws was published in 1974 and became a great success, staying on the bestseller list for some 44 weeks. Steven Spielberg has said that he initially found many of the characters unsympathetic and wanted the shark to win.[1] Book critics such as Michael Rogers of Rolling Stone Magazine shared the sentiment but the book struck a chord with readers. People in the know immediately recognized some of the characters as having been based on real life, especailly "Quint" who was based on sharkfisherman Frank Mundus and the Marine Biologist "Winch" who was based on Harold "Wes" Pratt.

Benchley co-wrote the screenplay with Carl Gottlieb (along with the uncredited Howard Sackler and John Milius, who provided the first draft of the memorable USS Indianapolis speech) for the Spielberg film released in 1975. Benchley made a cameo appearance as a news reporter on the beach. The film, starring Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw, was released in the summer season, traditionally considered to be the graveyard season for films. However, Universal Studios decided to break tradition by releasing the movie with extensive television advertising. Tautly edited by Verna Fields, featuring an ominous score by John Williams and infused with such an air of understated menace by director Steven Spielberg that he was hailed as the heir apparent to "Master of Suspense" Alfred Hitchcock, Jaws became the first movie to gross $100 million at the US box office. It eventually grossed $450 million globally. George Lucas used a similar strategy in 1977 for Star Wars which broke the box office records set by Jaws, and hence the summer blockbuster was born. [2] The film spawned three sequels, none of which matched the success of the original critically or commercially, two video games, "Jaws" in 1987 and "Jaws Unleashed" in 2006; both met with mostly negative critical attention. The film was also adapted into a theme park attraction at Universal Studios Florida (in Orlando, Florida and Hollywood, California), and two musicals: "JAWS The Musical!", which premiered in the summer of 2004 at the Minnesota Fringe Festival; and "Giant Killer Shark: The Musical", which premiered in the summer of 2006 at the Toronto Fringe Festival.

Benchley estimated that he earned enough from book sales, film rights and magazine/book club syndication to be able to work independently as a film writer for ten years [1].

Subsequent career

His reasonably successful second novel, The Deep, is about a honeymooning couple discovering two sunken treasures on the Bermuda reefs -- 17th century Spanish gold and a fortune in World War Two-era morphine -- who are subsequently targeted by a drug syndicate. This 1976 novel is based on Benchley's chance meeting in Bermuda with diver Teddy Tucker while writing a story for National Geographic. Benchley co-wrote the screenplay for the 1977 film release, along with Tracy Keenan Wynn and an uncredited Tom Mankiewicz. Directed by Peter Yates and starring Robert Shaw, Nick Nolte and Jacqueline Bisset, The Deep was the second-highest grossing release of 1977 after Star Wars, although its box office tally fell well short of Jaws.

The Island, published in 1979, was a story of descendants of 17th century pirates who terrorize pleasure craft in the Caribbean, providing a logical explanation to the Bermuda Triangle mystery. Benchley again wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation. But the movie version of The Island, starring Michael Caine and David Warner, failed at the box office when released in 1980.

During the 1980s, Benchley wrote three novels that did not sell as well as his previous works. However, Girl of the Sea of Cortez, a beguiling John Steinbeck-type fable about man's complicated relationship with the sea, was far and away his best reviewed book and has attracted a considerable cult following since its publication. Sea of Cortez signposted Benchley's growing interest in ecological issues and anticipated his future role as an impassioned and intelligent defender of the importance of redressing the current imbalance between human activities and the marine environment. Q Clearance published in 1986 was written from his experience as a staffer in the Johnson White House. Rummies (aka Lush), which appeared in 1989, is a semi-autobiographical work, loosely inspired by the Benchley family's history of alcohol abuse. While the first half of the novel is a relatively straightforward (and harrowing) account of a suburbanite's descent into alcoholic hell, the second part -- which takes place at a New Mexico substance abuse clinic -- veers off into wildly improbable thriller-type territory.

He returned to nautical themes in 1991's Beast written about a Giant squid threatening Bermuda. Beast was brought to the small screen as a made for TV movie in 1996, under the slightly altered title The Beast. His next novel, White Shark (novel), was published in 1994. The story of a Nazi-created genetically engineered shark/human hybrid failed to achieve popular or critical success with Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of the New York Times saying it "looks more like Arnold Schwarzenegger than any fish". ("Peter Benchley" Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2003) In 1999, the television show Peter Benchley's Amazon was created, about a group of plane crash survivors in the middle of a vast jungle.

In the last decade of his career, Benchley wrote non-fiction works about the sea and about sharks advocating their conservation. He was a member of the National Council of Environmental Defense and a spokesman for its Oceans Program.

"If I were to try to write Jaws today, I couldn't do it. Or, at least, the book I would write would be vastly different and, I surmise, much less successful," he said in a 1990s Smithsonian Institution lecture. "I see the sea today from a new perspective, not as an antagonist but as an ally, rife less with menace than with mystery and wonder.

"And I know I am not alone. Scientists, swimmers, scuba divers, snorkellers, and sailors all are learning that the sea is worthy more of respect and protection than of fear and exploitation.

"Today I could not, for instance, portray the shark as a villain, especially not as a mindless omnivore that attacks boats and humans with reckless abandon. No, the shark in an updated Jaws could not be the villain; it would have to be written as the victim, for, world-wide, sharks are much more the oppressed than the oppressors.

"Every year, more than a hundred million sharks are slaughtered by man. It has been estimated that for every human life taken by a shark, 4.5 million sharks are killed by humans. And rarely for a useful purpose."[3]

Death

Benchley died of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a progressive, fatal scarring of the lungs, at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, on February 11, 2006. He was 65. He is survived by his wife Wendy Benchley, a daughter: Tracy, and two sons: Chris and Clayton.

Work

Fiction

Non-fiction

See also

Film

References

  1. ^ "Peter Benchley", Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2003

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