Peter Benchley

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Peter Bradford Benchley (May 8, 1940 – February 11, 2006) was an American author, screenwriter, and ocean activist.

He wrote the best-selling book Jaws and co-wrote its film adaptation with Carl Gottlieb and co-wrote its film version.

Several more of his works were also made for film and television, including The Deep, The Island, Beast, and White Shark. Benchley's later life came to regret writing such eloquent literature about sharks, which he felt he promoted overconfidence and unnecessary culls of such a powerful predator in ocean ecosystems and became a promoter of marine conservation.

Early life

Benchley was the son of Marjorie (née Bradford) and author Nathaniel Benchley, as well as Algonquin Round Table founder Robert Benchley. Nat Benchley, his younger brother, is a writer and actor. Peter Benchley, a pupil of Allen-Stevenson School, Phillips Exeter Academy, and Harvard University, was a student.

Benchley travelled around the world for a year after graduating from college in 1961. In his first book, titled Time and a Ticket, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1964, the tale was told. Benchley served in the Marine Corps for six months before returning to the United States and then became a Washington Post reporter. Benchley was seated at an inn in Nantucket with Winifred "Wendy" Wesson, who dated and married the following year, 1964. Benchley had been living in New York by then, serving as the television editor for Newsweek. In 1967, he became a speechwriter in the White House for President Lyndon B. Johnson, and Tracy was born.

The Benchleys migrated out of Washington and into various homes, including an island off the coast of Stonington, Connecticut, where son Clayton was born in 1969. Benchley wanted to be close to New York, and the family eventually purchased a house in Pennington, New Jersey, in 1970. Benchley rented a room above a furnace supply firm because he had no space for an office.

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Subsequent career

His second novel, The Deep, published in 1976, emerged after Benchley's chance meeting in Bermuda with diver Teddy Tucker while writing a story for National Geographic. Benchley visited the wreck of the Constellation which he described as having sunk on top of two other wrecks the Montana and the Lartington. This gave Benchley the idea of a honeymooning couple discovering two sunken treasures on the Bermuda reefs — 17th century Spanish gold and a fortune in World War II-era morphine — and who are subsequently targeted by a drug syndicate. 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 a box office success, and one of the top 10 highest-grossing films in the US in 1977, though its box office tally fell well short of Jaws. However, the film inspired a number of technical firsts and was a Best Sound nominee at the 1978 Oscars.

The Island, published in 1979, was a story of descendants of 17th-century pirates who terrorize pleasure craft in the Caribbean, leading to the Bermuda Triangle mystery. Benchley again wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation. But the film version of The Island, starring Michael Caine and co-starring 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, among them was Girl of the Sea of Cortez, a fable influenced by John Steinbeck's The Log from the Sea of Cortez. Benchley's novel about a girl's complicated relationship with the sea, was 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 advocate of the importance of protecting the marine environment. Q Clearance, published in 1986, was written from his experience as a staffer in the Johnson White House. Rummies (also known as 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 account of a suburbanite's descent into alcoholic hell, the second part, which takes place at a New Mexico substance abuse clinic, is written as a thriller.

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-television film in 1996, under the title The Beast. His next novel, White Shark, was published in 1994. The story of a Nazi-created genetically engineered shark/human hybrid, it failed to achieve popular or critical success. It was also turned into a made-for-television film titled Creature, with Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of the New York Times saying it "looks more like Arnold Schwarzenegger than any fish". Also in 1994, Benchley became the first person to host Discovery Channel's Shark Week.

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. Among these was his book entitled Shark Trouble, which illustrated how hype and news sensationalism can help undermine the public's need to understand marine ecosystems and the potential negative consequences as humans interact with it. This work, which had editions in 2001 and 2003, was written to help a post-Jaws public to more fully understand "the sea in all its beauty, mystery and power." It details the ways in which man seems to have become more of an aggressor in his relationship with sharks, acting out of ignorance and greed as several of the species become increasingly threatened by overfishing.

Benchley was a member of the National Council of Environmental Defense and a spokesman for its Oceans Program: "[T]he shark in an updated Jaws could not be the villain; it would have to be written as the victim; for, worldwide, sharks are much more the oppressed than the oppressors."

He was also one of the founding board members of the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute (BUEI).

Benchley died of pulmonary fibrosis in 2006.

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