DALLAS (AP) -- Bob Guccione, who founded Penthouse magazine and created an erotic corporate empire around it, only to see it crumble as his investments soured and the world of pornography turned toward video and the Internet, died Wednesday. He was 79.

A statement issued by the Guccione family says he died at Plano Specialty Hospital in Plano. His wife, April Dawn Warren Guccione, had said he had battled lung cancer for several years.

Penthouse reached the pinnacle of its popularity in September 1984, when it published nude pictures of Vanessa Williams, the first black Miss America. Williams, now a singer and actress, was forced to relinquish her crown after the release of the issue, which sold nearly 6 million copies and reportedly made $14 million.

A frustrated artist who once attended a Catholic seminary, Guccione started Penthouse in 1965 in England to subsidize his art career and was the magazine's first photographer. He introduced the magazine to the American public in 1969 at the height of the feminist movement and the sexual revolution.

Penthouse quickly posed a challenge to Hugh Hefner's Playboy by offering a mix of tabloid journalism with provocative photos of nude women, dubbed Penthouse Pets.

"We followed the philosophy of voyeurism," Guccione told The Independent newspaper in London in 2004. He added that he attained a stylized eroticism in his photography by posing his models looking away from the camera.

"To see her as if she doesn't know she's being seen," he said. "That was the sexy part. That was the part that none of our competition understood."

Guccione estimated that Penthouse earned $4 billion during his reign as publisher. He was listed in the Forbes 400 ranking of wealthiest people with a net worth of about $400 million in 1982.

Guccione built a corporate empire under the General Media Inc. umbrella that included book publishing and merchandising divisions and Viva, a magazine featuring male nudes aimed at a female audience. He also created Penthouse Forum, the pocket-size magazine that played off the success of the racy letters to the editor that began, "Dear Penthouse, I never thought I'd be writing you..."

Guccione and longtime business collaborator Kathy Keeton, who later became his third wife, also published more mainstream fare, such as Omni magazine, which focused on science and science fiction, and Longevity, a health advice magazine. Keeton died of cancer in 1997 following surgery, but Guccione continued to list her on the Penthouse masthead as president.

Guccione lost much of his personal fortune on bad investments and risky ventures.

Probably his best-known business failure was a $17.5 million investment in the 1979 production of the X-rated film "Caligula." Malcolm McDowell was cast as the decadent emperor of the title, and the supporting cast included Helen Mirren, John Gielgud and Peter O'Toole.

Distributors shunned the film, with its graphic scenes of lesbianism and incest. However, it eventually became General Media's most popular DVD.

Guccione also lost millions on a proposed Atlantic City casino. He never received a gambling license and construction of the casino stalled.

Legal fees further eroded his fortune. Among those who sued were televangelist Jerry Falwell, a California resort, a former Miss Wyoming and a Penthouse Pet who accused Guccione of forcing her to perform sexual favors for business colleagues.

In 1985, Guccione had to pay $45 million in delinquent taxes.

The next year, U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese's Commission on Pornography issued a report attacking the adult entertainment industry. Guccione called the report "disgraceful" and doubted it would have any impact, but newsstands and convenience stores responded by pulling Penthouse from their magazine racks.

Circulation dropped after the Meese commission report and years later took another hit with the proliferation of X-rated videos and Web sites.

"The future has definitely migrated to electronic media," Guccione acknowledged in a 2002 New York Times interview.

In 2003, General Media Inc. filed for bankruptcy. A private-equity investor from Florida acquired Penthouse the following year in a bankruptcy sale.

Penthouse and related properties are now owned by FriendFinder Networks Inc., a Boca Raton, Fla.-based company that offers social networking and online adult entertainment, including some with the Penthouse brand.

Guccione was born in Brooklyn and attended prep school in New Jersey. He spent several months in a Catholic seminary before dropping out to pursue his dream of becoming an artist. He wandered Europe as a painter for several years.

April Guccione said her husband was working as a cartoonist and a manager of self-service laundries in London when he got the idea of starting a magazine more explicit and aimed more squarely at "regular guys" than Playboy, which cultivated an upscale image.

Guccione's staff, which included family members, often described the publisher as mercurial.

"He was a mass of contradictions, engendering fierce loyalty and equally fierce contempt," wrote Patricia Bosworth in a 2005 Vanity Fair article about Guccione, for whom she had worked as executive editor of Viva.

"He hired and fired people -- then rehired them. He could be warm and funny one minute and cold and detached the next."

Guccione's management style even sparked a rift with his own son, Bob Guccione Jr. In 1985, the publisher helped his son launch the music magazine Spin, with Bob Jr. serving as editor and publisher. After just two years, the two clashed over the direction of the magazine and the elder Guccione decided to shut it down, forcing his son to secure outside funding.

Success as a publisher allowed Guccione to amass an impressive art collection, which included paintings by El Greco, Modigliani, Dali, Degas, Matisse and Picasso. The works adorned his 30-room, 22,000-square-foot mansion in New York City.

Guccione's financial problems forced him to sell his art collection in 2002 at auction. The collection had been appraised by Christie's at $59 million two years earlier. Four years later, he was forced to sell his Manhattan mansion.

Guccione eventually went back to painting, and his works were shown at venues including the Butler Institute of American Art in Ohio and the Nassau County Museum of Art in New York, said April Guccione, who married him in 2006. The couple moved from New Jersey to Texas in 2009.

Married four times, Guccione had a daughter, Toni, from his first marriage and two sons, Bob Jr. and Nick, and a daughter, Nina, from his second marriage.

Robert Paynter, who died on October 20 aged 82, was a much-acclaimed cinematographer, best known for his work with the directors John Landis and Michael Winner, and for shooting the Michael Jackson video Thriller (1983), the most popular music video in history.

Directed by Landis and shot by Paynter on 35mm stock, the video is a 14-minute dance extravaganza that features a scarlet-clad Jackson eventually metamorphosing into a ghoul.

By 2006, nine million copies of the video had been sold, and in 2009 it was the first music video to be inducted into America's National Film Registry of the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant.

Robert William Paynter was born on March 12 1928 in south London and educated at Mercer's School, Holborn, and, during wartime evacuation, Collier's School, Horsham, the town where he later settled.

In the early 1950s he began working for the Central Office of Information's Colonial Film Unit (CFU), making several visits to east Africa. On one trip he was appointed personal cameraman to the Emperor Haile Selassie, the last monarch to rule Ethiopia. Another assignment was to help film the Queen's Coronation, his vantage point being high in the roof space of Westminster Abbey.

Moving to become a trainee cameraman with British Transport Films (BTF), Paynter worked alongside contemporaries including David Watkin, who went on to win an Oscar for his cinematography on Out Of Africa (1985), and Billy Williams, who would win an Oscar for On Golden Pond (1981).

Paynter made several shorts for BTF, including Snow Drift at Bleath Gill (1955), depicting the rescue of a goods train trapped by blizzards on the Yorkshire moors. Critics admired Paynter's enduring head-on image of a snowplough charging at full speed into a huge drift, the locomotive spouting smoke and debris in all directions as the lineside workers cheered on the crew.

From the late 1950s and throughout the ensuing decade, Paynter was the cameraman for dozens of television commercials for ITV, promoting brands such as Kellogg's, Mars, Guinness and Oxo, for which he shot several campaigns in his own home.

His career in feature films began with Michael Winner's Hannibal Brooks (1969). Winner's regular cameraman had declared himself too old to be climbing mountains in Austria with heavy equipment, and Paynter was recommended to succeed him.

He remained with Winner throughout the 1970s, on pictures including Lawman (1971); Scorpio (1973) and The Big Sleep (1978). When Marlon Brando starred in Winner's The Nightcomers (1971) he was particularly impressed by Paynter's ability to set and light a shot professionally and at speed. "I never knew you could make films so quickly," the actor remarked.

In the 1980s Paynter worked with John Landis on the comedy-horror An American Werewolf In London (1981); the Eddie Murphy comedy Trading Places (1983); and Spies Like Us (1985). For the director Richard Lester, Paynter also shot Superman II and Superman III (1980 and 1983).

In 1989 he showed off the art of the cinematographer (who oversees the technical side of cameras, film and lenses to achieve the general visual effect required by the director) in When The Whales Came. The film stars Paul Scofield and Helen Mirren, with Paynter employing much soft-focus camerawork to evoke the idyllic island of Bryher in 1914.

His other credits included Strike It Rich (1990), written and directed by James Scott and based on a Graham Greene novella, Loser Takes All (1957). Starring Robert Lindsay as a London accountant who falls for a pretty American (Molly Ringwald), the film gave Paynter an opportunity to vary his palette from the drabness of 1950s London to the garish picture postcard colours of Monte Carlo.

Robert Paynter was admired by his colleagues on both sides of the camera. After a career crafting film shoots, he appeared this year in front of the camera in John Landis's latest film, Burke & Hare, playing a doctor at the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh in 1828.

He married, in 1950, Marjorie Dawson, who died in 2001. Their son and a daughter survive him; another daughter predeceased him earlier this year.

Murray Deutch, a longtime music industry executive who helped propel Buddy Holly and the Crickets to stardom, died Oct. 2 in Scottsdale, Ariz. He was 90.
Deutch's survivors include son Howard Deutch, the director of such films as "Pretty in Pink" and "Grumpier Old Men" and the husband of actress Lea Thompson, and a brother-in-law, actor Robert Walden.
Deutch discovered and helped sign Holly and the Crickets to a recording contract after hearing "That'll Be the Day." The executive also had in hand in the rock 'n' roll legend getting married.
In 1958, when Deutch was head of New York-based music publishing company Peer-Southern International, his secretary set Holly up with a Peer-Southern receptionist, Maria Elena Santiago, and the singer proposed after their first date. They were married two months later in Texas.
Also while at Peer-Southern, Deutch was responsible for Jane Morgan's "Fascination," a huge hit in 1957.
During the mid-1960s, Deutch served as head of the music division at United Artists, where he oversaw the scores for the James Bond franchise, the Beatles films and "Hair."
In 1972, Deutch became the chairman and CEO of the New York Times Music Publishing Co. and acquired the publishing rights to "West Side Story" and "Godspell" for the company.
Four years later, he formed his own publishing company, Buttermilk Sky, where he represented artists such as Harry Belafonte and supervised music for "Annie," "Ghostbusters," "The Big Chill" and other films.
A native of the Bronx, N.Y., Deutch sang with big bands as a teenager, and after serving as a machine gunner in World War II, he appeared in Irving Berlin's "This Is the Army" with his identical twin brother, Irving.
In 1947, he became a "song plugger," a piano player employed by music stores to promote and help sell new sheet music. He went on to stints at Jubilee Records and Southern Records.
Fifteen years ago, Deutch retired to Scottsdale, Ariz.
In addition to Howard Deutch, Thompson and Walden, Deutch is survived by his wife of 62 years, Pamela; his daughter, Lisa Cantor; son-in-law Stuart Cantor; grandchildren Hayley, Sloane, Maddie and Zoey; great-granddaughter Avery; and niece Ivy Levine.