It’s been claimed that ABC News was wrong in reporting that director Tony Scott, who killed himself yesterday with a leap off the Vincent Thomas bridge in Long Beach, had inoperable brain cancer. Even though there was some vague backup from L.A. Times reporter Rebecca Keegan. Deadline and TMZ are reporting that Scott’s widow Donna has told police that the famed filmmaker/TV producer did not have brain cancer“.

I was just speaking to a journalist-novelist friend, and I was saying I don’t think I’d have the nerve to jump off a high bridge. It’s just too scary and freaky, and then there’s the bone-shattering impact to look forward to. Give me a nice hotel room in the late fall with a fire in the hearth and some pills to go to sleep with. That or a sudden heart attack in Paris, on a side street in Montmartre on my way home from a beautiful dinner.

“I can confirm that Tony Scott has passed away,” says Scott’s publicist Simon Halls, “and that the family asks that their privacy [be] respected at this time.”