‘The Towering Inferno’ at 50: The real-world legacy of the ‘Citizen Kane’ of disaster films

Throughout the 1970s, audiences couldn’t get enough of disaster movies. The decade began with the all-star blockbuster bomb-on-a-plane thrill ride Airport, based on Arthur Hailey’s best-seller. Burt Lancaster, Dean Martin, Maureen Stapleton, Van Heflin, Jean Seberg, and Jacqueline Bisset headlined Airport, which became the second-biggest box-office hit of the year and earned nine Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, and winning Best Supporting Actress for Hayes. Airport also established the template for subsequent movies: trapping all-star casts on a plane, a ship, or a high-rise.

Producer-director-writer Irwin Allen took disaster movies to the next level — so much so he was dubbed “The Master of Disaster.” Allen, who enjoyed great success on the small screen in the 1960s with the series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Time Tunnel, and Lost in Space, brought his disaster savvy to the big screen with 1972’s blockbuster The Poseidon Adventure, about a deadly wave capsizing a luxury liner loaded with such Oscar winners as Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Red Buttons, and Shelley Winters. The film earned eight Oscar nominations, including one for Winters, and won for Best Song for “The Morning After.” The film’s pre-CGI visual effects also received a special achievement award. Poseidon Adventure was the second most popular film of the year behind a little movie called The Godfather.

But it was 50 years ago, on Dec. 14, 1974, that Allen’s Citizen Kane of disaster thrillers arrived.

With a $14 million budget — the most expensive film to date — The Towering Inferno was so huge that it became the first joint production between Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox. The plot revolves around a fire that breaks out in the tallest building in the world — a 138-story San Francisco skyscraper made of glass and steel — during an opening night party on the 135th floor. It’s up to the noble architect played by Paul Newman — the New York Times described his character as a cross between Howard Roark and James Bond — and a world-weary fire chief (Steve McQueen) to rescue the partygoers.

Also starring in the movie: Faye Dunaway as a magazine editor who gets a little afternoon delight with Newman; William Holden as the building’s owner; Jennifer Jones in her final film as a middle-aged woman who is devoted to her cat; Fred Astaire in his first film in five years as a conman who sets his sights on Jones’ character; Susan Blakely as Holden’s daughter; Richard Chamberlain as her vile husband who cut corners on the building material; and Robert Wagner as the building’s PR head who is having an affair with Holden’s secretary (Susan Flannery). The less said about O.J. Simpson’s performance as the building’s security chief, the better — though six years later one of the most memorable scenes in the classic Fame finds a girl auditioning by enacting one of Simpson’s scenes in the movie.

John Guillermin was the director; Irwin Allen directed the action sequences. The film’s production designer, editor, special effects experts, and composer John Williams were among the personnel who had worked on Poseidon Adventure.

The Towering Inferno was based on two novels: The Tower, which Warner Bros. had bought the right to, and The Glass Inferno, bought by Allen. Veteran Oscar-winning screenwriter Sterling Silliphant took seven characters from the novels for his screenplay. Both books were inspired by the construction of the Twin Towers, which began in 1968.

Some exteriors were shot in San Francisco, but the Fox lot was primarily the home to the production. Fifty-seven sets were built including a full-scale of five floors of the skyscraper. Only eight sets remained after the unleashing of a million gallons of water that finally put out the fire in the movie. Models and special-effects photography were combined to make the visual effects as realistic as possible in the pre-CGI era. Consultants from the San Francisco, L.A, and Fox lot fire departments were assigned to shadow the main actors in scenes involving potentially dangerous fires.

The Towering Inferno was a reunion of sorts for Newman and McQueen. Newman played boxer Rocky Graziano in the 1956 biopic Somebody Up There Likes Me; McQueen made his uncredited debut in the film. By 1974, both were among the top 10 box-office giants. McQueen insisted they have the same number of lines and paid the same.

According to TCM, Holden didn’t want to do the film because he thought the script was “lousy” and that his character spent most of his time on the phone. But the healthy $750,000 paycheck ultimately swayed him. He was less than thrilled when Dunaway kept him waiting for two hours to do a scene. When she finally arrived, he reportedly shoved her against the stage wall telling her not to do that again. Ironically, two years later they would play lovers in Network.

Disaster films certainly weren’t Shakespeare, but when they were done well, as with Inferno, they were visceral experiences of the first order. Silliphant’s screenplay, wrote The New York Times‘ Vincent Canby, “probably reads like a traffic control report, but it succeeds in presenting dozens of incidents without noticeable overlaps and collisions.” The review added that the film “has an advantage over most movies of this sort in that it has a really classy cast. Though the actors are not required to do much except behave well according to type, their presence upgrades a secondary form of movie melodrama.”

The Towering Inferno was the top movie of the year, earning $50 million domestically (which translates to around $332 million today). In an Oscar year dominated by The Godfather Part II, The Towering Inferno held its own, receiving eight nominations, including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor for Astaire — his only Academy Award nomination. Inferno won three Oscars, for Best Song (“We May Never Love Like This Again”), Best Film Editing and Best Cinematography. (Though The Godfather Part II was the big winner that year, shockingly it failed to receive nominations for editing and Gordon Willis’ stunning cinematography.)

The Towering Inferno was the first to mention building codes in a major motion picture. And in a 1974 New York Times interview Allen (who died in 1991) stated that he didn’t make message movies per se “but as it turns out, I’ve got the hottest message in the world in The Towering Inferno: That there can be a terrible fire disaster in tall buildings.”

The public’s concern after seeing the film, spurred changes in construction. The Towering Inferno led to stricter building codes and stronger safety regulations especially when it came to sprinklers.

The investigative journalism site City Limits recently noted “for all its glitz and glamour, The Towering Infern” fed off very real concerns of the modern-high rise buildings. … Many of those concerns persisted for more than two decades until the Sept. 11 attacks forced officials to reconsider basic notions about high-rise disasters. Even today, there is ongoing debate among builders, safety experts and first responders about whether New York is doing enough to reduce the risks of high-rise fire catastrophes.”

In fact, the film and the continuing discussion about skyscraper safety are the subject this month of a conference at New York’s John Jay College’s Christian Regenhard Center for Emergency Response Studies.

Though 1974 was a stellar year for the disaster film — besides The Towering Inferno, Airport ’75 and Earthquake also did well at the box office — the genre couldn’t compete with such blockbusters as Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and George Lucas‘ Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope (1977).

Those who saw The Towering Inferno a half-century ago perched on the edge of their seat in a darkened theater might still have fond memories of the film. However, it’s unlikely most contemporary audiences would give it watch now. The stars are from a bygone era; the plotting is pokey and old-fashioned; the acting borderline hammy; the pre-CGI effects are dated; and, most of all, the melodramatic Hollywood horrors don’t compare to the real-world tragedy of Sept. 11.

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