By Nat Segaloff
The Towering Inferno, which premiered on
December 16, 1974, wasn’t the first disaster film, nor was it the last, but it
was the biggest and the best. It took the financial resources of two Hollywood
studios to get it made, and it was the crowning achievement of its
fifty-eight-year-old producer, Irwin Allen, who could not have known at the
time that his career had hit its zenith and that everything he did afterwards
would be downhill. Allen’s story and the history of his greatest film cannot be
told separately.Like the fictional 138-story skyscraper that
was built with a fatal defect, so, too, was Irwin Allen. He was a tireless
self-promoter who garnered so much success early in his career that the
self-promoting was justified. In an industry that ran on smoke and mirrors, he
was flesh and blood (and fire). He had confidence born of actual achievement,
not presumed expertise. Although he and modesty were strangers, he was often
quick to acknowledge the work of those around him. As a producer he provided
everything his cast and crew needed, and he was near-maniacal about safety on
his hazardous productions. He was vain but charming about it, and at heart was
a sentimentalist about the movie business that he so dearly loved. If he had
flaws, they were the flaws of passion.
I
never actually met Irwin Allen even though I worked for him. A young marketing
genius named David Forbes hired me along with five others to be a special
advance publicity team to handle regional publicity. The closest I came to
Allen was the lobby of the Showcase Cinema in Hartford, Connecticut where there
was a studio sneak of his about-to-be-released film. On this particular November
night, my job was to fly myself and a precious print of the film from Boston to
Hartford, where it was to be shown to a test audience. Everybody from the
studio was to be there including Allen, composer John Williams, father-son editors
Karl and Harold F. Kress, and a cadre of nervous executives from both Fox and
Warner Bros. (the film was a Fox-WB co-production). The
only one who wasn’t there was me. The print and I were socked in by fog on the
runway at Boston’s Logan Airport. There was no way to get off the plane and no
cell phones to alert Hartford. Eventually we were liberated and boarded a bus
supplied by the airline (in those days the airlines took care of passengers)
and driven to the Hartford Airport where the movie and I grabbed a cab to the
theatre and handed the print with moments to spare to a very impatient
projectionist.There
was just enough time to mingle in the lobby, and that’s where I spotted Irwin
Allen. You couldn’t miss him. What you also couldn’t miss was his very obvious toupee,
and that’s all I could think of. In those days I could be arrogant because I
still had hair; I’m the hirsute fellow in the back (see photo).
The Towering Inferno at
fifty is a relic as well as a milestone, and that’s why I decided to write a
book about it: More Fire! The Building of The Towering Inferno, A 50th
Anniversary Explosion. The title More Fire! comes from the most
frequent directorial command shouted by Irwin Allen while helming the action
sequences in the disaster film while John Guillermin directed the actors and
Paul Stader guided the remarkable stunt work. Somehow the three men got along
and merged their separate footage into one single film.
Who
was Irwin Allen? Beats me. He was born June 12, 1916, in New York named Irwin
Grinovit. Wikipedia says he was born Irwin O. Cohen, but that’s suspect, and
died on November 2, 1991. As most people know, he was the creative force behind
the classic TV series Lost in Space, Time Tunnel, Voyage to the Bottom of
the Sea and movies such as The Poseidon Adventure, The Lost World,
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and, regrettably, The Swarm and When
Time Ran Out. The Towering Inferno was his crowning achievement. He
married late in life – to Sheila Matthews, an actress of a certain age – and
remained childless. His archives (some of which Julien’s Auctions sold in
summer 2024) are bereft of anything of a personal nature. Throughout his
career, he recycled the same thin press release biography that he first used in
the 1950s while he was doing The Animal World with Ray Harryhausen’s and
Willis O’Brien’s dinosaurs and the documentary The Sea Around Us, which
won him an Oscar®. But what were his parents’ names? Whom did he date?
What were his hobbies? Did he have military service (he would have been
twenty-five as World War Two began)? Nada. In
fact, the man seems to have had absolutely no private life; all he did was work.
I was able to make some headway with the help of Jeff Bond and Marc Cushman who
had written books about Allen’s shows and paid his estate for access to his
files (something I refused to do). The results appear in More Fire! which
is as much about Irwin Allen as it is about Poseidon and Inferno,
his two most famous and successful motion pictures. It’s also about the history
of fire in films, special fire effects, and tips on how to survive fires. In
the end, Allen’s life was in his work. He was obsessive about going over every
script, usually without co-writing credit, and held to tight television
budgets. While his TV series hold nostalgic fascination for the Baby Boom
generation, I focused on his disaster movies.
“Disaster
movie” is a phrase you won’t hear from the people who make, well, disaster
movies. They prefer the phrase “group jeopardy films.” It probably has
something to do with worrying that Variety would use the word disaster
in a nasty headline if one of them failed. The heyday of the genre was the
1970s and Irwin Allen pretty much dominated the field. The films routinely
involved a core of people, preferably movie stars, who faced a cataclysmic
event that could kill any of them, and often did. The group placed in jeopardy
in The Towering Inferno included Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Faye
Dunaway, William Holden, Fred Astaire, Jennifer Jones, Robert Vaughn, Richard
Chamberlain, Susan Flannery, Susan Blakely, and O.J. Simpson. Yes, that
O.J. Simpson. When a fire breaks out on the world’s tallest skyscraper on the
night of its dedication, firefighters must attempt to rescue all the VIPs who
are trapped in the building’s rooftop ballroom.
The
film was scripted by Stirling Silliphant (who had co-written The Poseidon
Adventure) based on two books: The Glass Inferno by Thomas N.
Scortia and Frank M. Robinson and The Tower by Richard Martin Stern. By
coincidence, Warner Bros. had bought one and Fox the other and so, rather than
go broke competing with each other, the two studios decided to join forces and
let Irwin Allen sort it out. How he wrested control away from Warner Bros. and
literally willed his film into existence is the story that drives my book. It
was gratifying for me to close the circle after half a century that had begun
with my first real Hollywood job and now involves being able to finally write
about it. The book is both a personal journey and an archival mission, and I hope
it brings back the thrills and the secrets behind a memorable film. If you’ll
excuse the obvious pun, I hope it, um, sparks fond memories for anyone who
reads it.
Click here to order "More Fire! The Building of 'The Towering Inferno'" from Amazon
