Being a blockbuster reckoning with the man who invented the disaster movie. First published in Empire Magazine, 2014
"I have the most horrifying dreams in the world. I keep a dictating machine next to my bed so I won’t forget them.” – Irwin Allen, 1979
Sometime in the Spring of 1937, a 39-year-old writer by the name of Paul Gallico boarded the Queen Mary, then one of the world’s most luxurious ocean liners, at Southampton docks in preparation for the voyage home to his native New York. Gallico, an intense-looking man who wore large round spectacles and had a penchant for expansive bow ties, had the previous year abandoned a highly successful career as a newspaper sports journalist to pursue fiction writing. The Queen Mary, equally new to her role, had made her maiden Atlantic crossing only the year before and the ship was still the newest, fastest and most well-appointed vessel ploughing the Cunard Line’s twice-weekly ‘express’ route between Portsmouth and Manhattan. Making his way among the bustle of embarkation, the piles of trunks and suitcases, the embracing couples in the midst of their tearful farewells, Gallico marvelled at the ship: her two indoor swimming pools, tennis courts and luxurious ’Starlight’ nightclub.
A few days later Gallico was dining in the main restaurant when suddenly a loud bang reverberated through the hull and the ship shuddered and heeled alarmingly. A rogue wave had smashed into her port side. Tableware crashed to the floor. Waiters braced themselves against the restaurant pillars and reassured the anxious diners. She would right herself in time, they told them. She always did. Gallico looked to the window where moments before had been the sea and horizon. Now all he could see was the deep green of the freezing Atlantic. A brittle silence descended on the restaurant, somewhere on the edge of panic.
But the sky had soon begun to swing reassuringly into view, the Queen Mary slowly righting herself, as she was designed to do. The smashed crockery had been swept away, the passengers’ nerves soothed with gratis booze. But the experience had left a mark on the nascent novelist. What if the ship hadn’t stopped rolling? Could a vessel that large really capsize? And if it did, how would any survivors escape? Much later he wrote: “The ship screamed. The scream, long, drawn out and high pitched, was compounded of the agony of humans in mortal fear and pain, the shattering of glass and breaking of crockery, the clashing, cymbal sound of metal trays and pots and pans mingled with the crashing of dishes, cups, knives, forks and spoons hurled, some with deadly missile effect, from the dining-room tables. . . The passengers could only lie there stunned and deafened by the grinding, rumbling and poom-boom as of some great war drum, the clangour of metal striking upon metal and the shouting of steam loosed as though from the anteroom of hell. Then all the lights went out.”
Over 30 years later, well after the jet age had rendered the Queen Mary a technological relic, Gallico’s manuscript, now titled The Poseidon Adventure, landed on a desk in a studio office in Hollywood. Irwin Allen peered at the description of human carnage, of spectacular destruction and balls-out peril and grinned. It was what he had been looking for all his life.
“There is no sweeter sound than the crumbling of your fellow man.” – Groucho Marx quoted by Irwin Allen
Irwin Allen was born on June 12th, 1916 in The Bronx, New York City. He attended either City College or Columbia University, the record is, possibly deliberately, murky, studying journalism and marketing – surely the perfect combination of subjects for a fledgeling movie producer (Find a story! Sell it!) – but dropped out before completing his degree. He worked briefly in New York for Key Publications, a comic book company that later became notorious for its explicit horror publications, but by his mid-20s he had swapped coasts and was established in Hollywood where he drifted around the margins of the entertainment industry finding work as a syndicated showbiz correspondent, penning a column entitled Hollywood Merry Go Round, later adapted into a television celebrity panel game of which he was a brief and unmemorable host.
By the mid-1940s he had established himself as a literary agent, and from there drifted further towards the movies, producing a low-budget Sinatra/Marx brothers flick and undersea documentaries and finally deployed his newfound aquatic expertise with Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, a proto-disaster/sci-fi movie in 1961 which was successful enough to spawn a TV series. Here he really hit his stride and by the middle of the 1960s he was one of the booming medium’s most successful producers. In John Gregory Dunne’s indispensable The Studio, a fly-on-the-wall account of a year in the life of 20th Century Fox, he is to be found ensconced in an office on the Fox lot surrounded by masks, toys and props from his TV series – which by now included Lost in Space – a proto JJ Abrams. Allen – ‘a large, myopic, hirsute man with hair like Brillo and a bowl-shaped paunch that leaks out between the bottom of his shirt and the top of his trousers’ – is found micromanaging a worried special effects assistant who is being instructed to replace troublesome vibrating antennae on a terrifying sea monster with more reliable blinking lights. “That's why I sit in the big chair,” he counsels. “You got a little problem with Lobster Man, you come see Irwin”
He had always aimed, though, to be in the movie business and, fortuitously, he had arrived on the lot at a propitious time, one ripe with opportunity for young men with fast mouths, a flair for ballyhoo and more than the normal complement of chutzpa. In the previous decades becoming a movie producer meant being born into the family firm, or snagging a lowly post at one of the studios and working one’s way up a career ladder as labyrinthine and political as Congress. But after the collapse of the old factory system in the 50s, and with the studios on their uppers, the topography of the industry had been forever transformed. Now the studio executives, hungry for anything, anything, to stem the flood of punters away from the picture-houses, were looking outside their fancy gates for projects. A new breed of independent producer, typified by the likes of Arthur P. Jacobs (The Planet of the Apes, Doctor Dolittle) and later Richard Zanuck (The Sting, Jaws) acquired material, put together casts and screenplays and presented them to studio heads as faits accomplis, waiting only for a budget and a green light. These were outliers of a Hollywood defined by ‘The Deal’, a ruling principle that is dominant to this day. Thus when Irwin Allen, exploiting his contacts in the literary world, read Gallico’s The Poseidon Adventure months before publication he was primed to act quickly. He walked across the lot from his office to the office of Studio President Gordon Stulberg.
Who promptly told him to get lost.
Not to be deterred Allen shopped the project to Avco Embassy, an independent outfit that had made its name by backing The Graduate five years earlier, who bought the rights to the Gallico story for $225,000. Embassy was set to put up the whole $5 million budget, but after a management change got cold feet, deciding the story was too depressing and virtually impossible to make for the proposed budget. Allen went back to Stulberg who finally promised half the cash if Allen could come up with backers for the other $2.5 million. Charming cheques out of people was an Allen speciality and he immediately walked over to a country club where a pal, Steve Broidy, who also happened to be grand poobah of Allied Artists was hitting the links. Allen had his budget within half an hour.
What he didn’t have was a screenplay or a director. Wendell Mayes, best known for penning Otto Preminger’s groundbreaking courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (which had scandalised America with its shameless use of the word ‘panties’), took a pass at the novel while Gordon Douglas, veteran director of giant ant movie Them!, occupied the director’s chair for a short while before getting a bad case of the pre-production collywobbles and bolting. Allen put a call in to Ronald Neame in London. “He phoned me in a panic,” Neame remembered later. “He said Ronnie, I desperately need your help. We have a film in preparation and all the sets are built . . . “ Neame headed to Burbank and, as is traditional with a new director who must piss on a project a little to make it his own, commissioned an entirely new screenplay by star screenwriter Stirling Silliphant who worked to deftly sketch the stricken ensemble.
Allen’s intuition was that the key to the movie’s appeal would be casting. “We have a perfect set-up,” he said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “A group of people who are thrown together in terrible circumstances. In the first six minutes 1,400 people are killed and only the stars survive.” Just as the studio system was in disarray, so its key creation and resource, the star system, was breaking down. Actors who could once demand vast paycheques could be had for a relative song. Thus Allen packed his cast with recognizable faces, and posed audiences with the tantalising question that would essentially define the genre: who will make it to the end?
Shooting began on The Queen Mary herself, now docked at Long Beach before moving to the Fox lot for a 69-day schedule. “Are we meant to learn this stuff?” a mildly disgusted Hackman had asked Ernest Borgnine on the first day of filming. Borgnine had replied that he presumed so, and records in his memoirs that Hackman was cool to him for the rest of the shoot. Hackman, described as ‘tricky’ by Neame, was just off The French Connection, where William Friedkin had encouraged improvisation and discussion. There was little of that on the technically arduous Poseidon Adventure. “Each of the cast would blow up about once every nine or so days, but that was one a day for me,” remembered Neame. One of the biggest rows was over Shelley Winters's death scene. As written Winters dived into the freezing water first. Hackman made one of his increasingly regular interventions. “Ronnie, this is quite stupid,” he informed the director. “There’s no way I would let that woman dive in and just watch her. Why don't I dive in, get trapped and she comes in and rescues me?”
“Brilliant,” was Neame’s response. Winters, who could spot a scene hog a mile off, went ballistic. “Oh no,” she told Neame before performing an old-school flounce. “That scene is the only damn reason I’m doing the movie and Hackman’s not going to take it away from me.” Having lost the argument she subsequently declared it the “most dreadful morning I’ve had since I made a film with Judy Garland.”
The Poseidon Adventure, now ambitiously being touted as “Total Escape Entertainment!” by Allen, was released on the 13th of December 1972. “We cover every age in this picture,” Allen blasted to passing hacks, making sure that no key demographic might feel that the spectacle of maritime catastrophe was not for them. “Everyone suffers all emotions as a result of a terrible tragedy! There are moments of humour, joy and the sharing of experiences of being a human being!”
Allen’s original intuition turned out to be right on the money. Nearly $170 million of it worldwide to be precise. Whether it was the sharing of experiences of being a human being, or more prosaically seeing a load of famous rich people drown, Poseidon rang the box office bell like no other film that year.
Disaster had turned out to be a huge success.
"First you get yourself a match and then you start yourself a little fire . . . “ – Irwin Allen
Eager to capitalise quickly on Poseidon’s unexpected profitability, Allen’s eye fell on The Tower, a novel of high-rise combustion by Richard Martin Stern. It appeared to have all the qualities that had made Poseidon a hit: a multitude of stricken characters, a perilous and spectacular situation with plenty of scope for violent, unexpected death. He sought to option it but was outbid by Warner Bros who, caught on the hop by the success of Poseidon, coughed up $390,000 for the rights. Allen, furious, bided his time. A couple of months later his literary moles sent him The Glass Inferno, an almost identical story of vertiginous conflagration by Thomas M. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson. Along with Fox, Allen paid $400,000 for the rights and immediately put in a call to Warners. Wouldn’t it be dumb to make two nearly identical flicks? How about the studios pool their resources and split the cost of production? How about he produce the whole shebang? Thus in an industry-first, and a rare outbreak of Hollywood sanity, Fox and Warners agreed to co-produce what would become The Towering Inferno (see what they did there?), and split the $12 million budget.
Originally Allen had wanted Steve McQueen to star in the role of the building’s architect Doug Roberts. McQueen was intrigued (especially by the offer of a cool $1 million and 10 percent of the back end) but once he read the screenplay he baulked. An architect? It sounded a bit ‘candyass’ to him. Do young boys idolize or grown women swoon over mere architects? Instead, he spotted the role of the fire chief, Mike O’Hallorhan. O’Hallorhan was a secondary role, ten pages or so originally intended for Ernest Borgnine. “If you can get someone o my calibre to play the architect I’ll play the fire chief," he told Allen. Allen instructed Stirling Silliphant, who had been hired to perform a literary cut and shut with the two novels, to beef O’Hallorhan up. Allen approached Paul Newman who signed on as Doug Roberts, the doomed building’s designer.
Fading Hollywood star with uncertain narrative future duties were taken up by William Holden, who got paid $750,000 for a script he declared to be ‘lousy’. “I just spend my time talking on the telephone,” he snorted to his agent on reading the screenplay. But the cheque was the healthiest the by now booze-addled Wild Bunch star had been offered in a long time and he took it. Fred Astaire, Robert Vaughn and Robert Wagner also signed on with Faye Dunaway as the love interest.
The Towering Inferno went into production on May 8, 1974 at Fox’s soon-to-be-sold Malibu ranch, aiming for a Christmas release (an unimaginable schedule today) with Allen in charge of the action department (claiming for himself the credit ‘director of action sequences’ rather than the more prosaic, ‘second unit director’) and Brit. import John Guillermin in charge of handling the dramatic scenes. Guillermin had been brought on at Fox’s insistence despite Allen’s lobbying to direct the film himself. A tall, somewhat fastidious man who had a reputation as being both technically exacting and mean with praise – on one occasion an entire crew had threatened to walk off the set after a particularly blistering critique of their work – he was rarely seen without a pipe jammed in the corner of his mouth. His relationship with Irwin Allen was polite but tense. Accustomed to working quietly and with complete authority, he was irritated to find that Allen, permanently surrounded by an entourage of at least a dozen flunkies, was in the habit of noisily invading his sets with notes and suggestions. On one occasion the excitable Director of Action Sequences informed him that the film was not being shot in the style they had agreed, his camera was not moving enough. Guillermin, who prided himself on his set-ups (and with justification, Inferno is a much better-looking film than Poseidon) nodded, smiled, and undertook to try harder. Only one cast member noticed, as he walked away, that he had bitten clean through the stem of his pipe.
It fell to Guillermin too, for the most part, to deal with the stars. And in that job he would need all his reserves of tact and forbearance. The fact was that Steve McQueen and Paul Newman had been at war for nearly two decades. Or rather McQueen had been at war with Newman. Ever since 1956 on the set of Somebody Up There Likes Me when McQueen, a lowly uncredited extra, had watched jealously as Newman was pampered and praised McQueen had hated Newman, whom he mostly referred to as ‘The Fuckwit’. When he himself became an A-lister he always felt himself to be riding Newman’s coattails, and seemed never to get the credit as a serious actor that Newman elicited from critics. Now for the first time they would appear on the same bill, and McQueen was determined that no one be in any doubt who the true star of the picture was.
The marquee and opening titles though, they were a problem. Technically the two actors should have exactly equal billing (their financial contracts were identical) The result was one of the most ludicrously exacting on-screen credit agreements of all time. In July, midway through filming with the row over who would head the bill nowhere near resolved, McQueen’s long-suffering lawyer came up with a Solomonic solution expressed in a letter, complete with diagrams:
(A) If Artist’s full name appears on one line and Paul Newman’s name is also to appear on said line, then the bottom letters of Paul Newman’s name shall be no higher than an exact prolongation of a line drawn through the true middle of Artist's name, in the following manner:
(B) If Artist’s name appears on two lines, and should Paul Newman’s name also appear on said lines, then the word ‘Newman’ will appear on the same line as Artist’s first name, in the precise following manner:
Newman’s people acquiesced to the demands (and what became known as 'staggered-but-equal' billing became a staple of Hollywood contracts). McQueen was ecstatic, convinced that he’d got one over on his old, entirely oblivious, nemesis. People read left to right, he informed anyone who would listen. Not top to bottom. It was clear even to a fuckwit that he had top billing.
A prominent victim of the one-way feud would be Stirling Silliphant. Before shooting had commenced McQueen had physically counted his lines and Newman’s, only to discover that Newman had precisely twelve more than he did. “Goddammit, that fucker’s [Newman’s] always twisting my melon,” biographer Christopher Sandford reports McQueen as yelling. A call was put in to Silliphant who promised that he would look at it when he came back from vacation. McQueen said that was just fine, they’d get another writer. Silliphant duly cancelled his trip and went through the screenplay, padding dialogue. Once shooting started the complaints didn’t cease. During one rehearsal McQueen, fluffing his words, exploded. “This is shit,” he yelled at Silliphant, who, unusually, happened to be on set. Silliphant cornered McQueen. “It’s not shit,” he informed him. “In fact it happens to be very brilliant. What in the hell is your problem?” McQueen took him to one side. “Look, you gotta help me out,” he informed the writer. “Thing is,” he looked around to make sure they weren’t being overheard, “I have a slight lisp. Anything with a lot of S’s is real bad for me.” Silliphant sighed, went back to the screenplay and began stripping out sibilants. Even the final scene, in which the exhausted but triumphant fire chief walks out of the smouldering skyscraper to meet the bedraggled architect was fraught with difficulty. First McQueen complained that he didn’t have enough dialogue and that Newman was winning the scene from him. Silliphant duly wrote him more lines, but when McQueen saw the resulting rushes he was horrified. Now, almost speechless, Newman was still dominating the scene, deploying those infernal baby blues to maximum dramatic effect. “But Steve,” Silliphant finally exploded, “you asked me for these lines! And you’ve got blue eyes too!”
Inferno wrapped on schedule but about $2 million over budget. Allen immediately got to work on the marketing. Among the by-now-standard pre-release hoo-ha was that 300 stunt performers had been used on the production, a record at the time. (Among them was one John Landis who leaps through a window on fire). Fifty-eight sets had been built only a handful of which had been left standing . . . four filming units . . . 1,000 off-duty firefighters . . . hundred foot high miniatures . . . a million gallons of water . . . hundreds of pairs of Nomex fireproof underpants. The numbers were indeed staggering. But the only numbers that mattered to Allen were the millions that Inferno pulled in world-wide. The public’s appetite for star-studded carnage had clearly not been sated.
Allen began to ponder his next move. He had tackled two of nature’s greatest elements, first water and now fire. The next step was obvious.
Bees.
“I blame the bees. I knew they couldn’t act.” - Michael Caine
In 1957, at an experimental apiary in Southern Brazil run by internationally renowned entomologist Warwick E. Kerr, a replacement beekeeper, unaware of the sensitivity of Kerr’s experiments in breeding a more productive species of bee suited for use in tropical climates, neglected to replace ‘excluder grates’ on a number of hives. The result of this innocent mistake was the release of 26 Tanzanian queens who promptly made the bee with two backs with the drones of the surrounding colonies. Thus what would become known as the African Killer Bee was born.
The consequences of this entomological foul-up were twofold. Firstly, on the discovery in 1985 of a colony of the irascible insects glommed to the side of a Venezuelan tanker, the US press took an interest. Soon no nightly news programme was complete without a map of the American mainland, the sinister march of the psychotic bees projected by a spreading red stain. (It helped that the notion of a load of undocumented Africans swarming over the border from Mexico hammered at barely repressed Republican anxieties.)
Secondly, it helped put an end to Irwin Allen’s career.
Allen had seen the reports on the nightly news, and after the success of Inferno was looking for a subject to mine for his next excursion into cinematic calamity. The killer bees not only had a ripped-from-the-headlines appeal - half his publicity machine was already being driven by the regional media - but there was another, more practical consideration, perhaps inadvertently revealed in a quote to the Sarasota Herald Tribune: “You can buy a pack of bees by post,” he marvelled, “a queen and 6,000 workers for $32.” Bees, it turned out, were cheap.
As was his usual modus operandi he optioned a novel, this time by Arthur Herzog (later to pen Orca, itself later transformed into a moderate stinker) and commissioned his regular wordsmith Stirling Silliphant to adapt. By the Summer of 1977 he was ready to start shooting, having finally persuaded a studio to allow him full directorial responsibilities. But the producer in him was, as usual, much to the fore. In an interview with the New York Times he was in full-on carnival barker mode: “Laugh if you want to,” he cautioned a sceptical hack, “but these bees are moving north at a rate of 270 miles a year and no-one knows how to stop them. People are dropping like flies in Venezuela. These bees are the single most serious threat to our way of life!”
It also somehow got about that the Africanised bee’s poisonous payload was so deadly that a mere four stings could kill a healthy human. Nobody quite knows where this scientific calumny, which persists to this day, came from. In fact, the African bee’s sting juice is pretty much identical to his American cousin’s. But Allen was likely not above libelling a whole genus in the pursuit of cinematic hype.
A straw in the wind that the disaster genre might be running out of steam came with the casting of Michael Caine. Caine, who after an altercation with a communist electrician while having his home rewired had abandoned London in disgust and moved to Los Angeles, was not a star in the same league as Steve McQueen or Paul Newman. What’s more, he was hopelessly miscast as Brad Crane, an heroic entomologist. Caine spends much of the movie with his hands clasped professorially behind his back while wrestling, for the most part unsuccessfully, with lines such as: “I never thought it would be bees. They’ve always been our friends!”
“They had 22,000 bees,” an unimpressed Caine noted later. “And they had all these illegal Mexicans sitting in trailers pulling the stings out. Of course they missed a few. Every now and again you’d hear a yell from some crew member ‘Hot One!’” Jars full of tobacco soaking in water, a patent cure for bee stings discovered by an enterprising crew-member, dotted the set. Further humiliations were inflicted by the unwilling extras no doubt seeking revenge for their mass mutilation. Nobody had informed the human cast that the bee, an admirably house-proud insect, resists performing its natural functions inside the hive instead relieving itself in flight. “So they released these five million or whatever bees" remembered Caine, indulging in a little Allenesque statistical inflation, “and we’ve got these white smocks on. Suddenly there was this haze and all this bee pong was coming down. Our smocks all turned brown. At the time we only had an inkling that the bees were crapping all over us.” Given the film’s reception the symbolism, though, was not lost on him. “What do I know about bees?” He concluded.
The Swarm was, predictably, a critical flop. “You could pass it all off as a sick joke except it cost $12 million, 22,000 bees and several years of someone’s life,” said The Guardian. But more importantly, it underperformed catastrophically at the box office. Allen went immediately into production on The Poseidon Adventure 2, unwisely again demanding a full directorial role. When that signally failed to replicate its sister movie’s box office success he retreated to a sole producer credit for volcano pic When Time Ran Out, a hopeless lava palaver stocked with Allen retainers – Newman, Holden, Borgnine and Red Buttons – its roster of fading character actors goosed with a post-Rocky Burgess Meredith. It sank without trace.
But if Irwin Allen couldn’t recapture the dazzling, corpse-strewn success of the first two movies, neither could anyone else. All the major studios had piled on after Poseidon, but none had managed to conjure it, or Inferno’s, peculiar, macabre, popularity. Earthquake, presented in Sensurround (a gimcrack ‘process’ patented by Universal that involved placing large woofers behind cinema screens and had the effect of making audience members feel ill), The Hindenburg, Roller Coaster and Meteor all deployed stars and spectacular destruction to little box-office avail.
There were talks about The Towering Inferno 2, Allen even got as far as offering Steve McQueen $3 million to reprise his role as gritty fire chief Mike O’Hallorhan. The star, according to his biographer, ‘didn’t even bother to tell him to fuck off’. Perhaps Allen, by then, didn’t need telling. The writing was on the wall movie-wise and failing health drove him from the business, and he retired in 1986.
But the disaster movie as an idea, a weird need, abided. Somewhere deep in the moviegoer’s psyche was the lust for human catastrophe on a Hollywood scale. "People chase fire engines, flock to car crashes," Allen had said in happier times. "People thrive on tragedy. In my case, it's fortunate. The bigger the tragedy, the bigger the audience." Allen died of a heart attack in 1991 and so didn’t witness the digital FX-driven mini-revival of the 90s: Volcano, Armageddon, Dante’s Peak, Deep Impact, The Core, nor the curiously inert retread of his own Poseidon Adventure, Poseidon, in 2006. But even after that had run itself out, the genre that Allen all but created had already injected its DNA into other genres, like a randy escaped Queen Bee. Back as far as the 1970s it’s impossible not to see echoes of it in Jaws and its rip-offs and even now watching a Contagion with its sneezy, starry cast (who will survive?) or a Gravity with its 3D spectacle and choreographed catastrophe, you can still hear the faint voice of Irwin Allen, whispering his wide-screen nightmares into our ears.
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