1970s in film was far less successful. "The Towering Inferno" teamed Steve McQueen and Paul Newman against a fire in a San Francisco skyscraper. The film cost a whopping $14 million to produce (expensive for its time), and won Academy Awards for Cinematography, Film Editing, and Best Original Song. The same year, the epic "Earthquake" featured questionable effects (camera shake and models) to achieve a destructive 9.9 earthquake in Los Angeles. Despite this, the film was one of the most successful of its time, earning $80 million at box office. By the late 1970s, the novelty had worn off and the disasters had
Kaddish (Towering Inferno album) and had previously worked with Saunders in several groups. Wolfson and Saunders, both of European-Jewish descent, formed Towering Inferno in 1985 as an "ambient, techno and heavy metal" multimedia stage project that involved electronics and film. The duo toured Europe, augmenting their performances with slide and super 8 projectors. In 1986 they met Hungarian performance poet Endre Szkárosi in Italy at the Bologna Festival and were impressed by his cryptic works which challenged Communist dictatorship and explored European identity. Wolfson and Saunders decided to explore their own identities and spent the next five years on the road filming, performing and