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
The Towering Inferno 20th Century Fox on April 15, 2003, with a special edition released on May 9, 2006. Roger Ebert of the "Chicago Sun-Times" gave the film three out of four stars and praised it as "the best of the mid-1970s wave of disaster films". "Variety" praised the film as "one of the greatest disaster pictures made, a personal and professional triumph for producer Irwin Allen. The $14 million cost has yielded a truly magnificent production which complements but does not at all overwhelm a thoughtful personal drama." Vincent Canby of "The New York Times" wrote that the film is "overwrought and