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
O. J. Simpson the television mini-series "Roots" (1977), and the dramatic motion pictures "The Klansman" (1974), "The Towering Inferno" (1974), "The Cassandra Crossing" (1976) and "Capricorn One" (1978). In 1979, he started his own film production company, Orenthal Productions, which dealt mostly in made-for-TV fare such as the family-oriented "Goldie and the Boxer" films with Melissa Michaelsen (1979 and 1981), and "Cocaine and Blue Eyes" (1983), the pilot for a proposed detective series on NBC. He also starred in the comedic "Back to the Beach" (1987) and "The Naked Gun" trilogy (1988, 1991, 1994). Besides his acting career, Simpson worked as a commentator