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 Glass Inferno The Glass Inferno The Glass Inferno is a 1974 novel by Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson. It is one of the two books that was used to create the movie "The Towering Inferno", the other being the 1973 novel "The Tower" by Richard Martin Stern. The story concerns the events over the course of a single evening in a recently completed 66-story building in an unnamed American city. The building was called the National Curtainwall Building, nicknamed the Glass House, the headquarters of the fictitious National Curtainwall corporation. A combination of a skyscraper built to the absolute minimum