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
RMS Titanic in popular culture impact in America. It has nonetheless aged well; the film has considerable artistic merit and, according to Professor Paul Heyer, it helped to spark the wave of disaster films that included "The Poseidon Adventure" (1972) and "The Towering Inferno" (1974). Heyer comments that it "still stands as the definitive cinematic telling of the story and the prototype and finest example of the disaster-film genre". In 1979 EMI Television produced "S.O.S. Titanic", a TV movie that tells the story of the disaster as a personal drama. Survivor Lawrence Beesley (played by David Warner) is presented as a romantic hero and Thomas