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 insults our intelligence for close to three hours, it shouldn't preen itself on its own morality." Gene Siskel of "The Chicago Tribune" gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four, calling it "a stunt and not a story. It's a technical achievement more concerned with special effects than with people. That's why our attitude toward the film's cardboard characters is: let 'em burn." On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 71% based on 28 reviews with an average rating of 6.6/10. The film was one of the biggest grossing films of 1975 with