After the promise of Airport was confirmed by the huge success of The Poseidon Adventure, the disaster film became a proven commodity in Hollywood. As a result, the genre enjoyed its most successful and prolific period from 1974-1976, the years the industry saw a ton of money being thrown at such films, causing every studio to try to make one of their own. That race saw producers looking to mine whatever material they could — natural disasters, published novels or even historical events — so that they could assemble a cast chock full of stars that would attempt to survive whatever calamity they chose. In this rush, the genre not only found more success, but it inadvertently birthed a new style of filmmaking, proving conclusively that audiences could be drawn in droves to a film that was an event, rather than one that simply advertised stars and glamour. 

While a handful of major disaster film productions scrambled to make their way to the screen in The Poseidon Adventure’s wake, the earliest one to hit theaters was the follow-up to the film that had kicked off the trend: Airport 1975. Released in October of 1974 (making its titular date a little anachronistic), the film was initially being developed by producer Jennings Lang as a television movie, before he and Universal Studios decided to bump it up to a theatrical release. That move not only legitimized Airport 1975 and its genre, speaking to the fact that disaster fare was hot at that time, but made the series into virtually the only franchise of the genre — Irwin Allen would attempt to make a franchise out of The Poseidon Adventure, but that wouldn’t happen until the end of the decade. Helmed by veteran director Jack Smight, Airport 1975 would see another ensemble cast of stars (led by Charlton Heston, continuing his legendary run in the genre that began with 1972’s Skyjacked) in mid-air peril, this time due to a heart attack suffered by a nervous single-engine airplane pilot (Dana Andrews), causing his craft to collide with a packed 747. That event marks the only time in the Airport films that the disaster is an honest accident, as opposed to something deliberately instigated or recklessly ignored by people. Following in the footsteps of the original film, Airport 1975 allows its tone to veer between stone-faced suspense and wacky comedy — this is a movie that sees Karen Black’s stewardess have a near-nervous breakdown when she’s enlisted to fly the damaged plane, while also featuring comedy bits from the likes of Sid Caesar and Gloria Swanson (playing herself). The mix borders on camp, and it’s something the team of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker would remember when they made Airplane! later on, with this film being one of their primary targets. Still, Airport 1975 continued to carry the disaster torch, and proved that audiences would eat up a movie that was intended as pure entertainment. 

The next disaster epic to star Heston, released just a few weeks after Airport 1975, would be more indicative of the uneasy space disaster films occupied during the early 70s. Just as with The Poseidon Adventure, 1974’s Earthquake was marketed to the public as counter-programming to the New Hollywood dramas that were competing for screens at that time — its tagline on the posters literally read “An Event…,” touting Universal’s new sound process dubbed “Sensurround.” Sensurround was essentially a series of subwoofers specially installed into movie theaters, the gimmick being that audiences could actually “feel” the rumbles of the earthquake. Such William Castle-like showmanship would seem to infer that the film would be an amusement-park romp, but director Mark Robson and co-writer Mario Puzo, among the rest of the filmmakers, made Earthquake a morally ambiguous drama that’s surprisingly unsympathetic toward its characters. The film sees Heston’s building engineer cheat on his overbearing wife (Ava Gardner) with a widowed friend (Geneviéve Bujold) whose husband’s death he’s indirectly responsible for, while a righteous cop (George Kennedy, runner up to Heston in being a disaster movie mainstay) is suspended for giving chase to a perp who killed a kid. In addition, a kindly boss (Lorne Greene) suffers a heart attack after helping the rest of his staff to safety and a misogynist creep soldier (Marjoe Gortner) menacingly stalks a woman (Victoria Principal). It also features Richard Roundtree as an Evil Knievel wannabe and Walter Matthau (credited under a joke name) as a drunk in a pimp hat who is nonplussed by the earthquake. Unlike the Airport films, Earthquake positions itself as a serious movie, attempting to legitimize the disaster film in the wake of The Godfather (1972) and Chinatown (1974) but never quite strikes the perfect tone. 

The filmmaker who did strike the right tone was the aforementioned Allen. Thanks to The Poseidon Adventure, he had become 20th Century Fox’s wunderkind in the couple of years following, lining up a series of films he was hoping to make. Allen’s immediate mission, though, was, in his words, “to prove to the world that Poseidon Adventure was no mistake.” He believed he had found the right source material to do so in Richard Martin Stern’s novel The Tower, however he lost a bidding war for it with Warner Bros., a studio that was hungry for their own disaster film. The sly Allen then bought the rights to another novel with a highly similar premise, Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson’s The Glass Inferno, and rather than rush a competing film into production, he successfully convinced Warner and Fox to combine forces and jointly produce the movie. The result, The Towering Inferno, became Allen’s grandest achievement on the big screen as well as arguably the apex of the disaster genre, a nearly three-hour epic that delivers setpiece after harrowing setpiece yet never loses sight of its ensemble of characters. Allen and director John Guillermin (along with writer Sterling Silliphant, deftly combining two novels) juggle an insanely stacked cast (led by Paul Newman and Steve McQueen, who insisted on specific double billing), copious live physical special effects, blue screen/matte effects and gigantic miniatures, all in service of a story that’s set primarily in a single (albeit giant) building. Like The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno criticizes Man’s hubris (featuring characters cutting corners on building the tower to save money as well as others who think they can simply run through a burning building and not be hurt) while being a paean to people’s inner strength and courage, portraying firefighters in a highly positive light in particular. In its mixture of suspense, real stakes (the film isn’t afraid to kill off sympathetic characters) and Allen’s showman spectacle, The Towering Inferno made a huge impact, falling short of The Poseidon Adventure’s success only due to screens being crowded with all the other disaster films. It nonetheless made a significant impact on Fox — 14 years later, the studio would produce another film about people trapped in a high rise, one that would be seen as a sterling example of the action genre: 1988’s Die Hard . 

With The Towering Inferno acting as the epitome of the disaster movie (and one that would be difficult to beat), filmmakers looked for other ways to perpetuate the disaster trend. 1975’s The Hindenburg made the lateral move of connecting the trend to a real-life historical disaster, and The Andromeda Strain director Robert Wise was hired to bring his expertise with both disaster and period-piece material. The resulting film ended up as more of an Agatha Christie-type mystery (the author’s work having had a resurgence thanks to Sidney Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express the previous year), with the ensemble cast turned into suspects as George C. Scott’s German Colonel searches for a bomb on the zeppelin and the famous explosion/crash occurs only in the final moments. 1976’s Two-Minute Warning is an action-cop-thriller which sees an anonymous sniper menace a stadium full of patrons during a championship football game. Director Larry Peerce and writer Edward Hume structure the story like a disaster film, however, featuring an ensemble of characters (led once again by Heston) with their own storylines who are then impacted by the sniper’s attack, which is presented as an inexplicable act of nature as much as any earthquake or fire. Even though the requirements of the disaster film (a budget big enough to put together a cast full of name actors, big destructive effects and the like) meant that the thriving independent exploitation filmmakers of the time wouldn’t or couldn’t perpetuate the trend, that didn’t stop some from trying. 1976’s The Cassandra Crossing, directed by genre wild man George P. Cosmatos, is a disaster film mixed with tropes from pandemic, horror, conspiracy thriller and action movies. It proved there was more versatility in the trend than just spectacle and one-upmanship, giving it some other places to go.

However, the disaster movie had inadvertently morphed into something else the year before The Cassandra Crossing with a film that would unwittingly sew the seeds of the trend’s demise. In 1973, a year after The Poseidon Adventure’s success, Universal Studios (which, with the Airport series, Earthquake, The Hindenburg, Two-Minute Warning and others that followed, became a de facto disaster factory) bought the rights to Peter Benchley’s soon-to-be-published novel entitled Jaws. The book had an undeniable hook that seemed timely for movie screens — after all, if audiences ate up a giant wave attacking people at sea, why not a giant shark? The resultant film made by a young director named Steven Spielberg contains a few elements of the disaster formula: an unassuming group of people menaced by an uncaring force of nature, the same people put in more danger by a foolish authority figure and the threat being able to be defeated by ordinary men digging deep and finding inner courage. Yet Jaws also combines horror, adventure and humor, ending up with a winning concoction that would ultimately change the landscape of cinema forever. Jaws’ success wasn’t necessarily the death knell for the disaster trend, as its distant relation to it made the genre still seem viable. Yet as studios continued to put new disaster movies into production, the final blow that would topple the genre’s hold on blockbuster filmmaking was lying in wait, and would come from an unexpected source: a galaxy far, far away.

To be continued…

Bill Bria (@billbria) is a writer, actor, songwriter and comedian. ‘Sam & Bill Are Huge,’ his 2017 comedy music album with partner Sam Haft, reached #1 on an Amazon Best Sellers list, and the duo maintains an active YouTube channel and plays regularly all across the country. Bill‘s acting credits include an episode of HBO’s ‘Boardwalk Empire’ and a featured parts in Netflix’s ‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’ and CBS’ ‘Instinct.’ His film writing can also be seen at Crooked Marquee as well as his own website. Bill lives in New York City.