Talk:The Towering Inferno

Needs Re-written

Is it just me or is this page's plot horribly done? 146.186.41.11 (talk) 21:00, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

Robert Vaughn's character survives the battle of the breeches buoy. He gets squished by falling debris during the final flooding.WHPratt (talk) 20:44, 24 May 2010 (UTC) Well, I always had thought that was him, but watching it one more time, I concede that I may be mistaken.WHPratt (talk) 14:44, 2 June 2010 (UTC) Correct as stated in the article. Never mind, sorry and all that. WHPratt (talk) 14:56, 6 February 2012 (UTC)

Deleted paragraph

DELETED: The script of the film never names the city in which The Glass Tower stands, though clearly the exterior shots are of San Francisco, and at the Tower party Harlee Claiborne says to Lisolette Mueller, "I decided to come back to the reality of San Francisco."

REASON: The paragraph itself not only contradicts itself, with Claiborne indeed naming the city, but I saw the film again the other day and there are other references to San Francisco. Apart from the fact that the Golden Gate Bridge is clearly shown during the opening credits sequence, when the film shows the first batch of fire engines being despatched we clearly see on the opened door of one truck the words "San Francisco Fire Department". So that's at least three very clear references to where the Glass Tower is located. Asa01 10:38, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

Unsourced Material

Article has been tagged for needing references since 2011. Feel free to reincorporate below material with appropriate citations. Doniago (talk) 20:30, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

Still at it are you? You are a joke , a true joke. IRL you must be one hell of a social misfit. You deleted this because it had no sources. But did you ever, ever once bother to verify these fact yourself? Of course not. That is not your way. You are too damn lazy to do that. All you are about is a couple of couple of clicks. Frankly you piss on WP:GF, WP:BOLD and WP:IGNORE because you employ your own lazy interpretation of the rules which basically stands at "satisfy me". Your edit log is just one long list of red deletes of film articles punctuated with your sanctimonious rants justifying your actions in green. People like you are the reason why there is an ongoing fall in real contributions to this project. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.143.55.99 (talk) 17:29, 11 August 2013 (UTC)

Influences

==Influences== The film was released the year the Sears Tower, the world's tallest building until 1996, opened in Chicago, a year after the two World Trade Center skyscrapers — the world's second tallest building at the time of the film's premiere — opened in New York City, and not long after the 1972 Andraus Building and 1974 Joelma Building fires in São Paulo, Brazil. Both novels were inspired by construction of the World Trade Center and what would happen if fire broke out. In the movie, it is unclear where the building was located in regards to the rest of San Francisco's Financial District. However, it is mentioned by two firemen responding to the fire that it's on the corner of Montgomery Street, a main thoroughfare in the Financial District and SOMA, thus placing the building with the aerial footage, somewhere between the Financial District and SOMA. The film was often referred to in media reports on the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. Coincidentally, principal photography on the film started on May 8, 1974 and finished on September 11, 1974 and no building with an occupied floor level greater than 110 stories has since been constructed in the United States. It premiered on December 13, 1974 in a first run that lasted almost a year. The film's opening credits included a dedication which read: "To those who give their lives so that others might live, to the firefighters of the world, this picture is gratefully dedicated".

Production

==Production== File:The Towering Inferno End Card.jpg End of the closing credit crawl, illustrating the joint partnership between 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. in producing The Towering Inferno. After the success of The Poseidon Adventure, Warner Bros. bought the rights to The Tower for $390,000. Eight weeks later, Irwin Allen discovered another novel, The Glass Inferno, and bought the rights for $400,000 for 20th Century Fox. The productions were combined, with a budget of $14 million ($90 million adjusted for inflation). Each studio paid half the production costs. 20th Century Fox had the United States domestic box office receipts while Warner Bros. would distribute the film in all foreign territories around the world. Stirling Silliphant, who won an Oscar for his adaptation of In the Heat of the Night, combined the novels into a single screenplay. Silliphant took seven characters from each and combined the plots. In The Tower, a bomb in the utility room of a 150-floor tower (the world's tallest) causes a power surge which sets a janitor's closet on fire; the escape from the top floor is by breeches buoy to the adjacent 110-story North Tower of the World Trade Center, and is only partially successful. More than a hundred partygoers die in the restaurant on the top floor. In The Glass Inferno, an electrical spark sets the janitor's closet in a 60-story tower on fire; the escape from the top floor is by helicopter, and everyone left in the restaurant escapes. The 57 sets and four camera crews were records for a single film on the Twentieth Century Fox lot. At the end of filming of principal photography on September 11, 1974 only eight of those 57 sets were left standing. William Creber is credited as Production Designer of the film and under his direction, Dan Goozee from the Fox art department designed the final look of the Glass Tower itself. Filming locations and sets The atrium of the Hyatt Regency San Francisco was used as the lobby of the Glass Tower. Its iconic pill-shaped glass elevators, found in many of architect John Portman's buildings, were reproduced on set in Los Angeles for extensive use in the film. They feature in a key sequence when McQueen has to detach a derailed elevator from the side of the building and lower it to the ground by helicopter. The lobby and elevators also featured in Mel Brooks' comedy High Anxiety, the Charles Bronson spy thriller Telefon, and in Time After Time. The Bank of America building at 555 California Street in San Francisco doubled for the facade and plaza. The St. Francis Hotel stood in for the security control room. The film makers used the central heating and air conditioning plant for all of Century City (the palatial business district adjacent to Twentieth Century-Fox) for the basic water storage tank set. The Glass Tower itself was a miniature model inserted into the San Francisco skyline in the opening shot by a technique known as rotoscoping. A hand-drawn matte painting was made of the chopper on each frame in which it was backed up by the miniature buildings. This was achieved through some uncredited blue screen work by the legendary Douglas Trumbull. A 70-foot (21 m) high model with a combination of propane, acetylene and oxygen jets for exterior fire scenes was filmed by the special effects team headed by Bill Abbott, A.S.C at the Twentieth Century Fox Ranch in Malibu. The site itself was on the concrete floor of the man-made Sersen Lake. Additionally, another model showing only the upper 40 floors was used and seamlessly intercut with the five full scale floors created by film makers for close up shots. The Promenade Room set was filmed on a huge soundstage at Twentieth Century-Fox and was highly unusual in that it reportedly contained statues and set and wall decorations from a previous Fox film, Hello Dolly!. The floor space, on many levels, covered 11,000 square feet (1,000 m2). The lowest level was six feet off the stage floor and the ceiling was 12 feet (3.7 m) above that. Three sides of the set were backed by a 340-foot (100 m) cyclorama, an outstanding piece of work which was created by Gary Coakley. This cyclorama was also utilized as the backdrop to Captain Kirk’s futuristic San Francisco apartment in the films Star Trek II (1982) and Star Trek III (1984). The Westin St. Francis hotel was used for the ride aboard the scenic elevator in which characters ride the elevator towards the Promenade Room, following the ribbon cutting portion of the building's dedication ceremony.

1st paragraph

the cast is led by (1) mcqueen and (2) newman; mcqueen is top-billed. 63.142.146.194 (talk) 03:55, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Regarding the name of Steve McQueen's character

"O'Halloran"is a real-life Irish surname...the surname of the fire chief is a made-up one, "O'Hallorhan."

I happen to be watching the film right now and just noticed that, there are many things that can be said about a very common Irish name being replaced by a surname that looks somehow even more Gaelic or something but in fact the name was conjured out of thin air Only because I have subtitles on was I able to figure out what the heck everyone was calling the guy.

It's a cunning example of Hollywood's erasure of Irishness - If all the O'Halloran's in the world felt like Steve McQueen, well, maybe there would be a towering Catholic baby boom or something...."Let's make up a name to take the wind out of their sails," they must have said, in their smoky WASPy back room meetings..... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.16.191.143 (talk) 16:33, 30 July 2020 (UTC)