5 Things You Didn’t Know About ‘The Towering Inferno’ on Its 50th Anniversary

The Towering Inferno, Paul Newman — TM and Copyright (c)20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved./Courtesy Everett Collection

“It’s a fire, mister, and all fires are bad.”

The Towering Inferno, perhaps the most memorable of the 1970s big-budget, all-star disaster movies, was released in theaters 50 years ago on December 16, 1974.

The film starred Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Fred Astaire, Jennifer Jones, O.J. Simpson and a host of others, is the story of people trapped inside San Francisco’s new skyscraper, The Glass Tower, when its design and construction flaws lead to a massive blaze in the building.

Get fully involved in The Towering Inferno with these five little-known facts about the movie:

1A Collaborative Effort

Both 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. had been working on their own separate skyscraper disaster movies, with Warner Bros. trying to adapt Richard Martin Stern’s novel The Tower, and Fox developing a film based on the novel The Glass Inferno by Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson. The studios cooperated, split the costs evenly, and combined the stories and intellectual properties into one huge film.

2Paul Newman’s Son Played a Firefighter

Paul Newman’s only son, Scott, was an actor and stuntman whose lone role in the same film as his father came in The Towering Inferno, in which Scott played a young firefighter with a fear of heights. Scott had difficulty living in the shadow of his father, and he struggled with alcohol and drug addiction. A 1978 motorcycle accident left Scott addicted to painkillers, and he died as the result of an overdose in November of that year.

The Towering Inferno

3Disaster Strikes Again for Maureen McGovern

Singer Maureen McGovern performed the Oscar-winning “The Morning After” for 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure. Producer Irwin Allen wanted to keep a good thing going and featured McGovern again in The Towering Inferno with “We May Never Love Like This Again,” which also won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. McGovern makes a brief appearance as a singer in Inferno.

4Fred Astaire’s Only Oscar Nomination

Fred Astaire famously danced his way through hundreds of musical TV and film productions over the decades, but his first and only Oscar nomination came for Best Supporting Actor in The Towering Inferno as con man Harlee Claiborne. (Astaire lost to Robert De Niro for his role in The Godfather, Part II.)

5It Inspired the Christmas Classic Die Hard

Novelist Roderick Thorp had seen The Towering Inferno and then a dream that same night about a man being chased through a skyscraper by gun-wielding assailants. This inspired his 1979 book Nothing Lasts Forever, which eventually was made into the film Die Hard (1988).