Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God by Nat Segaloff

Author:Nat Segaloff [Segaloff, Nat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BearManor Media
Published: 2014-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

11: Master of Disaster

It’s a perverse statement about our media-driven world that, whenever a natural disaster or horrific accident occurs — anything from earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, or tornadoes to 9/11 — the first thing terrified witnesses usually say is, “It was just like a movie.”

Hollywood is almost entirely responsible for that disaster imagery, and the man who was mostly responsible for Hollywood’s disasters was Stirling Silliphant. During the decade of the 1970s, he earned the sobriquet “Master of Disaster,” although those who worked on those and other films coyly preferred to call them “group jeopardy” pictures.

“Let me begin,” Silliphant said with the wearisome sigh of an oft-repeated response, “by saying that the person most in peril from working on group jeopardy films is the writer.” He should know. Between 1971 and 1980 he wrote The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno (1974), The Swarm (1978), and one that turned out to be an actual disaster, When Time Ran Out (1980), all of which were produced and sometimes directed by Irwin Allen. A showman of the old-fashioned school who was as star-struck as any of his audiences, Allen was driven by, and dearly loved, movies and the movie business. Born in 1916 in New York City and trained as a journalist at Columbia University, he entered TV and movies by way of the advertising industry and won his first Oscar in 1953 for the documentary The Sea Around Us. Gaining studio access, he produced and directed The Animal World (1956), famous for its animated dinosaur sequence, and The Story of Mankind (1957), a nutty, cameo-filled version of Henrik Willem van Loon’s best-selling one-volume chronicle of the human race. His first real hit was the 1960 remake of The Lost World, after which he branched into television and established his legend with Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Lost in Space.

The Poseidon Adventure confirmed a trend that had arguably begun with Krakatoa, East of Java (1969) and Airport (1970), although the latter successful adaptation of Arthur Hailey’s 1968 novel involved a human villain instead of Nature’s wrath, as in Krakatoa (which, incidentally, is west of Java). Others produced during, and inspired by, the Silliphant-Allen canon included Hurricane (1974), Earthquake (1975), Hindenburg (1975), The Cassandra Crossing (1976), Avalanche (1978), and Meteor (1979), as well as sequels to Poseidon (Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, 1979) and Airport (1975, 1977 and 1979), most of which seemed to star George Kennedy, and some of which were made by Allen sans Silliphant. [205] The trend was so shameless that it even inspired an equally shameless joke: “Did you hear, they’re making a double feature out of Earthquake and The Towering Inferno? They’re going to call it Shake and Bake.” The laughter stopped when the profits started. Airport, for example, cost $10 million and grossed over ten times that; Earthquake cost $7 million and grossed eight times as much. And The Poseidon Adventure, which had to seek partial outside financing because its studio was on the fence

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