When I picked out The Towering Inferno as a blindspot movie for this year, I didn’t know yet that this quote from Steve McQueen at the end of the movie, more than 40 years later, still is relevant with the events in Grenfell Tower earlier this year in the back of your mind. “You know, we were lucky tonight. Body count’s less than 200. You know, one of these days, you’re gonna kill 10,000 in one of these firetraps, and I’m gonna keep eating smoke and bringing out bodies until somebody asks us… how to build them.”

When the World Trade Center was being during the seventies it inspired a number of writers (Richard Martin Stern, Thomas N. Scortia en Frank M. Robinson) to write stories about the dangers of such high buildings in case of fire. It resulted in the books “The Tower” and “The Glass Inferno”. After the success of the disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure the studios wanted to make other ones and started looking for material they could adapt. Warner Bros bought the rights for The Tower, 20th Century Fox for The Glass Inferno. This would mean both studios would be releasing their own version of basically the same story. The studios decided to negotiate though, which resulted in the first cooperation between two big studios and the movie was filled with famous actors of the time, including Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Fred Astaire and Richard Chamberlain. Continue reading →