Paul Newman and Steve McQueen star in The Towering Inferno. It's the classic story of a new huge building being built in San Francisco of all places, and funny enough it's basically exactly where they would build the Salesforce tower later. In the movie, the Tower is monumental, it is the new tallest building in the world, and it's like over 130 stories tall. I honestly don't remember if they ever definitively state how tall the building actually is.
Pretty soon into the ribbon cutting ceremony and the opening of the building, something goes wrong and a fire starts. They have security cameras everywhere, but the fire is in a closet and cannot be seen on the camera system. So the fire is ignored until it's uncontainable, and soon enough all the people in the building are in trouble.
The Towering Inferno was a true epic disaster movie. 2 hours 45 minutes long, this mammoth film showed everything needed to make this have an impact. Multiple setups happen to toss our heroes into danger. There's the scene of Newman dangling children over a precipice once the stairs have gone out, there's people trapped with fire on one side and a several hundred feet drop on the other. There's a scene with a basket carrying people away from one of the top stories of the building, the enormous height below them. There's all of these scenes and more.
The Towering Inferno was a smash success and spawned many disaster movie copycats. Newman and McQueen both deliver good leading man performances, and by the way, look very similar. They sbow up a water tank in the building and I guess that puts out the fire, everyone celebrates and the day is saved. Hooray.
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