ABSTRACT

I The mid-1970s vogue for disasters was principally a Hollywood phenomenon. But given the advancingly tied-in nature of the media, the book trade could only profit from the boom with novelizations, original scenarios, à la mode potboilers. Such was Hollywood’s appetite for this fashionable material that when Hailey put out The Moneychangers for film rights in 1974 the word came back, ‘Tell Hailey we want disasters’ (Sheila Hailey, 1978, p. 177). Hailey managed to sell his novel as a successful TV mini-series. But he clearly heard the industry’s call, as any alert bestselling novelist should, and he responded with his next novel, the duly catastrophic Overload. That lesser writers had an eye to Hollywood as they wrote can be inferred from the fact that over half the envisaged disasters in fiction afflict the handy film location of California. (Los Angeles, for example, is ravaged by earthquake twice, burned down, visited by an Ice Age, polluted by a power station gone China syndrome, inundated by flood.)

The big films in the disaster genre were Earthquake, Airports ’75, ’77 and ’79 (all based on Hailey’s original, disasterless melodrama), The Poseidon Adventure (devised by novelist Paul Gallico), Towering Inferno (‘partly based’ on Stern’s The Tower, ‘largely based’ on Scortia and Robinson’s Glass Inferno), Juggernaut and the remake of King Kong. These were blockbusters to end all blockbusters-all-or-nothing films which cost huge amounts in special effects. Their multiple narratives involved whole troupes of overpaid stars and hordes of extras. Towering Inferno, for example, had Steve McQueen, William Holden, Fred Astaire, Paul Newman, Richard Chamberlain; apart from anything else, satisfying all those egos’ needs for top billing must have been an advertising man’s nightmare. No expense was spared. Earthquake actually necessitated re-equipping cinemas with the vibrating ‘sensurround’ sound system. That these were the most lavish films ever made, and that they employed the most up-to-date media technology, was a main part of the sales pitch.