Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [125]
Screenwriter Stirling Silliphant was hired to combine the two books’ stories into one workable screenplay. Silliphant had written some of the best screenplays of his era and had won an Oscar for In the Heat of the Night. Allen, intrigued with the idea of two books made into one film, wanted Silliphant to write two stories that overlapped into a single movie. One was essentially the action parts, which Allen would direct; the other was all the dialogue scenes, which Allen hired British director John Guillermin to direct, believing the British excelled at wordy, plot-heavy stories. Guillermin’s most recent film had been 1972’s Skyjacked (an American film shot at Metro, starring Charlton Heston and Yvette Mimieux), which got him the job co-directing The Towering Inferno.
Expensive sets were built for the interiors, designed inside a five-floor high-rise mock-up at Fox’s Malibu ranch, with existing high-rises in San Francisco, the Bank of America Plaza entrance in Los Angeles, and the façade of L.A.’s Hyatt Regency used for the exterior shots. The Hyatt’s indoor glass elevators were also utilized. All of it was edited into a single locale.
While the script was being written and the sets designed and built, Allen continued to put together the rest of his ensemble cast, using his tried-and-true method of choosing famous sports figures and Hollywood legends, most of them long past their professional primes. Robert Wagner, Robert Vaughn (his third film with Steve), O. J. Simpson, Fred Astaire, Jennifer Jones, Richard Chamberlain, William Holden, Susan Blakely, and Faye Dunaway, who was Steve’s co-star in The Thomas Crown Affair, and who made Roman Polanski’s Chinatown the same year, rounded out the cast. The key role of the architect, the part Steve turned down in favor of the fire chief, went to Paul Newman.
Unlike the debacle that had gone on with Butch Cassidy, this time the question of billing was far easier to solve, as Freddie Fields offered the same proposition he had offered both actors for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—equal billing, the name on the left lower than the name on the right in America and the names reversed in Europe. This time there was no problem with it from either side. Announcing the arrangement, Variety’s headline ran: “Bit Player of 1956 Now Co-Equal with Paul Newman.”11
Newman said, “It didn’t make any difference to me. Any way anybody likes it is all right by me.” Steve agreed, except he also wanted Silliphant and Guillermin to make sure that both his character and Newman’s had the same exact number of words in the script, and that the final shot and sentence spoken in the film would belong to him. Everyone agreed, including Irwin Allen, who had the final say.12
These were the final hurdles, after which The Towering Inferno went into production that spring. There were some bruised feelings from some of the other actors at the kid-glove treatment Steve and Newman received during the making of the film and the fact that they received 90 percent of all the close-ups in the action sequences. William Holden, who had been one of the biggest American male stars of the 1950s, complained bitterly, according to someone on-set, that he had nothing to do in the film but answer the phone and sound grim.
DESPITE THE difficulties of filming the many special-effects sequences, for the most part production went smoothly. Steve and Newman had almost no scenes together, and they were cordial to each other, even friendly by some accounts (including Robert Vaughn’s in his memoir), whenever they encountered each other on-set. Dunaway, Steve, and Newman even sometimes got together between scenes, often caught up in laughter and the general bonhomie that permeated Irwin’s set. Dunaway was content with her smaller role as long as the money was good and arrived on time (and she knew Chinatown was going to put her back on top). Steve had a few complaints—when he didn’t like the helmet he had to wear, costumes found him another one—but for the most part, it was a very professional set where the potential for danger