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I agree with you here on virtually every argument you attempt to make.
It also has a very weak Williams score. I sold mine 4 years ago, and do not regret it one bit.
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But hey, there's a Genevieve Bujold titty scene so the film shouldn't be written off as a total loss.
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As mentioned it seems more like a TV movie of the week than a true cinematic epic taking advantage of the medium.
Watching it on TV, it really looks like any Universal TV production from the 70s: Columbo, et al. They *mastered* the art of flat, featureless lighting for both their TV shows and feature films.
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I loved this score for a long time. It was similar to The Towering Inferno in some of the themes, and when I got the FSM TTI CD, I didn't need Earthquake anymore.
The "elevator with animated blood" sequence is laughable and horribly fake. So fake that when it was shown on TV recently, that bit was actually edited out! Was it really deemed too graphic for US TV? You've gotta be kidding me.
Obe scene was ALMOST amazingly distrubing: the middle-age mom in the moo-moo who got a face full of falling glass. She turned around and showed us her face with bloody shards sticking out, while she stumbled around yelling "oh...oh GOD!"
What totally ruins it is that a second before the glass hits, you can see an already placed shard protruding from her forehead, even though we see her from the back. What could have been gut wrenching is made horrible due to some of the sloppiest filmmaking for a major studio release I've ever seen.
For all of Irwin Allen's faults (he ruined his own genre with The Swarm and everything after), he wrongly gets credited for this film in many reference materials. No need to give him brickbats for a work he didn't do, he has enough of his own failures (and successes).
Yeah, the movie did just sort of "end". I see the need to not wait for the last half hour to give us the quake, but these damned disaster films were so overly padded with the "flashing out" or badly realized "characters" that it was usually a chore to sit through them. The Towering Inferno was the biggest of the disaster films and should have been the last.
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Posted: |
Apr 23, 2009 - 4:37 PM
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By: |
cirtap
(Member)
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As mentioned it seems more like a TV movie of the week than a true cinematic epic taking advantage of the medium.
Watching it on TV, it really looks like any Universal TV production from the 70s: Columbo, et al. They *mastered* the art of flat, featureless lighting for both their TV shows and feature films.
Towering Inferno is the same, as well as a lot of Disney movies from that period too. The tired old remains of the old studio system.
I agree that Mark Robson was no John Guillerman.
Albert Whitlock's matte paintings from Earthquake are spectacular (shame that the miniatures supervised by Clifford Stine etc were amateurish in quality), as is William's score. Shame that every thing else (Genevive Bujold aside) is Z rate, IMHO. Let's not even mention the animated blood.
John Guillerman got credit for directing only the NON-ACTION sequences of The Towering Inferno. ON the backstory of The Towering Inferno, Irwin Allen had to go to Guillerman to move FASTER, and keep his camera moving. Remember there was 4 Filming Units going on at the same time. John Guillerman only directed the Actors standing around doing NOTHING, and he had to be coached doing that by Allen.
I remember reading Guillerman was very reluctant taking on King Kong, because he thought Dino De Larentis was going to do him the same way Allen did him. Shovel him to the side.
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Does it make sense to buy this CD on eBay - or does anybody know if the score is going to be re-released by FSM, Intrada, Varese etc. this year?
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Posted: |
Jul 9, 2010 - 3:39 PM
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By: |
Ed Nassour
(Member)
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I can never forget the opening lines in Earthquake -
Remy Graff: Goddammit!
Stuart Graff: Your last words last night, the very first words you greet me with this morning.
What a blast, eh?
About the music. I always appreciated it. But there is one thing. As with so much purported original motion picture soundtrack reportage, I've always thought the LP main title version was lighter in tone than that found in the actual movie, which has a deeper bass 'ring' to it. They are different, methinks. Yes, its about time the EXPANDED version came along.
I'm pretty sure the album was a rescore job. And with a smaller-sized orchestra. The original session didn't have that many players to begin with.
The biggest orchestra I ever saw assembled on the Universal scoring stage was for "Ghost Story." They even fired up the old Robert Morton pipe organ. I believe for that session there were well over 80 musicians crammed onto the stage. Terrific score by Philippe Sarde. It was conducted by Peter Knight. I sat in on that one. The soundtrack LP and later CD are right off the original session. Of all the albums I've listened to recorded on the Universal scoring stage after its acoustic were diminished from a very bad 1967 remodel, that one sounds the best.
Mentioning Sensurround reminds me of the day I sat in when scenes from "Rollercoaster" were being shown to a group of visiting Japanese entertainment execs. I sat at the console with Dick Stumpf, co-creator of the process. All of a sudden, Lew Wasserman jumped up, ran back to the console where we were seated and started yelling at us to turn down the Sensurround, that it was way too loud. He used rather colorful language. After he returned to his seat I looked over a Dick and both of us started to laugh!
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