For most movie lovers today, the idea of 1970s Hollywood conjures up an image of maverick filmmakers being given the keys to the castle. It was the era memorialized in histories like Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, when young turks like Scorsese, Coppola, and Spielberg did some of their greatest and most famous work. But the truth was more complicated than that. Certainly, movies like The Godfather and Jaws were huge hits, but films of that caliber striking gold at the box office were the exception rather than the rule. Then as now, Hollywood has always been first and foremost in the business of churning out big, mindless spectacles, and the blockbuster of choice for many studios in the early 1970s was the disaster film. The biggest of them all was the highest-grossing film of 1974, The Towering Inferno.
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