The Towering Inferno

Continuity mistake: At Patty's place, she places her right arm next to her face holding a cracker. Shot changes to a side angle and her arm is lowered. Then a shot afterwards it's raised again.

Sacha ★

Continuity mistake: When Fred Astaire leaves the cab he doesn't have anything in his hand with the box, but as he walks to the hotel he has a small bunch of flowers which he takes into the hotel with him. But they are never seen again. He does not give them to his date, nor does have a flower in his buttonhole.

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Suggested correction: He has the flowers with him the entire time, from the cab ride to entering the hotel. You can see them when he pays the cabbie and when he's going to the hotel. He's carrying the flowers and the box in the same hand.

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Mistakes

Revealing mistake: Watch carefully as the statue falls on the bartender. It barely touches his chest and rests on his left thigh. As the bartender slumps dead you can see a wide open gap between his whole upper body and the statue. Even if it crushed his thigh it would not have killed him so quickly. When the bartender slumps down the statue rocks freely as he brushes against it; obviously a styrofoam replica.

BocaDavie ★

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Quotes

Doug Roberts: I don't know. Maybe they just oughta leave it the way it is. Kind of a shrine to all the bullshit in the world.

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Trivia

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Questions

Answer: Mainly it was about egos (mostly McQueen's) and a professional rivalry, not only as top movie stars, but also as auto racers. McQueen considered himself a superior driver to Newman, even though they never competed against each other. When McQueen was considered to co-star with Newman in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," McQueen wanted top billing, then dropped out when he wouldn't receive it, even though Newman was considered the bigger star. In "The Towering Inferno," McQueen supposedly obsessed over how many lines he had compared to Newman.

raywest ★

Expanding on this: McQueen's demand for top billing continued on this film (as did William Holden's, but he was never a serious candidate), which is why the end result was "staggered": McQueen's name was to the left but lower, while Newman's was higher but to the right, so both had top billing depending how one read it (left-to-right, or top-to-bottom). Studies have shown that the name audiences tend to see first is the one on the left, regardless of staggering, so McQueen may have "won" here.

Newman does get a small victory of sorts at the end of this film when the cast credits begin scrolling upward on the screen. Newman's and McQueen's names are again staggered like in the beginning intro, but Newman's name appears first as it scrolls up from the screen's bottom.

raywest ★

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