Prolific author and film historian Nat Segaloff is back with not one, but two books guaranteed to please film fans, with deep dives into all aspects of The Towering Inferno (More Fire! The Building of the Towering Inferno: A Fiftieth Anniversary Explosion) and the stories behind the scenes that you were never allowed to see in some of the most famous films of all time (The Naughty Bits: What the Censors Wouldn’t Let You See in Hollywood’s Most Famous Movies).
With two “hot” books currently on the shelf at your favorite bookstore, we though it was high time to speak to Segaloff again about both of his new books (and if you’d like to hear the audio recording of this interview, just scroll to very bottom of this article).
Your personal history and experience with The Towering Inferno was initially through the promotion of the film, correct?
Segaloff: As a snot-nosed kid, fresh out of college, I was able to get the first job in the film industry that I desired to progress in, and that happened to be doing publicity. I didn’t realize the attrition rate among publicists was so great, but that was how I found an opening. And for five years I did publicity for a variety of studios, individual films, and eventually for a theater chain. And then I moved to New York and did publicity for studios.
And it was a kind of five years of a huge roller coaster ride because it was really, I found uncomfortable because publicists have a job of asking favors from people and all we can give in return is maybe a free movie pass, but I did keep notes. That’s the one thing I was careful to do I took, you know, Mae West’s advice about keeping a good diary and someday it will keep you. Well, I kept good notes of every celebrity I met at every event that I went to and I’ve gotten two memoirs and The Towering Inferno out of it, right?
I mean, this is the 70s, but you know, with promoting a film like Towering Inferno, it didn’t go, I imagine, into a William Castle-style of sort of promotion. But what was it like promoting and selling that movie?
Segaloff: I’m a romantic about publicity and promoting The Towering Inferno wasn’t at all like you read in the old days where people would, you know, sit on the top of flagpoles or bring a live lion into a hotel. It was much more sedate. Fortunately, we had the advantage of being as accurate as possible at the time as far as fire safety, which was a very important thing for producer Irwin Allen.
And so I was able to get a lot of mileage in the local newspapers and by interviewing people about fire safety, because at that time, people didn’t realize the danger of fires in high rise buildings. They still don’t, although I think the World Trade Center disaster has probably taught us an awful lot we didn’t know before. Just for starters, most ladder trucks don’t go above the seventh or eighth floor in a high-rise building, or on a lot of them, not even above the third or fourth floor. If that hotel or the high-rise is set back in a plaza, like in a shopping center, they can’t get in, let alone put the ladder up.
I think people are realizing the importance of checking where the exits are when they check into a room or knowing how to get out alternatively just in case. And the movie was the film that got people aware of their fire safety.
It seems like the 70s was a time when you could really sell a lot of films on that idea of reality. You could get audiences interested in Jaws through stories shark attacks. And with Inferno, you could actually sell them on things about fire safety, which is kind of surprising today.
Segaloff: I like to cite Quentin Tarantino, who I happen to agree with when he says that the middle 70s were the last great era in American filmmaking. First, it’s before the introduction of computers. So what you saw on the screen was what you saw on the screen; it is what existed in real life. That, of course, is what made The Exorcist so powerful. Even with The Towering Inferno, they built the model of the world’s tallest building, about 90 or 100 feet tall. So it was kind of a “bigoture” instead of a miniature. And there were actual people doing gone really in, you know, first with Star Wars and then of course with Close Encounters and everything else. I don’t want to get romantic because people hurt themselves in those days. Now the most damage we’re going to have is to a couple of pixels. But there was something on the screen, something that you knew was real and that really moved people.
One of the things you mentioned about, or one of the quotes that came out of it as far as, the disaster movie, and certainly Towering Inferno probably does it as well as any film, but there was a quote about, we want to be heroic and we enjoy accidents. I believe that was from Alan, right? Do you agree with him on why these films are popular?
Segaloff: You know the term “rubbernecking”; that’s when you’re driving by a traffic accident and you slow down to 10 miles an hour to see if anybody was hurt. And you hope that they weren’t hurt, but you sort of do. Or like if you’re in traffic and it’s backed up and you say, “oh God, if this was an accident, I hope it was worth it”. I mean, these thoughts go through your head.
Well, in a movie, they’re two hours of those thoughts. And we can, as Alan said, pretend we’re heroes, while we’re watching other people get paid to actually solve these problems.
Yeah, I also like, which I’d never thought about before, his idea of… that at the time that the idea of even selling this genre film as a disaster film was sort of verboten. So at the time they categorized them as a group jeopardy film?
Segaloff: So jeopardy was a term I heard from Sterling Silliphant who wrote both The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, and then unfortunately, The Swarm and some other films. He says that in a group jeopardy film, the person who’s most in jeopardy is the writer, because he has to give an equal number of lines to all the stars, and they actually do count them, and he has to give them equal moments.
But the idea of a disaster film was also something that I think the people who made them frowned upon because supposing the film didn’t do any business, “disaster” is the first word that the trade papers were going to use to describe the grosses and they weren’t going to feed the animal unless they had to.
Yeah, that right, it just writes itself. It was interesting when I was thinking about the group Jeopardy film, some of those things like The Poseidon Adventure or Towering Inferno or Earthquake, you know, you have your star, like in this one it’s Newman, But with all of the other characters you get just enough, right? Here’s the rich heiress and here’s the fireman or here’s this other person. It would seem to, I guess, while it’s a group, there is always that one person that the audience really connects with.
Do you feel like that character or the Newman character in this or in other films, is a specific character type that you find in the disaster movie genre or is it like that sort of standard hero that we see in all films and stories?
Segaloff: Sterling himself said this when he said, look at the poster for The Towering Inferno. It’s the architect, the fireman, the security guy, the heiress. They’re defined by their stereotypes, and that’s the good thing and the bad thing. It also helps if you have stars because the audience doesn’t have to get to know them. They already have some familiarity with them, and that’s a very good thing. But you talk about the definitions of the characters, and this is something I learned from Scott Newman, who is Paul Newman’s son, who played a young fireman in the film. He said, the film was first offered to Steve McQueen to play the architect.
And McQueen was such an expert in his own self-preservation. He let other people, be it a contractor, the mayor who was compromising, the adulterer, all of these other folks, but McQueen was the only one that comes in as the true hero who doesn’t have any guilt. That’s a great story about McQueen and also says something about every other person in the film.
You know, it was funny too, because we’ve talked about the horror genre before when we discussed your book The Exorcist Legacy: 50 Years of Fear. We don’t consider, you know, the campers in Friday the 13th as a group, as group jeopardy, right? They’re together in the haunted house or whatever. But I thought, I wonder if you could apply that term to the modern zombie genre perhaps, as you usually have one main character along with a cast of characters who are also sort of stereotypical.
Segaloff: You know, there’s so many genres these days. I call these films the genre of prep-icide, you know, they’re always killing preppies, right? A lot of people in these films are simply there to wear some makeup and get dispatched as quickly as possible. You have to have a certain body count, right? You get to know them too well. Well, that would be great because you’re supposed to feel for them. But I think modern audiences are kind of eschew such things as character development. They want to get right on to the action, which is unfortunate because we’re encouraging people to not feel about others. We’re just encouraging people to do a body count. But when you think about it, that’s what happens in war. So why not happen in horror movies or zombie pictures?
You continue, of course, your sidebars that you have used in your previous books in Inferno, and you’re able to share a lot of great information through that device. Was there one particular one that you’re proud of or that you really enjoy informing people about?
Segaloff: I’m sorry to say I just tried to do as many sidebars as I could because every time I tried to stick them in the main narrative, people got distracted. Because the size of the book is such that if it was a coffee table book, I could put sidebars in as actual sidebars are supposed to be, like in a newspaper. But in a book that goes from one page to another, it’s kind of hard to do that. I’m not sure if I’m inventing a genre or just showing how badly I edit my own stuff.
It’s a bonus.
Segaloff: Thank you. I’ll go with that.
I was also surprised to learn that the studios collaborated on Towering Inferno and that it was based on two books written at roughly the same time.
Segaloff: Yes, The Glass Inferno and The Tower.
Right. One of those weird moments where two ideas pop up at the same exact time, which seemed very similar to each other. But that seemed, again, like a sort of a tightrope act too, to get the two stories together, to get the studios together. It didn’t seem like this was an easy film to realize.
Segaloff: The Towering Inferno was very difficult to put together because no single studio could afford to make it. Now mind you, in these days when we’re talking about one and $200 million budgets, Towering Inferno was budgeted about $15 million and both Warner Brothers and 20th Century Fox who’d gone through some slow period shall say, neither one could afford the whole budget so they decided to work together. But it wasn’t as fortuitous as that, because the head of 20th Century Fox, Gordon Stolberg and the head of Warner Brothers at the time Ted Ashley? that actually were friends as all the moguls are, they’re playing tennis one day and they said, what are you working on? And each of them happened to have a book that was the same. So the deal was actually made on the tennis court. Then they went and called in the lawyers and everything else flowed from that.
Surprisingly, neither set of writers knew that the other set of writers was writing a book about a skyscraper fire. These sort of things happen. Every now and then it happens. You know, two movies about Gene Harlow, two movies about, well, The towering inferno. It just is one of these things. So Hollywood doesn’t work in trends. It copies, but it doesn’t work in trends.
The film The Swarm pops in the book as well. It wasn’t the hit that people thought it was going to be.
Segaloff: Not it wasn’t. There is a story about Henry Fonda and Michael Kane standing around the set and waiting to go on and they found little spots all over their suits and they realized they were covered in bee poop. As Kane said, first the bees did it and then the critics did it.
My memories of The Swarm, because I was working for Evening Magazine at the time, which was one of the prime time access shows, and I had to review films and they wanted to make each of the reviews special.
So, I probably shouldn’t be saying this, as I’ll live to regret it, but this was the time of Saturday Night Live where they had the bees, the Killer Bees with John Belushi, so I dressed up as a Killer Bee with antennae and wings, walking around Boston Commons sniffing the flowers and reviewing The Swarm.
I don’t think anyone remembers what I said about the film, but plenty of people stop me and ask me about the time I wore the bee costume.
It was a good idea at the time.
Segaloff: That and playing in traffic.
What do you think the legacy of The Towering Inferno is?
Segaloff: Not just because I wrote a book about it, but I don’t think The Towering Inferno will ever be remade. It would be the nadir of bad taste following 9/11 to make a movie about a building on fire, but you also wouldn’t be able to get the same star power involved in the film.
I think it stands the test of time because it has this seminal place in the background of a lot of kid’s memories, a lot of kids wanted to be firemen because of The Towering Inferno, and coming up on fifty years, it gave us a lot to talk about with fires and it gave us a hell of a lot of thrills. It really is one of those iconic films that is going to last forever.
Moving from your book on The Towering Inferno to The Naughty Bits, what gave you the idea to write a book about all of these pre-code scenes that were cut from some of the most famous films?
Segaloff: A year ago I had a book published calling Breaking the Code about Otto Preminger, and for that, the Motion Picture Academy and the Motion Picture Association gave me access to their unpublished files of a lot of the major films.
So after I finished talking about Otto, I decided to segue into doing this book called the Naughty Bits, which is a British expression for all the things that you aren’t supposed to be talking about, so I go over 50 plus films, from Casablanca and Gone with the Wind to The Sound of Music and The Ten Commandments, and how the censors went to work on those scripts at every stage of the way, cutting things out of movies that they thought they public shouldn’t see.
What was it like having access to those materials which normally don’t see the light of day?
Segaloff: Well, I’d like to say it was salacious, but it was a privilege reading this, but to go back for a minute about the origins of the Production Code. In the 1930s, many local communities wanted to establish their own censorship boards, and this terrified Hollywood, not so much in terms of what they could and couldn’t do, but it was the idea of creating separate versions of their films for hundreds of censorship boards.
So in 1930, they set up the Production Code Administration headed by a man named Will Hays, who looked like he fell out of a Grant Wood painting, he established a series of “donts” and “be carefuls” for producers so they would know if they put those in movies, they would probably run afoul of censors.
In 1934, he put a man by the name of Joseph Green in charge, who would issue code seals for every film. So what you have is, a code of performance, which, if you don’t let word get around, was the first “woke” organization in America. They were careful of including any kind of ethnic slurs, or disrespect for the police, or uses of certain stereotypical names, and they held sway over every aspect of filmmaking.
What amazed me the most was that these weren’t the type of people who you think would act as censors; they were intelligent, urbane, extremely well-read, and diplomatic people. So I’m not saying censorship is good, and neither were they, but they were saying that if we don’t do it, America will.
You don’t normally think of the Hays code in those terms; with someone saying I love this but I can’t let you make this.
Segaloff: And because of that attitude, the code eventually outdated itself. By the middle 60s when you have films like Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which the Code couldn’t handle, but you can’t say it isn’t a reputable project. Jack Valenti was in charge of the censorship office by then and he created something called SMA which was “suggested for mature audiences” and that was the stop gap between 1966 and 1968 before he introduced the letter rating system, which has changed somewhat over the years, but is still very much in sway.
From the films that we consider classics today, were there some scenes that surprised you due to the fact that they didn’t pass the test?
Segaloff: This one is going to be weird: Cecil B. Demille got a nasty letter about The Ten Commandments. And that was because, and its still in the film by the way, at the very beginning when Pharaoh orders the slaughter of all the first-born male Hebrews you have a scene of a mother crying against a wall as her infant has just been killed, and Pharaoh’s guard comes out with a bloody sword and wipes the blood off the sword. That image is in there and it is almost as disturbing as anything that you see in a slasher film today. The Green office had trouble with that because it seemed so graphic, and it was in The Ten Commandments!
There were issues with Of Mice and Men as well, correct?
Segaloff: There were a couple of issues with Of Mice and Men. The portrayal of Lenny, a mentally retarded man who was bent on accidental violence was one, there was problem with the death of Curley’s wife at his hands, the Vaseline-filled glove of Curley so he can keep his hand soft for his wife, and George’s mercy killing of Lennie.
You could not show a killing on screen, so the camera goes off-screen and you see Buzz Meredith with the gun, shooting Lennie, who we don’t see in the scene, as portrayed by Lon Chaney Jr. It is a powerful film and they did a beautiful job with it.
In fact, you couldn’t have a gun and the person being shot in the same scene until Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, which gave them apoplexy in the office, but they kept those scenes in.
For the book, I tried to choose different issues rather than films. I had to include the biggest ones but I also wanted to include things like the original and the remake of The Children’s Hour, which is about a relationship between two school teachers who are accused on having a lesbian relationship, but the playwright Lillian Hellman always said the story was about the power of a lie and that’s what they went with, but they had to be careful about going into other areas.
The most damnable of all the films is something called Convention City, a 1933 movie about what happens at a convention. No prints are known to exist of the film because the film was so scurrilous that all print s were to be destroyed. You can still find the trailer online, but that’s it. It broke about every rule in alphabetical order.
Upcoming projects?
Segaloff: The next big one is coming out next May and it is the Rambo Report. I got some help from the father of Rambo, writer David Morrell on the book which places the Rambo films in the context of when they were released and what was happening in the world when they came out.
More Fire! The Building of the Towering Inferno: A Fiftieth Anniversary Explosion and The Naughty Bits: What the Censors Wouldn’t Let You See in Hollywood’s Most Famous Movies are both currently available for purchase at finer bookstores everywhere.
If you’d like to read more about Segaloff’s books, check out our recent interview with the author about The Exorcist Legacy: 50 Years of Fear and a review of his even more recent book, Say Hello to My Little Friend: A Century of Scarface.
