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For the first episode of our new series 197:4 Fifty Years Later, we’re joined by the first guest ever to appear on the podcast, the peerless man of le cinema Brian Saur. The Pure Cinema and Just the Discs podcast impresario selected for our conversation to discuss one of the most maligned and neglected Best Picture nominees of all-time, the ne plus ultra of blockbuster disaster films, The Towering Inferno.

Star-studded cast featuring Steve McQueen (at the height of his box office power), Paul Newman (coming off 1973’s Best Picture winner, The Sting), Fred Astaire (shamelessly nominated for Best Supporting Actor), William Holden & Faye Dunaway (together two years before Network), Jennifer Jones, Richard Chamberlain and too many others to name battle a high-rise blaze in a special effects extravaganza that puts the spectacle in “Outrageously Outsized Hollywood Spectacle.” We do our best to ignore the consistent presence of OJ Simpson and put the focus where it belongs: on Sterling Siliphant.

We dig into the split-direction of disaster movie mastermind Irwin Allen and actor’s director John Guillermin, McQueen and Newman’s amazingly petty competition for screen-time, the utterly ridiculous Oscar the film did win, and why there should be more appreciation for Hollywood cinema doing what only Hollywood cinema can do. Stars, explosions, character actors, air-tight screenwriting and buckets of poured money into the blaze: join us in standing in awe of this monument to Hollywood blockbusterizing.

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Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two”

Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"