CHARLTON HESTON: MASTER OF DISASTER Part Three

EARTHQUAKE (1974: Dir. Mark Robson)

"An Event" indeed. The one two punch of Airport 1975 and Earthquake would make 1974 the biggest box office year of Charlton Heston's career. Once again hitching his wagon to another of executive producer Jennings Lang's disaster film juggernauts, Heston, after a crucial amelioration of his character's infidelity in the shooting script, delivered his expected gravitas and physical prowess in the role of beleaguered engineer Stewart Graff. He is joined by a carefully chosen array of low wattage stars including: Ava Gardner, his middle-aged former co-star from 55 Days at Peking (1963), Quebecoise ingenue Genevieve Bujold (Anne of the Thousand Days), Canadian cowboy Lorne Greene (Bonanza), Soul cinema superstar Richard Roundtree (Shaft) and the ubiquitous George Kennedy (Airport). Lang and producer/director Mark Robson knew that spectacle was the main attraction for an audience gorged on destruction and carnage, so they decided to put cinema patrons right on the fault line itself. Their invention was the sound system "Sensurround" a low frequency extended-range bass noise generator that could simulate the vibrations of an actual earthquake. Newly installed in dozens of cinemas across North America, this unique sensory experience left audiences both shaken and stirred by a genuine visceral reaction to the terrifying tremors depicted on screen. The script, originally conceived by Mario The Godfather Puzo and revised by neophyte screenwriter George Fox, is cleverly constructed to take advantage of numerous picturesque Los Angeles locations while at the same time thriftily staging large scale physical effects within the safety zone of the studio backlot. The most unsung member of the creative team however was matte artist Albert Whitlock, a genius with a paint brush on glass. His background depictions of downtown LA convincingly reduced to ruins, gave the film an essential sense of scale and apocalyptic threat. Not since the 1950s, when 3D and Cinerama were the dominating cinema gimmicks, had Hollywood created such a mercenary thrill ride motion picture, blatantly sacrificing character, dialogue and plot on the altar of cataclysm. Sensurround was subsequently used by Universal Pictures for only three more films: Midway (1976) also starring Heston, Rollercoaster (1977), and Battlestar Galactica (1978), all to diminishing effect. Judged purely by its gross profits, Earthquake would be the peak of the disaster film cycle and Charlton Heston now its undisputed star attraction. Two more films would complete his quintet of catastrophe, but they would take the genre into new and different directions, not always where the public wished to follow. BLU-RAY