[125 years
ago this coming weekend, the first name
in earthquakes, Charles Richter, was born. So in his honor I’ll AmericanStudy a
handful of seismic quakes, leading up to a special post on Richter himself!]
On
takeaways from three blockbuster films about catastrophic quakes.
1)
Earthquake (1974): I
wrote in
this post about the long history of disaster films (one of the most
enduring genres of blockbusters, in fact), and there’s never been a moment more
full of such movies than the 1970s. Indeed, production on Earthquake was
rushed in order to try to beat a competing
disaster film, The Towering Inferno, into theaters, and Earthquake
did come out about a month before Inferno so mission accomplished there.
But what really makes Earthquake stand out is its use of a
groundbreaking (bad pun once again intended) theatrical technology, “Sensurround,”
in order to help audiences truly feel the titular disaster. Given that the film
features a scene (available at the first hyperlink above) set in a movie theatre
during the earthquake, I can imagine that the blurring of art and reality would
have gotten real complicated for at least Southern California audiences.
2)
The Great Los Angeles
Earthquake (1990): In his review
of this film (which he calls The Big One, an alternate title), Washington
Post critic Tom Shales explicitly connected it to the 1974 film, noting
that, “bad as it is, [it] does seem an improvement over the 1974 theatrical
release Earthquake, which also fantasized the destruction of L.A.” But
what interests me most about the 1990 film is that it was made-for-TV, and yet
clearly intended to be just as much of a blockbuster as that prior theatrical release—the
1990 film cost more than $9 million, was made over a three-year period,
included sequences filmed at the same Universal Studios lot where Earthquake
had been filmed, and so on. There’s been a lot written in recent years, quite
rightly, about the shift from film to TV (including in how films themselves get
distributed and viewed), but this blockbuster TV movie from 1990 reminds us
that that process has been a multi-decade one to be sure.
3)
San Andreas (2015): Hollywood
was far from done with big-screen blockbuster disaster movies, of course, as
reflected by this 2015 film about a catastrophic quake that hits the San
Francisco Bay Area, starring blockbuster big guy Dwayne Johnson himself (among
many others in an over-stuffed cast as is typical for the genre). I don’t know
that there’s too much more to say about this particular film, but I’d note that,
to my knowledge, there hasn’t yet been a feature film made about the 1906 San
Francisco earthquake and fire, a real-life disaster that was (as I wrote in
Monday’s post) as full of compelling stories as any imaginary one could be. I
know that period pieces can be trickier, and generally are a distinct genre
from disaster films—but if we’re gonna keep telling these stories, we might as
well engage with the real ones.
Richter
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Famous quakes or other natural disasters you’d analyze?
