“The Towering Inferno” (dir. John Guillerman, 1974) was an epic disaster movie about a fire in a Los Angeles skyscraper. It had an all-star cast and was nominated for eight Academy Awards. More importantly, it was the highest grossing movie of the year and earned back fifteen times what it had cost to make.[1]
Fifty years on, it’s ripe for a remake that adapts the story to the issues of our own time.
On the one hand, New York City has entered a doom spiral. The Covid pandemic popularized working from home. Now it’s hard to get people back in the office. This imperils the business models of both property developers and big cities like San Francisco and New York. Big cities depend on big and dense populations with a large share of high-income earners. Dense crowding leads to small living units; small living units and busy professional lives push people out to restaurants, theaters, galleries, bars, concerts, and museums. These service industries employ masses of people who can barely afford to live in the molten core of American urbanism. Then there are the vast numbers employed in the construction industry and all its myriad up-stream suppliers. Decades of continual growth have led banks to loan immense sums of money to developers. If people don’t come back to the office, then this skyscraper of cards will crash.
On the other hand, hundreds of millions of people want to come to America to escape their “shithole countries,” just as did the ancestors of all other Americans. In the years since the the financial crisis of 2007-2009, a flood of humanity has been entering the United States across the southern border. After relentlessly criticizing Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, Democrats have seen their own “Remain in Texas” policy fail. Texas and, to a lesser extent Arizona, have been bussing illegal immigrants and asylum seekers to major “sanctuary cities” like San Francisco, Washington, DC, and New York. Now the counties surrounding New York City have been trying out a “Remain in Manhattan” policy. New York mayor Eric Adams is loudly complaining that the city’s shelters and services are swamped; he has—so far unavailingly—demanded assistance from the federal government. Agonizing policy choices for progressives abound. Where to house these distressed people? How to pay for housing and all the other services they need without gutting every other part of the city budget? How to non-coercively assimilate them into American life? What if they just keep coming? How will New Yorkers respond?
The story is set in the recent future. It weaves together these two strands of problems in the story of “The Towering Inferno.” The unstoppable influx of impoverished immigrants continually increased the demand for more cheap housing. Developers have fallen so far behind in their payments on loans, that they have begun to default. The banks are left owning increasing valueless collateral and lose all interest in maintaining the buildings.
Developer Peter Rockman appears on the scene as a God-send. Himself an immigrant from Ukraine, he proposed creating huge numbers of affordable housing units in the vacant floors of under-utilized office buildings. Construction companies and banks began to see him as a lifeline. His vision tempts the owners of one tower building into supporting his experiment. Rockman has a darker side. His real intention is to flood the towers with immigrants far greater in number than his permits allow, then to rack-rent the tenants. He expects the impoverished tenants in his Tower of Babel to cause the remaining businesses to flee, permitting him to buy the building at a fire-sale price. He backed up his appeal with corruption and black-mail to get the necessary permits to repurpose and reconstruct the buildings. Tenants who complain soon encounter Mike Malik, Rockman’s terrifying Director of Tenant Welfare.
Over the course of a few years, the planned apartments are sub-divided and open spaces are filled with hovels built of packing crate and palettes; rats scurry along the corridors piled with garbage; without air-conditioning in summer, the tenants have smashed holes in the windows; without heat in winter, the holes are plugged with rags or covered with boards; much of the wiring and electrical fixtures are stripped out; fires for light, heat, and cooking have scorched the floors, the plumbing has failed; criminals seize some of the apartments as bases for their businesses and to prey on the other tenants.
The tenants prove not to be the sheep Rockman expects. They come from Central America, West Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. The story focuses on three of them: a Guatemalan woman fleeing with her children from a drunken and abusive husband who belongs to the MS-13 gang; a Senegalese veteran of ISIS who has lost his faith in “jihad”; and a young couple from India who have run away from looming arranged marriages. All have hell-hounds on their heels: the MS-13 gunman, two ISIS scalp-hunters, and the elder brothers of the runaway couple.
Rockman and the Mayor combine forces in an effort to restore their reputations. An upper floor is transformed into an event-space, with several express elevators restored so that guests can bypass 80 floors of squalid nightmares. To inaugurate the new venue, the Mayor will attend a gala celebration honoring the casts of some of the television shows set and filmed in New York. Members of the casts of “Law and Order,” “Blue Bloods,” “Seinfeld,” and “Sex and the City” will attend. Among the other dignitaries is the British Ambassador to the United Nations, Sir Steven Martin-Short.
Things go terribly wrong. On the one hand, the Hell-hounds arrive in deadly pursuit of the migrants/fugitives. Mayhem erupts in different parts of the vertical homeless encampment. On the other hand, and as a result, fire sweeps through the middle floors on the night of the gala. The staircases become chimneys.
Who will live and who will die? How will the city choose to help those in danger? The second half of the movie focuses on the struggle for survival of the residents and top-floor guests, and on the heroic efforts of the FDNY.
The firemen confront a nighttime re-run of the 9/11 Twin Towers disaster. Blue-eyed men running up the steps toward death. Swarms of helicopters land on the roof to evacuate the well-heeled, dodging around the news helicopters filming those waiting below in a macabre version of the Oscars’ red-carpet show. “Look, there’s Tom Selleck!”
In the fight for survival, the immigrants exhibit the determination and ingenuity that led them to break with their own pasts and gain entry to the United States. In contrast, the Hell-hounds fall from their inability to abandon the “old ways,” to think anew and act anew.
In a brief closing scene, New York City donates the burned-out hulk of the building to the Mohegan Tribe as a subsidiary of their reservation in Connecticut.
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