Yes, yes, another story about a movie that’s not being made—but in this case, it’s not a production shutdown or delay due to a pandemic! In this case, it’s a movie that’s been not being made since it was written in the early ’90s. And it’s still not being made, but this weekend, it will be introduced to audiences all the same, and for a good cause.
On Saturday, July 25 at 8 p.m. ET, Ben Stiller, David Cross, and Robert Cohen’s The Towering Disaster—a spoof of ’70s disaster epics like The Poseidon Adventure—will finally see the light of day thanks to a digital live reading with a starry cast. Pretty much everything about The Towering Disaster sounds bonkers, and Stiller acknowledges as much in this fun interview with Vanity Fair about the project:
“[F]or whatever reason, it never got made,” Stiller said of the project, which was set up at the now defunct Hollywood Pictures, a former subsidiary of Disney. “It was probably just too insane.”
He’s not necessarily wrong. The screenplay sets its action inside a high-rise hotel built in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, on top of an active undersea volcano. As one might expect from its 1970s forebears, calamity is quick to ensue. Stiller plays a radical preacher in the script, a role that on paper sounds similar to the part Gene Hackman played in The Poseidon Adventure. (“I don’t know what you’re talking about; it’s a purely original character,” Stiller joked when the comparison was made.)
The reading, made possible by pulling the script from a floppy disk, is scheduled to feature both Cross and Stiller as well as Michael Cera, Don Cheadle, John Ennis, Will Forte, Regina Hall, David Koechner, Jack McBrayer, Michael McKean, Bob Odenkirk, Sarah Silverman, Kristen Wiig, and Henry Winkler. There’s also a surprise guest Stiller hints at by teasing, “There’s one bit of casting that literally no one else in the world could play.”
But it’s at this point that your Great Job Internet correspondent must admit that she has buried the lede, because the VF interview contains a terrific Gene Hackman anecdote, and there are few purer joys in the world than a really good Gene Hackman anecdote. Here’s Stiller:
“When I had the opportunity to work with Gene Hackman in The Royal Tenenbaums, it was a dream come true for me. The whole shoot, I was waiting to get up the nerve—because he’s an intimidating guy—to tell him how much Poseidon Adventure meant to me. So, two days before the shoot was over, finally, there’s this quiet moment. I said, ‘Gene, I just want to say it’s just been amazing working with you—and I didn’t say this before, but really for me, Poseidon Adventure is probably one of the most important movies for me, ever, because it really made me want to be a filmmaker, to be in movies, and I saw it multiple times and it just really, really changed my life.’”
Hackman, Stiller recalled, took a moment, looked at him, and said, “Oh yeah. Money job.”
“Then he got up and he walked away,” Stiller said, as Cohen expressed delighted surprise at the story. “My world was shattered. So this is my chance to, somehow… I don’t know, I have to live it out somehow. I have to make it right. It’s not a money job for me.”
Besides, he concluded, “Even if it was a money job for Hackman, it was the most incredible money-job performance I’ve ever seen.”
You can watch Stiller and company do the exact opposite of a money-job (a charity-job?) on Saturday here; the stream will remain active for 48 hours after its conclusion. Tickets, which will set you back $12.50, benefit the Equal Justice Initiative and Direct Relief.
24 Comments
Please no. I don’t want to create any possible opportunity for the return of Friedberg and Seltzer.
I love the Wikipedia summary text when you Google them.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Friedberg+and+SeltzerFriedberg and Seltzer aren’t writers; they’re
comic terrorists who cavalierly destroy what others create for their own
ugly self-interest. Their success is entirely dependent on making
comedy a dumber, crasser, less dignified place.
That’s from a quote in the Wikipedia article by none other than Nathan Rabin!
Until he dies, Gene Hackman will be the coolest person currently on earth.
Even after, assuming his ashes aren’t launched into space.
So will he be the surprise actor? There is this: When asked during a GQ interview in 2011 if he would ever come out of retirement to do one more film, he said he might consider it “if I could do it in my own house, maybe, without them disturbing anything and just one or two people.” source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_HackmanSure sounds like this project fits those parameters.
I’ll be majorly surprised. Hackman is 90 years old now, retired from acting years ago, and barely even made appearances outside of movie premieres when he was a working actor. He doesn’t exactly crave attention…and, again, he’s 90 years-old! Maybe, I guess. But I can’t imagine it.
I’d always suspected that, unlike The Replacements, Hackman did The Poseidon Adventure for the money.
Welcome to Mooseport, otoh, he did because it was a chance to finally work with Ray Romano.
Well, I mean, everybody does love Raymond.
Well yeah, The Replacements is fucking awesome.
It really is a great bad movie.
Sounds like a new column “Money Job or AAACTING”
Little bit of column A, little bit of column B.(I would also read the fuck out of that series. Kinda like “My World of Flops”.)
well this weekend is as good as any to watch the poseidon adventure for the first time.
I’d watch it Sunday. It’s got to be the morning after.
All the retro reference stars for you, minus one. Dock one star–for letting that earworm of a song back in my head.
The general consensus is that it’s the best of the 70s disaster movies. Not great, but a workmanlike crowd-pleasing adventure. Mind you, given the average 70s disaster film, it’s faint praise.
My adult viewpoint sees it as you do and I think your summation is a good one but my self as a kid back in the day? In a one screen hometown theater packed to the gills with the local populace (reacting to every moment, happy/sad/scary/exhilarating), it was faaaaan-tastic.
Speaking of unmade Ben Stiller films from the ‘90s … does anyone besides me remember an idea floating around for a film called The Hardy Men, in which Ben Stiller and Tom Cruise would play adult Frank and Joe Hardy?! This was around the time Stiller made his MTV Movie Awards short film with Cruise, spoofing MI 2 …
Hackman’s disdain for “Poseidon Adventure” has been public knowledge since almost the day the movie came out. If Stiller had expressed himself more eloquently at the time (admittedly a difficult thing for anyone to do in front of an idol) and put it in the context of, “I know it’s a dumb movie but to a little boy it was awesome,” Hackman might have appreciated the perspective the same way Christopher Plummer eventually came around on “The Sound of Music .” The guy’s not that big of a stick in the mud, though. I mean he did that brilliant cameo in “Young Frankenstein” for no money at all, just for the fun of it.
That Young Frankenstein cameo is brilliant — especially as it casts Hackman diametrically opposite his usual type.
I think he has probably thrown that answer out for years no matter who is asking and no amount of fan-boying would change that answer.