Earthquake..on Netflix now

How dare you mention someone as irrelevant as Marjoe but not Genevieve Bujold?

Are these people all dead now?

Not all R2 though Victoria Principal is on her last legs.

How dare you mention someone as irrelevant as Genevieve Bujold but not DEBRALEE SCOTT?

The souvenir T shirts they sold in the lobby now bring $500 on ebay

Lloyd Bridges is not in Earthquake.

But Walter Matthau is!

Yes, Walter Matthau in a pimp hat is a sight to behold.

I hate the ending...seriously.

It lacks the sensurrond.

Ava Gardner was chugging the booze in her dressing room between every take.

Walter Matthau is billed as Walter Matuschanskayasky

I just have a dim memory of everyone gathering in the basement of a sort of brutalist concrete public library.

R4 - Debralee Scott doesn't count because she was in the cheesy reedited TV version of the movie not the theatrical one.

Are we talking about this movie AGAIN? Wasn’t it a topic merely 6 months ago? Where is the Marjoe Gortner troll?

Wasn't that colored man that murdered that blonde girl in that movie?

I remember it as the moment Ava Gardner officially crossed from aging sex symbol to blowsy broad.

I just watched this yesterday for the first time. I liked it.

R9 the ending was very abrupt. I wasn’t expecting it to end that way. Although, I did like the outcome of who lived and didn’t.

What happened to Miles? I must have missed his final scene. Last I remember he was riding his motorcycle and I think the dam had just broken.

Charlton Heston seemed way too old for Genevieve Bujold. The Marjoe character was nuts. Such a creep.

I know this is creepy but Marjoe was kind of hawt.

One of the great injustices of the entertainment world is that of all people, it was Marjoe who got the benefit of Lynda Carter's only nude sex scenes.

20 replies and no mention of the hilarity of Lorne Greene as Ava Gardner’s “daddy”. She was 8 years older than him.

Scratch that. He was 7 years older than her.

Did anyone actually do this film for their craft or just the money?

Ok this movie has made me want to see the Posedein Adventure now.

I hate that shot of the cows falling out of the truck on the highway when the big one hits.

R25 - The craft, Darling, the craft….

I mean Ava gives her all, and as for that one who plays Lorne Greene’s secretary….

That should be R23 - not R25 !!

Ah, the age of the 1970s all-star blockbuster movie.

Do it, R24. I watched it not too long ago, I think on Tubi. Come for the ship getting overturned by the wave, stay for the story (and surprisingly hot Gene Hackman).

[quote] surprisingly hot Gene Hackman

𝑺𝒖𝒓𝒑𝒓𝒊𝒔𝒊𝒏𝒈𝒍𝒚 𝒉𝒐𝒕 ?

A feel-good Lorne Greene story:

When Bonanza was cancelled, Lorne (who didn't particularly like horses/riding) became very concerned about the future of Buck, Ben Cartwright's beautiful buckskin horse. The show ran for so friggin' long, Buck was 26 years old when it ended. (25-30 years = average lifespan) Although Lorne was not a horse-lover, he'd grown very fond of gentle, old Buck.

Buck was owned by a stable in Burbank that provided horses for film & tv productions. Given his advanced age, Lorne feared (and rightly so) that Buck would no longer be "viable" (read: profitable) to the stable, and he'd end up at the proverbial glue factory or a slaughterhouse.

Lorne couldn't stand that thought; Buck deserved better. So, he purchased Buck from the stable, and donated him to an Equine therapy program for kids with disabilities in San Juan Capistrano. Buck spent the rest of his life there -- an incredible 19 years! -- being doted upon. He died in 1992, five years after Lorne, at age 45.

Being petted and fed an endless supply of carrots by loving children. That's a pretty sweet retirement for an old horse.

John Randolph as The Mayor

Donald Moffat as the Priggish Seismologist

Ava Gardner's Tijuana eye job as Lorne Greene's Daughter.

Charles Atlas as Jody's whack-off material

Buck, horsing around with his co-stars between scenes:

spoiler

I always thought Ava Gardener must have had the most sensitive hands imaginable. A man steps on it and she is in so much pain she lets go of the ladder? Really?

She really was a drama queen. Just look at her entrance, goddammit!

Heston is personally responsible for screwing up the film's ending. His character was supposed to survive as Ava dies but Chuck insisted his character needed to pay the price of his adultery with Bujold.

R29, I remember him more as Lex Luthor from Superman, where he was decidedly not hot.

R32, I've rubbed one out to Charles Atlas too (or at least the comic book ad where Mac becomes a man). 😉

I preferred the ending we got. Originally George Kennedy’s cop character was going to get crushed in the tunnel underground on the way out and Heston survived. I’d rather he lived than Heston.

And even though he couldn’t stand his wife, it made sense that he’d go back for her. I don’t care about him being an adulterer and having to pay for his sins, but I do think his character was the type of guy to go back for his wife. Good ending. And I was definitely not expecting it.

It is always vague what happened to Richard Roundtree's character.

generally when you don't seem them again they don't make it.

Yes the producers shafted him

[quote] The souvenir T shirts they sold in the lobby now bring $500 on ebay

"Miles Quade" would be a GREAT NAME for a band!

Marjoe’s character was supposed to be deeply closeted or something?

Love that ketchup splatter effect with the idiots who shove their way into the elevator during an earthquake.

Even in the Seventies, people surely knew it was unwise to use an elevator during an earthquake.

Richard Roundtree was supposed to be in the sequel so we gather he survived.

A sequel, "Earthquake II", was planned, and a first draft of the script was written by George Fox, who wrote the script for this movie, but it never made it into development. The sequel follows several of the surviving characters of this movie: George Kennedy, Victoria Principal, Richard Roundtree, and Gabriel Dell, as they settle in San Francisco, California. The multitiered plot centers on a group of scientists trying to predict future earthquakes on the west coast, a corrupt builder constructing high rise apartments on unstable land, and the original characters adjusting to new relationships (George Kennedy and Principal) and new business ventures (Richard Roundtree and Gabriel Dell). An unexpected, massive earthquake hits off the coast of San Francisco, levelling the city, as a tsunami threatens to wash the Bay Area off the map. Completed in late 1975, the script went through several channels at Universal (up to Sid Sheinberg) and the project was active up until early 1977 ("EQII" and Rollercoaster (1977) were in pre-production simultaneously) but the "EQII" project was killed.

Victoria Principal's afro was sublime.

And it was her real hair.

R45 What a shitty idea for a sequel.

Who moves from the earthquake-wrecked ruins of Los Angeles to the even more earthquake-prone San Francisco and says "This looks like a good place for steady ground!"

I did enjoy Walter Matthau as the drunk in the bar.

Ava Gardner looked like Heston's mother. She even looked like the mother of the actor playing her father.

Heston looked like the dad of his girlfriend. He was ancient compared to her.

I'm the guy who was eating a chicken leg with one hand with a can of beer in the other while my cliffside balcony was shakin'

Those houses on stilts were ridiculous.

Copying my post from the Towering Inferno thread:

I have very clear memories of when they were released, [R320]. I was working at the Aladdin and we were getting Earthquake. The Aladdin was built in 1926 (first theatre west of the Mississippi to be built specifically for sound pictures). They had to inspect the building to make sure it could withstand the Sensurround speakers (I think there were eight of them). We doormen wore black tuxedo jacket, powder blue tuxedo shirt with a ruffle & French cuffs and a big ol' black velvet bow tie. Our manager, Mrs. Hallett, had started as a concessionaire and worked her way up to be one of only two female theatre managers in Denver at the time. She was something. She decided the doormen and concessionaires would wear Red Cross Disaster Services jumpsuits and plastic hardhats. The Red Cross obliged and that's what we wore for the Earthquake run.

I much preferred the blue jeans and Tommy t-shirts we got to wear when it opened after Earthquake's run.

Victoria was really lovely when she was young.

She was the one sent to Denver to do publicity, r55. Mr's Hallett said she was very nice.

[quote] Those houses on stilts were ridiculous.

We sell the houses to people who didn't see the movie

^Lol no fucking way would I even consider living there. Those people must be crazy.

I recall reading somewhere that Universal rushed to wrap and release Earthquake before 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. released Irwin Allen's The Towering Inferno (his disaster follow up to the very successful The Poseidon Adventure), which was also to be released in 1974. Universal allegedly test screened Earthquake somewhere in Flyoverstan and ended up cutting a lot of the character development, such that the arcs focused on various people ended up being somehow incomplete.

Sadly, Earthquake pales in comparison to the masterful disaster movies by Irwin Allen.

R57, there's also Lautner's Chemosphere

Oh noo.....

[quote] Marjoe’s character was supposed to be deeply closeted or something?

That was only part of it. He was a wide spectrum perv but the muscle men posters were the proof in case the audience was slow in picking it up

R61 - its funny when the man pushes the lady out his way but then he ends up saving her life.

R63 The broad he shoved was Lorne Greene’s secretary, and Genevieve Bujold’s friend. She had plot armor, as she needed to stay alive to tell Heston about his various loved ones.

And the woman who played Lorne's secretary and Genevieve's friend was Monica Lewis, wife of Earthquake producer Jennings Lang. She was to Lang what Sheila Matthews was to Irwin Allen.

R65 and what Stella Stevens pantyline was to Borgnine.

R62 - John Williams also telegraphed It with a harpsichord riff on the soundtrack when Marjoe appeared on screen… as if to underscore how off kilter and fruity his character was…

I never noticed if the Black Evel Knieval guy and the hot babe's brother live. Last shot of the Black guy is him on a bike with water coming towards him.

There’s a Marjoe Gortner troll?

but what about Lloyd Nolan as the doctor at the quake-proof mall who pronounces Lorne dead?

Did he survive the second quake?

Great trash cinema

Disaster flicks rule!

Next up THE TOWERING INFERNO

George Kennedy starred in all of those disaster movies

I hated the ending of this film. Absolutely hated it.

Goddamn, a lifetime of booze fucked up Ava Gardner's face.