EARTHQUAKE (in Sensurround): The Last Great Gimmick

EARTHQUAKE (1974)

Starring Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, George Kennedy, Lorne Greene, Geneiéve Bujold, Richard Roundtree, Marjoe Gortner, Victoria Principal, Barry Sullivan, Lloyd Nolan, Kip Niven, Monica Lewis. Directed by Mark Robson. (123 min)

ESSAY BY D.M. ANDERSON💀

Earthquake turns 50 this year, but it’s an anniversary that’s unlikely to be celebrated with any fanfare. 

First, it’s a disaster movie, a genre that never garnered all that much respect, especially during its 1970s heyday. A few classics like Airport, The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno managed to earn critical accolades, but even the most positive reviews were often tempered with snarky observations of melodramatic subplots, stock characters and ridiculously huge casts (a majority of whom probably signed on for the money). 

Conversely, Earthquake was more-or-less critically savaged at the time of release. With the exception of the special effects (which won an Oscar), nearly every aspect of the movie was routinely dismissed as a cynical, poorly conceived attempt to capitalize on the success of previous disaster films. The addition of “Sensurround” tended to exacerbate the general consensus that this was nothing more than a “gimmick movie” (more on that later). 

Second, the reign of the disaster movie as mainstream cinema’s most popular pastime was fairly short. With The Towering Inferno, Earthquake and Airport 1975 all released within months of each other, 1974 was the peak of the genre’s popularity. Afterwards, there were a slew of cheap, laughably bad knock-offs, and ironically, some of the worst ones came from the same guy who was once responsible for the best ones (Irwin Allen). 

Soon after, a little movie called Airplane! came along in 1980 to ruthlessly - and brilliantly - parody every trope and cliche moviegoers associated with the genre, making it difficult to revisit most of these films with a straight face (though I can attest that 1978’s The Swarm and The Concorde: Airport ‘79 were funny enough on their own, albeit unintentionally). Airplane! may not have killed the genre, but it arguably sealed the coffin for a few decades. Disaster’s demise was as swift and merciless as the death of hair metal in the 90s.

"I swear, it was like this when I got here."

Still, Earthquake does deserve a certain amount of retrospective appreciation for its 50th anniversary, even if it only comes from yours truly. The film was a blockbuster and the second highest grosser of the year (right behind The Towering Inferno). That’s not to suggest any movie’s box-office success is an indication of its quality. After all, the entire Transformers franchise is a steaming pile of robot shit, no matter how many 11-year-old boys handed over their allowance to gawk at the screen in slack-jawed wonder.

Admittedly, many of the criticisms aimed at Earthquake over the years are indeed valid, but simply went unnoticed in 1974 by my 11-year-old self, handing over my allowance to gawk at the screen in slack-jawed wonder. So maybe much of my current appreciation for the film is purely nostalgic. Not only was disaster my favorite genre (and still is), this was my first “gimmick movie,” that gimmick being the sinus-clearing wonder of Sensurround.

I had the misfortune of being born too late to experience the golden age of movie gimmicks, employed by studios and enterprising indie moguls to tear people away from their televisions. So I missed out on Cinerama, 3-D, barf bags and fright insurance, to say nothing of producer William Castle’s crazy collection of tacky tricks (such as creating ‘Percepto’ for The Tingler, which involved attaching buzzers to theater seats). 

Sensurround was a brand new, highly-publicized movie-enhancing technology. It was developed by Universal Studios for Earthquake and consisted of massive speakers amplified to emit an extremely low-frequency rumble. These speakers were installed in the front & back of theater auditoriums, and during the film’s two major quake sequences, they were powerful enough to cause every seat to vibrate. 

Not only was this expensive, it required most theaters to remove several rows of seats to accommodate the size of the speakers. Additionally, there were incidents in which Sensurround caused plaster to fall from the ceilings of a few theaters where the film played. It also created a problem for many multiplexes because Earthquake’s rumbling could be heard in adjoining auditoriums. Unlike the comparative simplicity of 3-D, this particular endeavor carried a significant amount of financial risk.

But it paid off. As gimmicks go, Sensurround was a pretty damn good one for the time and truly turned Earthquake into “An Event” (just as the tagine touted on the original one-sheet and in newspaper ads). I certainly treated it as such when, after months of pestering my parents, they finally agreed to drop a friend and I off at the Eastgate Tri-Cinema. Entering the auditorium itself, I was awestruck by the sheer size of these speakers, as big as my dad’s VW Beetle and standing taller than a Great Dane. The were almost intimidating, but I still thought sitting right in front of one might be cool. My friend, however, insisted we sit somewhere in the middle. Coward.

As for the movie itself, Earthquake assembles the usual all-star cast to wonder around and dig each other out of the rubble after a massive quake hits Los Angeles. Charlton Heston stars as Stewart Graff, a successful architect who designs skyscrapers for a company owned by his father-in-law, Sam Royce (Lorne Greene). He’s married to Royce’s angry, obnoxious, pill-popping daughter, Remy (Ava Gardner). Remy suspects Stewart is having an affair with young aspiring actress Denise (Geneiéve Bujold), which isn’t actually true until Remy’s vindictiveness drives him into her arms.

"Lady, I do everything in Sensurround, if you know what I mean."

Elsewhere, George Kennedy is on-hand to pretty-much play the same guy he does in the Airport movies (this time as a hard-nosed cop on suspension). Others along for the ride include Richard Roundtree as a motorcycle daredevil, Marjoe Gortner as a creepy, unhinged National Guardsman who becomes fixated on Rosa (Victoria Principal), and Walter Matthau as a dancing drunk (essentially a cameo, he’s billed as Walter Matuschanskayasky).

Ever since seeing Planet of the Apes, I was a big Charlton Heston fan. He was doing a lot of disaster movies at the time, and until I discovered Steve McQueen, Chuck was the coolest movie star in the world, so I thought he was great in Earthquake. Ava Gardner, on the other hand, looked and sounded like the scary old aunt in my family who reeked of cigarettes and Pond’s cold cream. Being 11 at the time, I had no idea she was once the most smoking hot femme fatale in film noir history. 

Of course, all these actors take a back seat to the true stars of the movie, the special effects team. There are two massive (and lengthy) quakes during the film, and Los Angeles ends up pretty well wasted. Skyscrapers crumble, bridges collapse, a dam bursts, houses topple or explode; victims fall to their deaths, get crushed, blown up, broiled, drowned or shot by Gortner (the film’s only real villain). 

The special effects are a (mostly) seamless combination of real sets, miniatures and incredible matte paintings by the legendary Albert Whitlock. Much of the destruction is pretty convincing even by modern standards, save for a few goofy scenes, such as when a cattle truck flies off of a crumbling bridge. Though the truck topples a hundred feet to the ground, none of the anti-gravity cows fall out. Another now-infamous scene shows passengers in a high-rise elevator falling to their deaths. When they hit the ground floor, an animated splotch of red paint is badly superimposed over the shot. The effect is unintentionally hilarious.

Sensurround certainly lowers property values..

Earthquake deserves additional kudos for being one of the few disaster movies with a fairly downbeat ending. A majority of the cast is dead by the time the credits roll (I won’t say who!), and the few who survive aren’t embracing each other, happy to be alive. They are understandably shellshocked, dazed and confused. Earthquake is also the only time you’ll ever hear Lorne Greene roar, “Take off your panty hose, dammit!” (imagine if he had yelled that on Bonanza).

I left the theater physically drained and sporting a headache, but it was allowance money well spent. Well spent twice, actually, because I went back a few weeks later (by myself this time) to watch it again. On Eastgate’s massive curved screen, compounded by bone-rattling Sensurround, Earthquake was as amazingly immersive as movies got at the time. 

But the novelty of Sensurround ended up being short-lived. Universal would use it for three more films (Midway, Rollercoaster and Battlestar Galactica), but it was only really effective in Earthquake, when the idea was still new. Since then, cinema technology has advanced to the point where nearly all action movies jar our fillings loose. 

Looking back at it 50 years later - having since revisited it numerous times without Sensurround - I wouldn’t call Earthquake a great film. Like the use of 3-D in Avatar, those Beetle-sized speakers made the whole thing seem bigger and better than it really was. Today, we’ve all undoubtedly experienced something similar to Sensurround whenever some passing motorist shares his love of rap music with everyone in a three block radius. But in 1974, we hadn’t seen or heard anything like it before. For those of us who were once blown away by Earthquake in theaters as children, it’s an anniversary worth remembering.