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Towering Inferno

Last updated: 3/21/2025

The Towering Inferno

Towering inferno.jpg

The Towering Inferno story refers to the arrangement of names in the opening credits of the 1974 disaster movie.

According to Mark, there was an agreement made between the two main stars of the film, Steve McQueen and Paul Newman. Rather than argue over who should receive top billing (both actors being similarly famous and popular at the time) they agreed that one actor's name would appear in the credits in the leftmost position, while the others would be higher up the layout. Thus both actors would be "first" depending if you were reading left to right or top to bottom.

In addition to this, they were both given exactly the same number of lines of dialogue in the script.

This story has been aired many times.