Walter Matthau's Atrocious Cameo in Earthquake
Watching Charlton Heston read the film's terrible, stilted soap opera lines, I'm reminded that Walter Matthau was offered that lead and -- being the discriminating fellow he was about scripts -- turned it down.
Instead, Matthau agreed to a rather embarrassing cameo as a drunk in a bar frequented by cop George Kennedy. Matthau wears an awful polyester shirt and pants and a great big floppy pimp hat and frankly -- its an embarrassment.
He looks terrible as the drunk(I guess he was doing things to his face makeup to LOOK drunk.) This was only a year after Matthau had played tough and cool and even sexy in the well-scripted and directed Charley Varrick. This was also barely a month since he had anchored the great 1974 thriller "The Taking of Pelham 123." What a comedown.
As I recall, Matthau as upset that the producers stretched out his "one scene short cameo" into cutaways that added up to about 6 or 7 "mini-scenes." I don't know if he sued, but he forced them to change his last name billing...to something unintelligble.
And they added the drunk character (with no view of Matthau's face; it was a different performer) to a later scene at the medical rescue building -- dancing and falling over.
PS. As it turned out, Walter Matthau never had to act a lead in any of the 70's disaster movies. The Earthquake cameo was his only, rather contemptuous contribution. Meanwhile, his Odd Couple buddy Jack Lemmon took the lead in Airport 1977 -- and rather redeemed a decade of wimpy roles as the heroic airline captain.