Man what a cast!

It was considered stupendous and incredible at the time...finally getting Newman and McQueen together as stars. They had almost done Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid together, but McQueen wanted top billing and Newman said "no, I was here first."

Interesting to me is that whereas in Butch, Newman and McQueen would have had to have been together on screen all the time(even riding on the SAME HORSE in some scenes)...in Inferno, they only share three scenes as i recall - though one is pretty long(their first meeting) and thereafter, each star is moved into a "separate movie" and they communicate by phone.

The billing was "fixed" by putting McQueen left, Newman right; McQueen lower, Newman higher. Also and famously, McQueen read the script and demanded that he be given as many lines as Newman...no more, no less.

But McQueen and Newman weren't the whole show with The Towering Inferno. Williiam Holden had been a Number One star in the fifties and had a recent 60's hit in "The Wild Bunch"; Faye Dunaway was the biggest female star of the decade behind (way behind) Streisand(and was coming directly off of "Chinatown"); Fred Astaire had been a superstar of the 30's and 40s; and the line-up of "TV leads" (Robert Wagner, Robert Vaughn, Richard Chamberlain) was TV stellar. Plus Jennifer Jones coming out of retirement and one of the greatest athletes alive -- OJ Simpson(uh oh.)

I recall how Variety announced the cast members of The Towering Inferno one at a time, each week and showed all those big names. I'd say that only "A Bridge Too Far" had more stars -- but most of them were one-scene cameos. Murder on the Orient Express had Sean Connery and a bunch of "prestige" actors.

And right ahead of "The Towering Inferno," BOTH "Airport 75" AND "Earthquake" starred. Charlton Heston and George Kennedy.

The Towering Inferno blew those two films out of the water, cast wise.