December 16, 1974: “The Towering Inferno” Premieres

December 16, 1974: The Towering Inferno premieres, directed by John Guillerman and produced by Irwin Allen, "The Master of Disaster." Within the past 2 years, the 1,368-foot, 110-story World Trade Center had opened in New York; the 1,454-foot, 110-story Sears Tower had opened in Chicago; and the 1,815-foot CN Tower in Toronto, with a 1,122-foot-high observation deck, had begun construction.

It's a film with "a cast of thousands." Steve McQueen and Paul Newman were two of the biggest stars in the movies at the time, and each wanted top billing. So a compromise was reached: Their names were staggered on the posters, so that McQueen was listed on the left, but Newman's name was higher, allowing each man to claim top billing. Each man was paid $1 million -- about $5.75 million in 2022 money.

The film was based on the novels The Tower by Richard Martin Stern, and The Glass Inferno by Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson. In the film, the skyscraper is known as the Glass Tower, designed by architect Doug Roberts (Newman). It's 1,688 feet high (a height that wouldn't be reached in real life until 2007) and 138 stories above the streets of San Francisco.

The Tower's electrical system gets overloaded, and a fire starts on the 81st floor. McQueen plays Battalion Chief Michael O'Hallorhan, leading the firefighters. Maureen McGovern, previously in Allen's disaster film The Poseidon Adventure, plays a singer, and, as she did in the previous film with "The Morning After" (which hit Number 1 for her in 1973), sings the theme song.

Older stars: Fred Astaire, William Holden, Jennifer Jones, Olan Soule. Younger stars: Richard Chamberlain, Dabney Coleman, Faye Dunaway, Susan Flannery, Mike Lookinland, Felton Perry, Gregory Sierra, Robert Vaughn, Robert Wagner... and football star O.J. Simpson.

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December 16, 1974 was a Monday. Despite this, ABC did not air a Monday Night Football game, having aired a Saturday night game 2 nights earlier. Baseball was out of season. No games were played in the NBA, the ABA, the NHL or the WHA. So there were no scores on this historic day.

October 12, 1960: "The Magnificent Seven" Premieres

Left to right: Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Horst Buchholz,

Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn, Brad Dexter, James Coburn

October 12, 1960: The Magnificent Seven premieres. It is a Western, directed by John Sturges, based on the Japanese film The Seven Samurai, directed by Akira Kurosawa.

The title characters are gunfighters, hired by a small Mexican town to protect them from a gang of bandits, whose leader is played not by a Latino actor, but by the Brooklyn-born Austrian Jew Eli Wallach. (Wallach would also play a Mexican villain opposite Clint Eastwood's "Man With No Name" in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; and had already played a Japanese interpreter for the U.S. Army in Teahouse of the August Moon.)

The Seven are played by Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Robert Vaughn, Brad Dexter and Horst Buchholz. I won't spoil the movie by telling you which ones survive.

Sturges had directed McQueen before, and wanted him again, but he was starring in the TV Western Wanted Dead or Alive. McQueen, like Paul Newman an avid auto racer, staged an accident, and claimed he needed time off to recover. He got it, and was free to appear. But he and Brynner, by far the 2 biggest stars at the time, did not get along.

Coburn had an affinity for Japanese culture, as he would show many years later as a guest star on The Muppet Show. He claimed to have seen Seven Samurai 15 times, and badly wanted to appear in this version. Vaughn was a friend, and put in a good word for Coburn.

Despite being the leader of the good guys, Brynner's Chris Adams wears all black, much like Zorro does, and like Richard Boone did as Paladin on the then-current TV hit Have Gun -- Will Travel. Brynner would pay homage to this role, playing a robot in Westworld, which spawned a sequel, Futureworld, and a TV series reboot.

Brynner would play Adams again in the 1966 sequel Return of the Seven, but would be replaced in the role by George Kennedy in Guns of the Magnificent Seven (1969) and by Lee Van Cleef in The Magnificent Seven Ride (1972).

McQueen died in 1980, from cancer, only 50 years old. Brynner also died from cancer, in 1985, at 65, shortly after filming an anti-smoking commercial, saying, "Now that I'm dead, I'm warning you: Don't smoke." Coburn and Dexter lived until 2002, Bronson and Buchholz until 2003, and Wallach until 2014. Vaughn, later to star as Agent Napoleon Solo on the TV series The Man From U.N.C.L.E., turned out to be the last survivor of the actors, living until 2016, and was the only one of the good guys to outlive Wallach.

A Magnificent Seven TV series aired on CBS from 1998 to 2000, with Michael Biehn playing the leader, there named Chris Larabee. Vaughn played the man who hired the Seven in the pilot. In the 2016 remake, Denzel Washington played the leader, Sam Chisolm.

In 1980, the film Battle Beyond the Stars took the concept to space, with George Peppard playing "Space Cowboy," and Vaughn playing a variation on his character in M7. The planet they're hired to protect is named Akira, in honor of Kurosawa. Peppard would also star as John "Hannibal" Smith in The A-Team, after M7 veteran Coburn turned the part down. That show was devised as a combination of The Magnificent Seven and The Dirty Dozen. (Bronson was the only actor to be one of the M7 and the D12.)

Toshiro Mifune was Japan's Steve McQueen, its Harrison Ford, and its Clint Eastwood, before any of those men had become famous in America. In 1954, he starred in Seven Samurai, so he was McQueen as Vin Tanner. In 1958, he starred in The Hidden Fortress, which George Lucas used as a basis for Star Wars, so he was Ford as Han Solo. In 1961, he starred in Yojimbo, which Sergio Leone turned into A Fistful of Dollars, so he was Eastwood as "The Man With No Name." Not that Kurosawa was above doing an homage: In 1957, he made Throne of Blood, set it in feudal-era Japan, and cast Mifune as his Macbeth.

Mifune was in some English-language films, including John Frankenheimer's 1966 Grand Prix, John Boorman's 1968 Hell in the Pacific, and Steven Spielberg's 1979 film 1941. He died in 1997.

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October 12, 1960 was a Wednesday. It was the day of Game 6 of the World Series. Whitey Ford pitches a 7-hit shutout, and singles home the 1st run of a 12-0 New York Yankees rout of the Pittsburgh Pirates at Forbes Field. There will be a Game 7 tomorrow, also in Pittsburgh.

The Yankees had won their 3 games 16-3, 10-0 and 12-0. The Pirates wins had been by scores of 6-4, 3-2 and 5-2. It seems as though a high-scoring game favors the Yankees. And the Yankees will score 9 runs in Game 7, while the Pirates hadn't yet scored more than 5. Sounds like a Yankee title. Except...

Football was in midweek. The NBA season didn't begin until November 1. There was 1 NHL game that day: The Chicago Black Hawks beat the Toronto Maple Leafs, 3-0 at the Chicago Stadium.

September 22, 1964: "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." Premieres

Robert Vaughn and David McCallum

September 22, 1964: The Man from U.N.C.L.E. premieres on NBC, produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It follows the spy fiction craze launched by the James Bond films.

"U.N.C.L.E." stood for United Network Command for Law and Enforcement. It was based on the East Side of Midtown Manhattan, which led to the misunderstanding that the "U.N." stood for "United Nations," whose headquarters was a few blocks away.

Nevertheless, their lead two-man team was an American and a Russian working together. The American was Napoleon Solo, played by Robert Vaughn, who had been one of The Magnificent Seven in 1960. Solo was supposed to be the "Bond" of the series, the suave secret agent, impeccably dressed, completely competent, and irresistible to women. However, the character was smoothed over for American TV audiences, so he was less violent than Bond.

The Russian was Illya Kuryakin, played by Scottish actor David McCallum, who had starred in the 1958 film A Night to Remember, about the sinking of the Titanic. The approach he hit upon was to build a persona based on ambiguity and enigma -- hiding, rather than revealing, aspects of the character's background and personality. McCallum summed up the character in commenting, "No one knows what Illya Kuryakin does when he goes home at night." Nevertheless, Illya proved such a popular character that McCallum received more fan mail than any actor in MGM's history. 

(This was paralleled on Star Trek: Walter Koenig, who played Pavel Chekov, said, "When they thought I was Russian, 22 and single, I got more mail than anybody except Leonard (Nimoy). When they found out I was American, 31 and married, the mail dried up."

Napoleon and Illya reported to the chief of U.N.C.L.E., an Englishman named Alexander Waverly, played by Leo G. Carroll, who starred in the 1953-55 CBS series Topper. U.N.C.L.E.'s primary adversary was Thrush. The implication was that Thrush was considered an organization so dangerous that the U.N. founded U.N.C.L.E., with nations that would normally be adversaries cooperating to combat their agents. (A year later, the sitcom Get Smart would premiere, parodying U.N.C.L.E. as "CONTROL," and Thrush as "KAOS," with neither organization's letters standing for anything.)

The original series never divulged whom or what Thrush represented, nor was it ever used as an acronym. Norman Felton, who, along with Sam Rolfe, created and produced the show, always insisted that "Thrush" was not an acronym and stood for nothing. In a second season episode, guest star Jessie Royce Landis plays a character who claims that she founded Thrush. (Rolfe and Herb Meadow created the Western series Have Gun -- Will Travel. Felton created the TV version of Dr. Kildare.)

Each episode, titled, "The (something) Affair," followed a similar format. An innocent character would be featured, giving the audience someone with whom to identify. Despite many changes over four seasons, "innocents" remained a constant, from a suburban housewife in the pilot, "The Vulcan Affair," to those kidnapped in the final episode, "The Seven Wonders of the World Affair." In 1966, there was a Christmas episode, "The Jingle Bells Affair," in which Armenian-American actor Akim Tamiroff played a Khrushchev-like figure who ends up having to wear a Santa Claus suit.

The show's pilot was being filmed on November 22, 1963, which was Vaughn's 31st birthday, when word came that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. They stopped, and resumed filming the next week.

On November 24, 1964, the episode "The Project Strigas Affair" aired. Among the guest stars were William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. It was the first time the future Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock of Star Trek were in the same entertainment production, and they were, very briefly, onscreen together.

The show ran for 4 seasons, and inspired a spinoff, The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., with Carroll's Alexander Waverly advising young American agent April Dancer, played by Stefanie Powers. It lasted just 1 season.

Carroll died in 1972, Vaughn in 2016. McCallum went on to star in the brief 1975 NBC series The Invisible Man, and then became beloved by a new generation of fans, playing medical examiner Dr. Donald "Ducky" Mallard on CBS' NCIS. An inside joke came in that show's 1st season: Special Agent Caitlin Todd (Sasha Alexander) asked Special Agent In Charge Leroy Jethro Gibbs (Mark Harmon) what Ducky looked like when he was younger. Gibbs said, "Illya Kuryakin." As of September 22, 2022, McCallum is still alive, although, due to his advancing age, his appearances on NCIS have been reduced. (UPDATE: He died in 2023, a few days after his 90th birthday.)

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September 22, 1964 was a Tuesday. The Broadway musical Fiddler On the Roof premiered on this day. I have a separate entry for this event.

These baseball games were played that day:

* The New York Yankees swept a doubleheader from the Cleveland Indians, 5-3 and 8-1 at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. Mel Stottlemyre won the opener, Whitey Ford the nightcap. Home runs were hit by Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Joe Pepitone and Phil Linz.

* The New York Mets lost to the St. Louis Cardinals, 2-1 at Shea Stadium. Curt Simmons outpitched Tracey Stallard.

* The Cincinnati Reds beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 9-2 at Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia. This was the 2nd game of the 10-game "Phillie Phlop" that cost Philadelphia the National League Pennant. Frank Robinson went 2-for-4 with a home run, a walk, and 2 RBIs. Pete Rose also went 2-for-4 with a walk.

* The Boston Red Sox beat the Washington Senators, 3-0 at District of Columbia Stadium in Washington. (It was renamed Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium in 1969.) Bill Monboquette pitched a 5-hit shutout, and Carl Yastrzemski went 1-for-3 with a walk.

* The Milwaukee Braves beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 2-0 at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. Bob Veale pitched a 7-hit shutout. Roberto Clemente went 3-for-4. Hank Aaron went 1-for-4.

* The Detroit Tigers beat the Baltimore Orioles, 2-1 at Tiger Stadium in Detroit. Al Kaline went 2-for-4 with a home run and 2 RBIs. Brooks Robinson went 0-for-4 with a walk.

* The Chicago Cubs beat the Los Angeles Dodgers, 1-0 at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Lew Burdette pitched a perfect 1st inning for the Cubs, then had to leave the game due to an injury. Cal Koonce pitched a 7-hit shutout the rest of the way, outpitching Don Drysdale. Ernie Banks went 0-for-3.

* The Kansas City Athletics beat the Minnesota Twins, 10-9 at Kansas City Municipal Stadium. Harmon Killebrew went 1-for-4 with a walk.

* The San Francisco Giants beat the Houston Colt .45s, 7-1 at Colt Stadium in Houston. Willie Mays went 1-for-4 with a walk and an RBI. The Colts became the Houston Astros the next season.

* And The Los Angeles Angels beat the Chicago White Sox, 1-0 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, where the Angels were groundsharing while waiting for their stadium in suburban Anaheim to be ready. Fred Newman pitched a 5-hit shutout.