Back in the early 1990s, when three friends were watching The Poseidon Adventure on laser disc while eating Italian food, it’s very unlikely any of them could have predicted the project they hatched that night would finally reach an audience 27 years later.
“I was going to say I was famous for my Italian dinners, but the reality is I don’t think I ever took the time for one since then,” Ben Stiller joked in an interview with Vanity Fair this week.
But on Saturday night, Stiller and former Ben Stiller Show writers David Cross and Robert Cohen will indeed unveil The Towering Disaster—their homage to the disaster movies of the 1970s produced by the famed Irwin Allen—with a digital live reading of their long-forgotten script. Among the all-star names scheduled to participate are Michael Cera, Don Cheadle, John Ennis, Will Forte, Regina Hall, David Koechner, Jack McBrayer, Michael McKean, Bob Odenkirk, Sarah Silverman, Kristen Wiig, and Henry Winkler, as well as Cross, Stiller, and at least one surprise guest. “There’s one bit of casting that literally no one else in the world could play,” a cryptic Stiller said.
Written by Cross and Cohen after that fateful night of Italian cuisine, The Towering Disaster was at one point earmarked as Stiller’s directorial debut. But, “for whatever reason, it never got made,” Stiller said of the project, which was set up at the now defunct Hollywood Pictures, a former subsidiary of Disney. “It was probably just too insane.”
He’s not necessarily wrong. The screenplay sets its action inside a high-rise hotel built in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, on top of an active undersea volcano. As one might expect from its 1970s forebears, calamity is quick to ensue. Stiller plays a radical preacher in the script, a role that on paper sounds similar to the part Gene Hackman played in The Poseidon Adventure. (“I don’t know what you’re talking about; it’s a purely original character,” Stiller joked when the comparison was made.)
In the years since the project fell apart, its creators moved on to bigger successes. Stiller’s directorial debut was 1994’s Reality Bites, released one year after The Towering Disaster sunk. Cohen has written and produced for a number of high profile comedy series, including MADtv, The Big Bang Theory, and Maron. Cross’s first major gig after The Ben Stiller Show was cocreating Mr. Show With Bob and David. But despite their individual triumphs, they’ve always considered The Towering Disaster to be the one that got away.
“Every once in a while over the years I would think about it,” Stiller said. “Probably whenever I showed my son Poseidon Adventure for the first time. ‘Oh, there’s that crazy movie we were going to do.’ And then, thinking about, Oh, this would be funny now, still.”
As Cohen recalled, it was Cross who pushed for the live read to happen after he put together a similar reunion of Mr. Show. “David reached out to me a couple of months ago and just said, ‘Wouldn’t this be great?’” Cohen told me. In keeping with the ’90s of it all, the script had been stored on a floppy disc. “He and I cleaned it up a bit, and then sent it to Ben—who immediately, and to our joy, was so into it. That’s how the train started to roll,” Cohen added.
By all accounts, the cast came together pretty quickly, especially once the live event was fitted with a charitable component: a ticket for the reading costs $12.50, with proceeds being split between the Equal Justice Initiative and Direct Relief, an organization focused on the coronavirus pandemic. After it initially streams at 8 p.m. eastern time on Saturday, a capture of the event will remain available for 48 hours. But what the future holds beyond that is unclear.
“I think it would be a great end of the story, but we’ve loosely joked about this maybe being a Netflix comedy feature or something. But one step at a time,” Cohen said. “I think that would be really the greatest thing ever.”
For his part, Stiller is simply hoping to do his younger self proud. As a kid, he saw The Poseidon Adventure about 10 times in the movie theater; he credits it with sparking his interest in making films himself.
“I’ll tell you a little anecdote, because Poseidon Adventure is truly one of my favorite films of all time,” Stiller said as our interview was winding down. “When I had the opportunity to work with Gene Hackman in The Royal Tenenbaums, it was a dream come true for me. The whole shoot, I was waiting to get up the nerve—because he’s an intimidating guy—to tell him how much Poseidon Adventure meant to me. So, two days before the shoot was over, finally, there’s this quiet moment. I said, ‘Gene, I just want to say it’s just been amazing working with you—and I didn’t say this before, but really for me, Poseidon Adventure is probably one of the most important movies for me, ever, because it really made me want to be a filmmaker, to be in movies, and I saw it multiple times and it just really, really changed my life.’”
Hackman, Stiller recalled, took a moment, looked at him, and said, “Oh yeah. Money job.”
“Then he got up and he walked away,” Stiller said, as Cohen expressed delighted surprise at the story. “My world was shattered. So this is my chance to, somehow... I don’t know, I have to live it out somehow. I have to make it right. It’s not a money job for me.”
Besides, he concluded, “Even if it was a money job for Hackman, it was the most incredible money-job performance I’ve ever seen.”
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