Devastation, celebration: Disaster movies were in vogue 50 years ago, giving Oklahoman chance to shine (2024)

Jimmie Tramel

This is a story about an Academy Award winner from tiny Sayre, Oklahoma.

Before ID’ing this person, here’s a question: Who doesn’t love a good disaster?

Hollywood discovered decades ago that disaster films were the opposite of disastrous at the box office.

Moviegoers, it seems, love suffering, just so long as the the suffering is restricted to the big screen. Who will survive this disaster movie that we’re watching? Will anyone survive? More popcorn, please.

Fifty years ago, we were at a high-water mark for disaster movies. Three disaster films were released — boom, boom, boom — in the last three months of 1974. All went ka-ching at the ticket window. “Airport 1975,” “Earthquake“ and “The Towering Inferno“ finished among 1974’s top 10 moneymakers.

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Disaster movies continue to present day — “Twisters,” anyone? — but the 1970s generated a disaster movie trend in the same way that film studios from that decade also jumped on a kung fu bandwagon. If a kung fu or disaster movie is a hit, feed the beast. Make more — and then more.

For instance:

Airport,“ released in 1970, triggered the slew of ‘70s disaster films. Boasting a grandiose cast of stars (a staple of disaster films from that decade) led by Dean Martin and Burt Lancaster, “Airport” was nominated for 10 Academy Awards and was the second-highest grossing film of 1970. Afterward came “Airport 1975,” “Airport ‘77,” “The Concorde... Airport ‘79“ and a classic parody (“Airplane“), plus 1975’s “The Hindenburg.”

But why limit disasters to only air?

Let’s get disastrous with the other elements — earth (“Earthquake”), fire (“The Towering Inferno,” “City on Fire“) and water (“The Poseidon Adventure,” “Beyond the Poseidon Adventure“). Toss in some killer bees (1978’s “The Swarm“) for good measure.

A winner amid all that chaos was an Oklahoman.

A.D. Flowers Jr. was born in Texas and raised in Oklahoma, where he was one of 35 graduates in Sayre High School’s class of 1935.

Maybe Flowers was destined for work in the entertainment industry. He took on roles in school plays and was drawn to cinema jobs. A 1973 story in the Oklahoman said he started his career in the movie industry by selling popcorn at the theater in Sayre. After picking up his diploma, he worked at the Liberty Theater in Shamrock, Texas, the Max Theater in Erick and the Lyric Theater in Cheyenne.

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In 1937, Flowers headed to Tinseltown. How he got there is up for debate. His IMDb bio says he hitchhiked. The 1973 Oklahoman story, which quoted his mother, indicated he traveled to California in beat-up old truck to find his fortune. First, he found a wife.

Flowers was married to Vivian “Vee” Flowers on Oct. 22, 1938. An engagement notice said he was in Los Angeles attending a school for moving picture projection.

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A Camarillo Daily News story said Flowers and his bride met because a friend wanted to go out with her, but he was too shy to chance it. The friend said “I want you to meet the girl I’m going to marry” and arranged for Flowers and Vee to go on a double date with him and another girl. Oops. Flowers got the girl — and a foot in the door at MGM.

Vee’s father, Everett Shea, was a studio painter. Jobs weren’t easy to come by during the Great Depression, but Shea put in a good word for his son-in-law, who became an MGM laborer. A 1975 Newsday story said Flowers spent the first 19 nights on the job polishing a dance floor with gasoline “so it would be shiny when Mickey Rooney’s dancing feet hit it early the next morning.”

Flowers’ initial stint at MGM was interrupted by World War II. He picked up welding skills, plus two battle stars and four service ribbons, in the Navy. After being discharged, he returned to the movie industry and became a legendary and innovative figure in the field of special effects. He was known as one of the best “powder men” in his profession, specializing in explosions, bullet holes (he created a special blood-spurting jacket for actors with “gunshot wounds”) and various forms of carnage.

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Said the lead paragraph of a 1975 profile in Newsday: “If you want to burn a building, machine gun a Mafioso or bomb Pearl Harbor, A.D. Flowers is the man to call.”

Flowers earned his first Academy Award for his work in “Tora! Tora! Tora!,” a 1970 film about the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. The gig included him positioning more than a hundred smoke pots in and around the harbor and manually activating them to recreate the attack. According to IMDb, the pots were used to replicate explosions and obscure visuals that would have sabotaged the authenticity of 1941 imagery.

Here’s where the disaster film trend and Flowers’ story collide: Flowers won his second Academy Award for his work on “The Poseidon Adventure.” Flowers was tasked with capsizing a ship (actually a 30-foot scale model) and showing the horror of a ship’s ballroom being turned upside down. Two ballroom sets were crafted — one that could be tilted to a 45-degree angle and another that was upside down with tables bolted to the roof/floor.

Picking up a statuette for “The Poseidon Adventure” came on a big Oscar night for Flowers, who also created special effects for that year’s best picture winner, “The Godfather.”

Flowers was sent on a publicity tour the mid-’70s, because it was suspected he might have a chance to win a third Academy Award, this time for his work on “The Towering Inferno” (he got to ravage 49 of 57 sets built for the film). The effects guys from a different disaster film (“Earthquake”) won instead.

Flowers earned a final Oscar nomination for creating visual tricks in the 1979 Steven Spielberg comedy “1941.” For that film, Flowers arranged for a two-story house fall over a cliff, made it seem as if a Ferris wheel rolled into the ocean and was part of a two-man team that created technology to help miniature planes move like actual warplanes.

Flowers called it quits in 1979. He said in a Camarillo Daily News interview that Spielberg and Coppola (Flowers also worked on the Coppola films “Godfather II” and “Apocalypse Now”) tried to get him to come back, but he stayed happily retired.

A 1975 Los Angeles Times profile described Flowers as a “slim drawling Oklahoman with amiably wrinkled visage and a voice strongly reminiscent of actor Ben Johnson.” Flowers died in 2001 in Fullerton, California. He was 84, which means he died 75 years after his movie career began.

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“I worked in theaters since I was 9, taking tickets and selling popcorn,” he told Newsday in 1975, adding that actress Barbara Stanwyck was a childhood love he got to work with in Hollywood.

“She was shipwrecked and I had her in a tank of water with a big wind machine turned on her,” Flowers said. “Now, that was a thrill.”

One person’s disaster is another person’s triumph.

The Tulsa World is where your story lives

jimmie.tramel@tulsaworld.com

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Devastation, celebration: Disaster movies were in vogue 50 years ago, giving Oklahoman chance to shine (2024)

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