RaveVlog

I posed this question to Irwin Allen, creator of the Poseidon movies and "The Swarm" and "The Towering Inferno," during one sunny afternoon in Southern California when disasters were the last thing on his mind. He said he had an idea. It was, in all candor, he said, a great idea. The survivors of the Poseidon would be rescued and taken to land in Italy and be placed on a train which would go through a tunnel in the Alps, and the tunnel would collapse and everyone would be trapped under the mountain.

Irwin Allen cleared his throat modestly. What, he asked, did I think about his idea?

It was, I said, a great idea, terrific if not actually stupendous.

But I had a better idea.

Allen didn't seem too enthralled, but I told it to him anyway. There is, by the way, nothing quite so glazed as the eyes of a movie producer who has just seen his interviewer put his Pentel Rolling Marker away, but I persisted.

Here's what happens, I said. After everybody fights his or her way to the top and/or bottom of the boat, surviving fires and floods and explosions, another big tidal wave comes along and turns the great ship over again. And so the hapless survivors have to retrace their steps.

It makes no sense, said Allen, because (a) he probably wouldn't be able to reassemble the original cast, and (b) lots of the original cast members, like Shelley Winters and Gene Hackman, were killed in the original movie -- so who you gonna topline?

Hackman's gone for sure, I conceded. He lost his grip and fell into the flaming oil. But in the case of Winters -- well, she says in the movie that she won the underwater swimming competition at the Young Womens' Hebrew Assn., and so maybe at the beginning of the sequel she comes up gasping, and you go on from there.

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