Airport (1970) Airport

See: Wiki Index

George Seaton's Airport (1970). On a brutal snowy night at fictional Lincoln International Airport outside Chicago, airport manager Mel Bakersfeld manages a runway crisis (a stuck Boeing 707 blocking the longest runway in a blizzard) while a bomber boards Trans Global Flight 2 to Rome. Adapted by Seaton from Arthur Hailey's 1968 bestselling novel of the same name. Produced by Ross Hunter for Universal. Stars Burt Lancaster as Bakersfeld, Dean Martin as Captain Vernon Demerest, Jean Seberg as Tanya Livingston, Jacqueline Bisset as stewardess Gwen Meighen, George Kennedy as TWA mechanic Joe Patroni, Helen Hayes as stowaway Ada Quonsett, Van Heflin as the bomber D.O. Guerrero, and Maureen Stapleton as his wife Inez. Hayes won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar; the film was nominated for ten Academy Awards including Best Picture and was the highest-grossing film of 1970. It founded the modern disaster-movie genre and seeded the Airport sequels (1975, '77, '79) and the Airplane! parody.