Why did thousands of Palm Beach County residents appear in a Super Bowl movie?
While the Super Bowl is being played on Sunday, the event reminds us of a movie made decades ago that involved the big game and a lot of Palm Beach County extras.
It was a Super Bowl movie that wasn’t so super.
But nobody knew that at the time, in January 1976, when thousands of people from Palm Beach County and South Florida thronged to the Orange Bowl in Miami to appear in a thriller about a terrorist plot to explode a blimp at the Super Bowl.
Ripped from the headlines of a turbulent decade filled with hijackings and hostages, the film was 1977's “Black Sunday,” starring Robert Shaw and Bruce Dern, and directed by John Frankenheimer (“The Manchurian Candidate,” “Seconds,” “Ronin.”)
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If you haven’t seen it on those canonical lists of the ’70s best movies, well, there’s a reason for that. “Black Sunday” tanked at the box office, and proved that audiences were starting to tire of big-budget disaster films spawned by “The Towering Inferno” and “The Poseidon Adventure.”
Perhaps the most amazing thing about “Black Sunday” was that producer Robert Evans secured the cooperation of the NFL, which allowed Frankenheimer to film at the now-demolished Orange Bowl during Super Bowl X between the Dallas Cowboys and Pittsburgh Steelers. It’s doubtful the image-controlling league would condone that today, at least not for a movie that shows fans screaming in terror and fleeing from their seats during its showcase event.
After filming on the sidelines at the real matchup (Steelers, 21-17), the production crew returned to an empty Orange Bowl on the week of January 29 for a climactic scene in which the bomb-laden blimp barrels into the stands. News photographers ringed the field to snap pictures of a giant mockup of the Goodyear gondola. (What was Goodyear thinking, by the way? An exploding blimp = good publicity?) Members of the Miami Dolphins milled around, too, getting in on the Hollywood action.
Surveying the hectic scene was director Frankenheimer -- perfect casting for the image of a moviemaker, with his rugged, wind-blown looks and camera loupes dangling from his neck.
One more thing was needed. To give the climax authenticity, the film needed extras to play terrified fans. Lots of extras.
Weeks earlier, filmmakers contacted the United Way offices of Dade and Palm Beach counties. They proposed a deal: If the United Way would round up volunteers and transport them to the Orange Bowl, Paramount Pictures would produce the organization’s 1976 campaign film for free. Ads appeared in Miami papers promising fun and (maybe) fame.
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“Our request for volunteers has succeeded far beyond our expectations,” Palm Beach County United Way project coordinator Cy Kennedy told the Post two days before filming began. “We’ve signed up over 3,000 people so far.”
The United Way arranged for three buses to ferry extras from Palm Beach County to Miami.
“The diversity of the response has been amazing so far,” Kennedy said. “We’ve signed up senior citizen groups, schoolchildren, students from Palm Beach Junior College -- the list just goes on and on.”
One of the extras was Palm Beach Post features columnist Ron Wiggins. He spent an afternoon crammed with thousands of other day players, including some Century Village seniors, in a top tier of the stadium. He reported that fiction became fact -- there was “actual trampling, bona fide injuries...and some of the most sincere shrieking and crying I have ever heard.
“That’s the grisly part,” Wiggins wrote. “On the brighter side, we all got free Cokes and a free lunch.”
It took awhile to get what Frankenheimer wanted. At first, people thought they were supposed to be partying when disaster strikes. Assistant director Jerry Ziesmer laid down the law after one botched take: “That did not work. If the blimp were truly coming through the stadium, you would not be laughing or smiling or waving pennants or enjoying yourselves.”
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They tried again, punctuated by Ziesmer screaming through a bullhorn, “Look in back of you! Over the stadium! A blimp! Run! The light stand in back of you is beginning to fall!”
It got real.
“They stepped on my feet and I’m wearing sandals,” complained one extra to Wiggins.
“I got knocked down,” said another.
“I lost my bracelet,” chimed a third extra.
After a few more hectic takes, with some bumps and scrapes as people rushed pell-mell from the stands -- and more screaming of “BLIMP! BLIMP! BLIMP!” -- Wiggins said he learned an important acting lesson:
“We all panicked very sincerely -- but very carefully.”
Even a Miami Dolphin got injured. Safety Barry Hill, who went to Carver High School in Delray Beach, told a Palm Beach County sports banquet a week later that he fell during one of the panic scenes, requiring a splint and a bandage on his right hand.
He told the Post that the disaster film “turned out to be a bit of a disaster for me.
“It’s amazing,” said Hill, who went on to become a local high school coach before he died at 57 in 2011. “I go through a whole season of football and don’t get hurt. Then, I get associated with this movie through football and I get banged up.”
Paramount was expecting “Black Sunday” to be a bang at the box office when it came out in April 1977. With Robert Shaw, fresh off “Jaws,” playing an Israeli operative hunting down the terrorists, the studio was hoping audiences would respond like they did to the Spielberg shark tale, according to Wikipedia.
They didn’t.
Neither did critics, who offered praise for Frankenheimer’s tense action sequences, but not the meandering screenplay (based on a novel by Thomas Harris, before he wrote his Hannibal Lecter books). Look at it today and the film hasn’t aged well -- you can tell the blimp is on a separate piece of film, and nowhere near the stadium at the climax. And the movie’s plot strands -- about the infamous Black September terrorist organization, Israeli-Palestinian conflicts and mistreatment of returning Vietnam vets -- never quite cohere. Plus, Bruce Dern, in full crazy mode, plays an ex-POW piloting the blimp, and who would let crazy Bruce Dern fly over the Super Bowl?
The movie has its online partisans, though, and a 71 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. For South Floridians, it serves as an interesting time capsule if nothing else. A chase and shootout scene is filmed on a pre-glitz Miami Beach packed with retirees on verandas, not hipsters sipping lattes. And the Orange Bowl itself is practically a character, with cameos by Dolphins owner Joe Robbie and football players Terry Bradshaw, Roger Staubach and Franco Harris.
“Black Sunday” didn’t make Wiggins a star, either. So he tried again. Later that same year, the Post columnist went out to Belle Glade and appeared as an extra in the cheesy sci-fi horror flick “Empire of the Ants,” starring Joan Collins and a bunch of mutated multi-leggers running amok in the cane fields and brainwashing the population.
It also came out in 1977.
So, you’ve got to hand it to Wiggins. It’s not everybody -- even seasoned Hollywood pros -- who can boast that they “acted” in two turkeys in one year.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Why did Palm Beach County residents appear in a 1977 Super Bowl movie?
