When Time Ran Out...

When Time Ran Out... (1980)

Caught in a game of power. Playing time: 24 hours. Prizes: Untold wealth. Rules: None.

An active volcano threatens a south Pacific island resort and its guests as a power struggle ensues between the property's developer and a drilling foreman.

Date of release
1980-03-28
TMDB
5.3 / 10 (86)
Runtime
2h 1m
Genres
Action, Adventure, Drama, Thriller
Director
James Goldstone

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Hawaii
  • Awards: 0 · Nominations: 1

When Time Ran Out... is a 1980 American disaster film directed by James Goldstone and starring Paul Newman, Jacqueline Bisset and William Holden. The supporting cast features James Franciscus, Ernest Borgnine, Red Buttons, Burgess Meredith, Valentina Cortese, Veronica Hamel, Pat Morita, Edward Albert, Alex Karras and Barbara Carrera.

Production

The Day the World Ended, by English television writers Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts, was a 1969 non-fiction account of the disastrous eruption of Mount Pelée in Martinique in 1902, which killed 30,000 people. It was called "literally impossible to put down" by The New York Times. Film rights were bought by Irwin Allen. In 1975, Allen was riding high on the success of The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno.

Allen began to prepare The Swarm but also started pre-production on Day in Hawaii. Filming was to start in March 1976 with a view to the film being ready by Christmas 1976. Then Alan Ladd Jr., head of Fox, decided that the disaster cycle had peaked and decided not to finance the films. Allen took his projects to Warner Bros.

Allen hired Carl Foreman to write the script "for more money than I'd ever heard of before." By this time the project was no longer a historical dramatization of the Mount Pelée eruption, but had become a contemporary, fictional account of a resort hotel built near an active volcano.

Allen raised his biggest budget to date for the film, $20 million. Warner Bros. told Allen that the film could have a large budget on one condition: that Allen himself not direct it. Several of the actors who appeared in the movie, including Paul Newman and Ernest Borgnine, didn't like the script but signed on because they were contractually bound to doing one last movie with Allen, and wanted to get their obligations over with.

Filming started 8 February 1979 on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi. The primary location was the Kona Surf Resort (today known as the Outrigger Kona Resort and Spa), which served as the film's fictional Kalaleu Gilmore Hotel. The exterior scenes of Bob Spangler walking on the floor of the volcano were shot at both the Kilauea Iki crater, and the Halemaʻumaʻu Crater (which was radically altered during the April, 2018 eruption).

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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