Writer: Stirling Silliphant

Stirling Silliphant won Best Adapted Screenplay for In the Heat of the Night and then spent much of the 1970s writing the disaster films that defined the decade, including The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno.

That combination looks odd until you notice the shared method. Both are ensemble structures where a group under pressure reveals what each member is, and the disaster is just the pressure.

He wrote extensively for television, including Route 66, and produced a body of work large enough that his best material is genuinely hard to find under the volume.