He also created and produced the popular 1960s science-fiction television series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel, and Land of the Giants.
Irwin Allen was born in New York City, the son of poor Jewish immigrants (Joseph Cohen and Eva Davis) from Russia.
Allen moved to Hollywood in 1938, where he edited Key magazine followed by an 11-year stint producing his own program at radio station KLAC.
Allen's first film as producer was Where Danger Lives (1950) with Robert Mitchum, directed by John Farrow and written by Charles Bennett.
It featured cameos from the Marx Brothers, Ronald Colman, Hedy Lamarr, Vincent Price, and Dennis Hopper.
The actors were each paid $2,500 (equal to $27,121 today) for a single day's work with Allen relying on stock footage for the rest of the film.
[8] Allen co-wrote (with Bennett) and produced The Big Circus (1959) for Allied Artists Pictures with Mature, Red Buttons, Peter Lorre, and Price.
[10] Allen then went to 20th Century Fox, where he co-wrote (with Bennett), produced, and directed three films: The Lost World (1960), from the novel by Arthur Conan Doyle, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961), and Five Weeks in a Balloon (1962).
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was a scientifically dubious, Jules Verne-style adventure to save the world from a burning Van Allen belt.
[11]: 204 Allen used many of the same craftsmen on his TV shows as he did on his films, including composer John Williams and costume designer and general assistant Paul Zastupnevich.
[4]: 36–7 The show used several science-fiction elements that have since become common, such as the comic robot (e.g. Silent Running, Star Wars) or android (Logan's Run, Star Trek: The Next Generation), the heroic child (Meeno Peluce in Voyagers!, Wesley Crusher), and the wacky, lovable alien (Albert in Alien Nation, Vir in Babylon 5).
[13] As another castaway-themed show, Allen incorporated some of the successful elements from Lost in Space, although this time he did not allow the treacherous character to dominate the series.
[11]: 273 Allen also produced several television films, such as City Beneath the Sea, which recycled many props and models from Voyage, Lost in Space, and The Man from the 25th Century.
Lost in Space's Bill Mumy said of Allen that, while he was very good at writing television pilots that sold, his unwillingness to spend money hurt his shows' quality once on the air.
In the 1970s, Allen produced the most successful films of his career: The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974), directing the action scenes for both.
Rather than produce competing movies, 20th Century-Fox and Warner Bros. agreed to coproduce The Towering Inferno with a script based on both novels and a $14 million budget.
"Pick up the daily newspaper, which is my best source for crisis stories, and you'll find 10 or 15 every day ... People chase fire engines, flock to car crashes.
[24][25] He is buried in the Garden of Heritage 5, upper-level wall crypt 39J in Mount Sinai Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles.
Numerous cast members and associates from various Irwin Allen projects appeared in the film, lending recollections of their time working with him.
In 1994, while senior VP of Foxstar, Burns founded Van Ness Films, a nonfiction and documentary production unit.
That same year, he met Jon Jashni, a Fox film executive who shared Burns' interest in Allen's works.
Hosted by John Laroquette, it chronicled the series' creation and run on TV in the 1960s and beyond, and featured appearances by Bill Mumy, Jonathan Harris, June Lockhart, Angela Cartwright, Mark Goddard, and Marta Kristen, as well as film footage of vintage interviews with Guy Williams.
It also was used as a vehicle to promote the 1998 Lost in Space film version of the original television series, starring William Hurt, Matt LeBlanc, Gary Oldman, Lacey Chabert, Mimi Rogers, and Heather Graham.
[29] In the film Ocean's Thirteen (2007) Linus Caldwell (played by Matt Damon) announces aloud to a catatonic Reuben Tishkoff that Rusty Ryan is doing an 'Irwin Allen' which is a reference to the fake earthquake they stage later in the story.
American noise rock band Killdozer released a song about Irwin Allen's work called "Man vs.
[30] The second half of "Marge vs. the Monorail," often considered the best episode of the long-running animated comedy The Simpsons, is a parody of Irwin Allen's disaster films.