Black Sunday (1977)

Black Sunday is a 1977 American thriller film based on the novel by Thomas Harris. The film was nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Motion Picture in 1978. The inspiration of the story came from the Black September attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics.

Michael Lander (Bruce Dern) is an American blimp pilot deranged by years of torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, a failed marriage, and a bitter court martial. He longs to commit suicide and take as many people as possible with him, so he conspires with Dahlia Iyad (Marthe Keller), an operative from a Palestinian terrorist group known as Black September, to launch a massive suicide bombing on American soil. Lander plans to detonate a flechette-based bomb, housed on the underside of a blimp, over the Miami Orange Bowl during the Super Bowl X between Pittsburgh and Dallas. American and Israeli intelligence agencies, led by Mossad agent David Kabakov (Robert Shaw) and FBI agent Sam Corley (Fritz Weaver), race to prevent the catastrophe. The President of the United States is also attending the game.

The film was a commercial hit when it was released in 1977. Although director John Frankenheimer lamented serious shortcomings in the visual effects of the climax (due to time and budgetary shortfalls), many critics trumpeted the final scene featuring a helicopter/blimp chase over the Orange Bowl as one of the more riveting and unusual in movie history. Black Sunday also features a film score from John Williams.

A significant portion of the filming was done during actual Super Bowl X at the Orange Bowl in Miami, Florida, on January 18, 1976. In the movie, Kabakov discusses the security arrangements for the game with Miami Dolphins owner Joe Robbie, who plays himself. In the movie, Jimmy Carter is shown as the President of the United States who attends the Super Bowl, although Gerald Ford was President when Super Bowl X took place.

The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company granted use of all three of its U.S.-based blimps for Black Sunday. The landing and hijacking scenes were photographed at the Goodyear airship base in Carson, California with Columbia (N3A); a short scene in the Spring, Texas base with the America (N10A), and the Miami, Florida Super Bowl scenes with the Mayflower (N1A), which was then based on Watson Island across the Port of Miami. While Goodyear allowed the use of their airship fleet, they did not allow the "Goodyear Wingfoot" logo (prominently featured on the side of the blimp) to be used in the advertising or movie poster for the film. Thus, the words "Super Bowl" are featured in place of the logo on the blimp in the advertising collateral.