After the success of The Poseidon Adventure, Warner Brothers bought the rights to film The Tower for $390,000. Eight weeks later, Irwin Allen discovered The Glass Inferno and bought the rights for $400,000 for 20th Century Fox. In order to avoid having two similar films produced at the same time, the productions were combined, with a budget of $14 million (over $58 million adjusted for inflation 1974-2005). Each studio paid half of the production costs. In return, Fox was given the United States box office receipts, and Warner Brothers got the profits from the rest of the world. The movie's 57 sets and four complete camera crews established records for a single film on the Twentieth Century Fox lot. In addition, songstress Maureen McGovern was hired to sing the Oscar-winning love ballad, "We May Never Love Like This Again".

The movie was released a year after the two World Trade Center skyscrapers — at that time, the newest, tallest buildings in the world — were opened in New York City. The screenplay may have been inspired by the catastrophic fires in the Andraus Building in 1972 and the Joelma Building 1974, both in São Paulo, Brazil. Both novels upon which this movie was based were inspired by the construction of the World Trade Center towers and concerns over what would happen if a fire broke out in a large highrise tower. Although the two disasters were not alike — in particular, the fictional Glass Tower did not collapse — following the events of September 11, 2001 attacks, the film was often referred to by the media. (Coincidentally, principal photography on The Towering Inferno was completed on September 11, 1974.)

The atrium of San Francisco's Hyatt Regency Hotel (at 5 Embarcadero Center) was used as the lobby for the fictional Glass Tower. This hotel actually features three glass-walled elevators, identical to the glass-walled "Scenic Elevator" of the fictional Glass Tower. This lobby area and the elevators were also prominently featured in other films such as Mel Brooks' comedy High Anxiety, in the Charles Bronson spy thriller Telefon, and in Time After Time. Matching the Hyatt Regency, The Glass Tower does have three elevator tracks. In a deleted scene, it is explained that cables for only one elevator had been installed at the time of the building's dedication.

The Bank of America building at 555 California Street in San Francisco was used to double for the outside facade and plaza of the Glass Tower. Utility areas of the immense Century City complex in Los Angeles (adjacent to the Twentieth Century Fox studios) stood in for the Glass Tower's security control room and water tank area. The Glass Tower itself was a matte painting in the opening shot, and an 80-foot tall "miniature" fitted with propane gas jets for exterior fire scenes.

There are many small parts in the movie played by actors who appeared in The Poseidon Adventure, which Irwin Allen also produced.

McQueen, Newman, and Holden all tried to obtain top billing. Holden was refused out of hand, as his "star power" was not considered to be in the same league as McQueen and Newman by that time. To provide "dual" top billing and mollify McQueen, the credits were arranged diagonally, with McQueen at the lower left and Newman at the upper right. Thus, each actor appeared to have "top billing" depending on whether the poster was read from left to right or from top to bottom. Technically, McQueen has "top billing" and is mentioned first in the film's trailers; however, at the end of the movie, as the cast's names roll up from the bottom of the screen, Newman's name is fully visible first, something McQueen apparently didn't catch. This was the first time that this type of "staggered but equal" billing had been used for a movie, although the same thing had been discussed for the same two actors several years earlier when McQueen was going to play the Sundance Kid in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. (McQueen ultimately passed on the part and was replaced by Robert Redford, who didn't enjoy McQueen's status and consequently took second billing to Newman.) Today, this kind of billing is used frequently and it's become understood that whoever's name appears to the left has top billing, but this was by no means the case when The Towering Inferno was produced and the procedure was new.

- Wikipedia.org

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