It's the top news story here in Los Angeles.

About 5 this morning the Universal backlot caught fire.  It's taken out their "blockbuster" stage where most Universal summer big movies are shot.  The town square set with the court house from Back to the Future is gone.  The King Kong stage/ride is also gone. If you watch Ghost Whisperer the entire town is gone.

If you want to see the carnage: http://media.myfoxla.com/live/2/

Damn, that's a lot of destruction.

I have a feeling a couple insurance companies are going: Ouch!

That sucks. I wonder how many movies are being made there now?

~Zack~

Quoted from Tierney The town square set with the court house from Back to the Future is gone.

That really sucks.

I'd also heard a tape storage building was destroyed. I wonder what was stored there, any valuable copies of broadcast shows or maybe audio containing score master tapes ( like the debacle in the 70's when the idiots at MGM just took countless hundreds of reels of master tapes from film scores and tossed them in a landfill)?

The storage building had 40,000 movies, all made by the studio but duplicates are secured at a different location.

This is such a big loss. The town square and the courthouse were part of my all time favorite movie Back to the Future. I've never taken the tour of the back lot, but I saw the courthouse, the "Psycho" house and the airplane from War of the Worlds, up from a vantage point in the hills of Los Angeles a couple years ago when I was working on a house...I'm going up there again later this afternoon to take a look.

Sad day for Hollywood; I got to go there a few times, and loved the King Kong part...Glad they had back ups of thier materials...Good lesson to always back up your files..

Well now it seems there might be a catastrophic loss after all , from Nikki Finke today:

It looks like more was damaged or destroyed in today's Universal Studios fire than anyone previously thought. I've learned that Universal Music, which is a completely separate company and owned by Vivendi (which owns 20% of NBC Universal), rents space in the huge video vault housed on the studio lot. But one source tells me that, as a consequence, inside the video vault that was billowing thick black smoke were 1000's of original Decca, MCA, ABC recording masters from the last century including a wide range of music from Bing Crosby and the Andrew Sisters to Judy Garland and The Carpenters. "This is a tremendous loss in music history. A very sad day indeed. It's too bad they saved the videos that they have backups on instead of the master recordings in which they do not, although they may not have had a choice since the fire had already engulfed much of the music side of the vault," a source just told me. Universal Studios tells me it can't confirm what has been damaged or destroyed music-wise at this point because it doesn't yet know what exactly was housed in the storage rented to Universal Music.

thats such a bummer!
i wonder how Ghost Whisperer will re-cooperate? maybe a new plot line? should be interesting in that part. Good thing they've got a few backups in store but what a loss!

Ever get the feeling the ol' blue screen might be back in action!

I cannot believe I was actually there about a week and a half prior to the fire. o_O

For those of you interested in my two cents...

http://theworkingscreenwriter.blogspot.com/2008/06/fire.html