'Shells'
A place to talk about movies--old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
The MSNBC story is saying the firefighters are trying to protect the film vaults, which are, in fact, in that area of the lot.
If they lose the vaults, that loss will be worse than any of the other buildings. Innumerable prints of Universal films dating back to the beginning of the studio are stored in those vaults.
And both Universal and the FDLA are saying they plan on opening the park and even operating the backlot tour today (avoiding the danger zone, of course).
As of 20 minutes ago I think there was one report of smoke injury, but the firefighter's been treated and released. The King Kong ride burnt, as well as the New York sets. I think that the classic archives were safe, but some video archives were in danger.
The smoke column has dissipated. It seems the worst is over.
NPR said two firefighters sustained minor injuries and the video vault was lost. Nothing irreplaceable there, just copies.
video vault was lost.
Yeah, I caught that just now at MSNBC.com (I think). The film vault appears to be fine, but the video vault was lost.
In non-Universal fire related news, the KungFu Panda trailer where Jack Black's panda says he's going to need more [to eat] than dew, and, uh... Universe... juice... is CRACKING ME UP.
the King Kong section of the backlot tour is gone and so is the town square from Back to the Future.
The facades (the NY streets and the BttF town square) will be easy enough to reconstruct. It happens all the time. They've rebuilt the the Psycho house a bunch of times. Those fascades rot away pretty quickly and have to be rebuilt even without fires.
The King Kong building is another story. There was a lot of technology involved in bringing that section of the lot tour to life. Also, I'm pretty sure they'd recently revamped that building, to account for the Peter Jackson remake.
They've rebuilt the the Psycho house a bunch of times.
I did not know that. I was so disappointed when I got to peek inside and it was just an empty shell. Then I felt silly for expecting something real in Hollywood.