No doubt you heard about what went down yesterday at Universal Studio’s in Los Angeles as a major fire ripped through one of it’s sets, destroying parts of the famous Back to the Future clock tower/courthouse location, a King Kong exhibition and tens of thousands of tapes.

Quotes later from the AP reassured everyone that no films “would be lost forever” as Universal keep “duplicates of everything” and verbal plans were already beginning to be made over how it could be rebuilt.

Thankfully no-one was killed in the fire, with the only casualties being fairly minor to a few firefighters.

It was the second major fire from the studio in the last twenty years and it continued to burn for 12 hours beginning early yesterday morning. The previous fire which happened in November 1990 cost the studio over $25 million in damages and was started by a disgruntled employee (a security guard apparently) who was later convicted of Arson. No word on how this one was started or how much the damages will run up to.

Various news coverage of the event…

Every movie the studio has ever produced belonged in a building vault that was burned down and although firefighters manged frantically to recover hundreds of tapes, they couldn’t save 40,000+ of what was there including episodes of Miami Vice and other such canned shows. But like I said, they were all stored again in another location so although they are going to have to hire a lot of copying staff - there will be no lost films because of this.

The poor Kong that was destroyed was the one that would greet visitors as part of a tour. Poor thing… it wasn’t beauty that killed the beast after all, it was FIRE!

Shooting use of the sets date back to the 1930’s, famously by productions of musicals Bye Bye Birdie, The Musical Man and popular films To Kill a Mockingbird, Back to the Future, Bruce Almighty and er… The Cat in the Hat.

Most recently it had been used by Clint Eastwood’s upcoming Angelina Jolie period drama Changeling (which I believe is now to be titled The Exchange) and the soon to be released Meet Dave, of which the latter’s movie producer said when he heard of the fire…

“It’s so unfortunate… We shot three different scenes there,” Griffith says of the New York Street set. “One of them is an Italian street fair, which is pretty hard to do in New York unless you are there [during the fair]. There’s also an explosion outside a police station, and it would have cost a lot of money if we shot it in New York.”

LOTS MORE HERE AT THE L.A. TIMES.