Sound Bite: Eliot Sekular – Vice President, Public Relations, Universal Studios Hollywood
Um yeah we don’t want to minimize the seriousness of the fire. Um three and a half acres burned, to put it in some perspective, though, that’s three and a half acres of a 391 acre property that we have here, so it’s less than 1 percent of our total property actually burned. The New York sets which were near and dear to the hearts of many of us are gone but they will be rebuilt, everything here will be rebuilt and replaced. The King Kong attraction is gone but that will also be replaced, um most of the, almost all of the theme park um all the tram tour is still available uh the theme park rides and shows are all totally untouched by all this. On the production side there’s 30 soundstages here and none of the soundstages were impacted at all. Uh ten productions were at work here today, they all showed up for work as usual. We had a very good turnout at the theme park today as we would expect on a nice sunny day, June day like today, so it’s business as usual at Universal Studios Hollywood. We don’t wanna minimize the losses to the New York sets and to the King Kong attraction but that is a small part of what we have here and again we want to thank the fire departments from Burbank and from Arcadia as well as our own LA County and LA City fire departments, all of whom came together with just an amazing amount of teamwork to salvage um to save our studio, they really did a great job and the studio is up and running and back to business.

B-Roll – Universal Backlot Fire Footage – shots of the rubble in the backlot,

B-Roll – Universal Backlot Fire Footage – shot of a tram at some special effects thing but the whole thing’s pretty much blocked by trees, more wreckage, another tram driving by, more wreckage, another tram,