(Movie) News You Need to Know: Save the Clock Tower

Tragedy struck Hill Valley early Sunday morning when a massive fire swept through the Universal Studies backlot, destroying the famous Courthouse Square seen in Back to the Future and Back to the Future Part II, along with a New York City streetscape, a soundstage, the King Kong exhibit, and a video vault that contained copies of thousands of films and television shows.

According to the L.A. Times at least 300 firefighters were called to the scene, which Los Angeles City Councilman Tom LaBonge ironically said looked "like a movie set." Uhh...

This is not the first studio fire in Hollywood, but in this green screen/blue screen/CGI-crazy era, it stings a little to lose "real" movie sets. That was actually one of the coolest things about the Universal Studios tour for me - seeing where so many iconic movie scenes were physically filmed. Passing by the clock tower, which was actually dressed up at the time as something else for whatever was shooting, I felt like I was inside my memory of Back to the Future. It's not often you get to travel back to 1955 like that:

The same L.A. Times story reports that something may have gone haywire with the fire protection system, and there was not enough water pressure in Universal City to adequately fight the flames. No word yet on the cause of the fire, or what films were shooting at the time.