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Showing posts from June, 2019

The Day the Music Burned: Universal Studios Hollywood, Sunday, June 1, 2008

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‘The Vault Is on Fire’ A New York Times investigation has revealed that decades of Universal Music Group treasures burned in 2008. The fire that swept across the backlot of Universal Studios Hollywood on Sunday, June 1, 2008, began early that morning, in New England. At 4:43 a.m., a security guard at the movie studio and theme park saw flames rising from a rooftop on the set known as New England Street, a stretch of quaint Colonial-style buildings where small-town scenes were filmed for motion pictures and television shows. That night, maintenance workers had repaired the roof of a building on the set, using blowtorches to heat asphalt shingles. They finished the job at 3 a.m. and, following protocol, kept watch over the site for another hour to ensure that the shingles had cooled. But the roof remained hot, and some 40 minutes after the workers left, one of the hot spots flared up. Louis Armstrong, 1953 The fire moved quickly. It engulfed the backlot’s famous New York