A security guard sets fire to the Universal Studios backlot - November 6th, 1990

On this day in 1990, an arson fire swept through the Universal Studios backlot.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello and Welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show that tallies the gains and losses of everyday history.

(00:21):
I'm Gabe Bluesier, and in this episode, we're looking back
on the dark day when Universal Studios caught fire and
acres of Hollywood history went up in smoke. The day
was November sixth, nineteen ninety An arson fire swept through

(00:43):
the Universal Studios backlot. It was started on an outdoor
film set known as Brownstone Street by a security guard
with a cigarette lighter. The wooden building facades went up
like matchbooks, and fifty mile per hour winds carried the
flames to other parts of the backlot. It took four
hundred firefighters several hours to extinguish what was later described

(01:07):
as one of the largest fires in LA history. By
the time the smoke cleared, about twenty percent of Universal
standing film sets had been destroyed, along with countless movie props, costumes,
and camera equipment. The total damage was estimated at more
than fifty million dollars, and while Universal was able to

(01:27):
use insurance money to gradually rebuild most of the sets,
there was no replacing all the history that had been lost.
The alarm was raised at seven point fifteen that evening
when a Universal Studio security guard received a call about
a structure fire on Brownstone Street. There were still about
two hundred studio employees on the four hundred and twenty

(01:48):
acre property, as well as some tour groups, since the
backlot also hosted a popular tram tour operated by the
Universal Studios Theme Park. All the workers and park guests
were evacuated with no injuries reported, and firefighters arrived on
the scene within minutes. The frenzied scene provided quite the
spectacle for a group of politicians just half a mile away.

(02:12):
It was election night and hundreds of Republican Party members
had gathered at the Universal City Hilton Hotel to watch
the returns, and while the sight of a massive inferno
likely put a damper on their celebration, it turned out
to be a pretty fitting backdrop, since the only Senate
seat that changed parties that night went to a Democrat. Meanwhile,

(02:33):
just down the hill, LA firefighters were also having a
rough night. The blaze was being fanned by dry gale
force winds and fueled by row after row of wooden facades,
classic cars and combustible chemicals. Eventually, the fire began creeping
up the hillside, leading to the Tour Center complex, where

(02:54):
a fleet of trams and several other theme park attractions
were housed. First responders used everything they could to stop
the spread, including fire extinguishers, garden hoses, studio water tanker trucks,
and even water from the studio's Red Sea Tour attraction,
a parting river meant to replicate a scene from Cecil B.

(03:14):
De Mill's Ten Commandments. The fire burned for nearly three hours,
but through the combined effort of eighty six fire companies
and six helicopters, it was finally contained. By that point,
roughly four acres of famous movie sets had been lost,
including city streetscapes used in movies like Dick Tracy and

(03:34):
The Sting, as well as portions of Courthouse Square, which
had featured prominently in the Back to the Future trilogy.
Sets used in the filming of Spartacus, Ben Hur and
To Kill a Mockingbird were also consumed by the flames,
as was the wooden exterior of the King Kong Encounter,
a popular theme park ride that featured a thirty foot

(03:55):
animatronic ape Thankfully, the building's water sprinklers were set off
off by the heat, saving the mechanical cang and the
rest of the ride system. In another lucky break, the
vaults containing the studio's film archives were also saved, along
with the sound stages where many films and TV shows
were produced. One production that wasn't as lucky was Oscar,

(04:19):
a comedy set in the nineteen twenties starring Sylvester Stallone.
It had been shooting on the Brownstone set just a
few hours before the fire broke out, and the film's
extensive period wardrobe, props and twenty one vintage cars were
among the first things to burn. Oscar turned out to
be central to the fire in more ways than one.

(04:39):
Authorities later determined that the security guard behind the blaze
had been hired specifically to protect the film's classic cars.
Forty year old Michael J. Houston had been contracted through
a private security company called ironically Enough Burns Incorporated. He'd
been on the job less than two months before setting
fire to the back lot. Houston was booked on suspicion

(05:03):
of arson early the next morning after raising some red
flags in his interview with fire investigators. He later admitted
to having started the fire for no particular reason, though
his family members would attribute the crime to a mental
disorder allegedly caused by his exposure to chemicals while serving
in the Vietnam War. In the end, Houston entered a

(05:23):
guilty plea at trial and was sentenced to four years
in prison in January of nineteen ninety two, several weeks
after the fire, Universal began the lengthy process of rebuilding
what had been lost. Director Steven Spielberg took a special
interest in the project, helping to design replacement sets that
would retain the charm in details of the originals, while

(05:45):
also incorporating changes to better suit the needs of modern
film crews. The reconstruction took years to complete, with Disney's
Newsies being the first production to shoot on the freshly
rebuilt New York sets. On the theme park side, only
the King Kong Encounter was closed after the fire, and
only for about two weeks while the water damage from

(06:07):
the sprinklers was repaired. The attraction reopened in late November
during a ceremony honoring the four hundred firefighters who had
helped save the studio. According to a Universal spokeswoman, the
three story seven Ton Kong animatronic was used to present
a top Banana award along with four hundred free tour
passes for the patients of a local burn clinic. And

(06:30):
while that sounds like a happy ending, don't raise your
bananas in celebration just yet, because on June first of
two thousand and eight, another massive fire broke out at
Universal Studios, and that time Kong didn't escape the flames.
The second fire had been started by accident after a
worker used a blowtorch to warm asphalt shingles and then

(06:52):
left before all of them had cooled. The most notable
loss that day was the estimated one hundred and fifty
thousand master recordings housed in the studio's music archive, including
works by Billie Holliday, Louis Armstrong, and Aretha Franklin, among
many others. But the biggest casualty, at least in physical size,

(07:12):
was the King Kong encounter. The cherished attraction was completely
gutted by the fire, with only four exterior walls remaining. Still,
it's hard to keep a good Kong down, and in
twenty ten, Universal opened a new attraction featuring the Great
Ape right on the side of the original. It doesn't
have a giant robotic ape with banana scented breath like

(07:33):
its predecessor. No really look it up, but perhaps some
things are just too good for this world. I'm Gabe
Lusier and hopefully you now know a little more about
history today than you did yesterday. You can learn even
more about history by following us on Twitter, Facebook, and

(07:54):
Instagram at TDI HC Show, and if you have any
comments or suggestions, you can always send him my way
by writing to this Day at iHeartMedia dot com. Thanks
to Chandler Mays for producing the show, and thank you
for listening. I'll see you back here again tomorrow for
another day in History class.