BuzzSugar

Fire at Universal Studios: Like Backdraft, But Real

BuzzSugar — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 09:27:58 PDT

A fire broke out at Hollywood's Universal Studios around 4:30 a.m. Sunday morning. Nobody was seriously hurt, though the fire destroyed some set pieces and soundstages, including the courthouse square used for Back to the Future. According the AP, "Two mock New York and New England streets used both for movies such as Bruce Almighty, Spider-Man 2 and Transformers and as tourist displays were a total loss," and in addition to the courthouse square, "the famous clock tower that enabled Michael J. Fox's character in Back to the Future to travel through time was damaged." Thousands of videos were also destroyed, though Universal has duplicates of all the lost footage.

Today officials are saying the fire took over 12 hours to extinguish due to low water pressure and because "the sprinkler system on the outdoor sets was nearly useless." The cause of the fire is still unknown.

Many of the people quoted about the fire can't help but quip that the incident was just like what filmmakers crave when making a disaster film, except, you know, real.

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Why Pixar's First Leading Lady Merida Is the Bravest Princess of Them All

Tara Block — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 12:44:25 PDT

I recently attended a Pixar event at the animation film company's HQ for its upcoming Summer flick Brave. I was able to watch the first 30 minutes of the film, interview the director Mark Andrews and producer Katherine Sarafian, learn all about Scottish traditions, and even channel my inner Merida with archery lessons. Not only am I hooked on archery (pretty proud of my bull's-eye), I'm also hooked on Brave's heroine Princess Merida - Pixar's first leading lady! But don't let Merida's royal title fool you. As an adventurous girl in ancient Scotland who'd rather shoot arrows than get married, she's far from a typical Disney princess. Katherine and Mark both shared the ways she's breaking the princess mold and what makes her a great role model for us all. And as you'll see in the clip from the film below, the last thing Princess Merida wants is a Prince Charming.

Brave producer Katherine Sarafian agrees that the studio's latest project is especially exciting because it stars a girl. She asked me, "Who among us wouldn't want to give our daughters or sons a great cinema role model?" And not only is Merida a "powerhouse of a girl" with "fire and gusto and vigor" as Katherine describes her, she's also relatable, as she doesn't come with any special superpowers. "She just has great skills and she practices them," Katherine explains, "and she earned her skills by working hard and practicing and playing archery and playing sword fighting with her dad."

What really makes Merida someone little girls and adult women alike can relate to is that she's not perfect. At one point Merida's mom, Elinor, who's trying desperately to persuade her daughter to conform to her traditional role as a lady, says, "A princess strives for perfection." As women, we're constantly feeling that pressure to meet impossible expectations and aspire to society's ideal of who we should be and what we should be doing. But we rarely hit the mark. Katherine tells me, "I find her very relatable as someone who's coming of age and struggling with that central question of how can I really be seen for who I am in a world where there's an expectation of me that is incongruous to who I am?"

So why is such a relatable female lead so rare? Katherine tells me she's never understood why we haven't seen more strong female characters onscreen. With Brave, the filmmakers weren't trying to produce a story with a leading lady; it was the story, that happened to be about a girl, that got the project made. "If more filmmakers are developing ideas with great females at the center of the story, we should be able to take the world by storm," Katherine says.

The good news is with hits like The Hunger Games that are incredibly popular with both sexes, perhaps Brave is a part of a trend toward more female-driven films. Katherine points out that the box office figures have proven that people want to see girls and women lead stories. She adds, "I'm hoping people are realizing and studios realize that there is an audience, that this is half the population."

I found it interesting that Pixar (a subsidiary of Disney) would have its first female lead in a feature film be a princess, meaning, technically, Merida is a Disney princess. It appears that for a girl to be the lead in an animated movie she has to be princess. But both Katherine and director Mark Andrews insist the princess decision had nothing to do with the classic Disney princess archetype, but rather it was about a more exciting plot. "If you're a teenager and you make a stupid decision, maybe you get grounded," Katherine explains. "If you're royalty, your bad decision can have consequences that could cause a war in your kingdom. It was important that her decisions be tied to something much bigger than herself and her immediate family."

Alexander Skarsgard Jokes About Naked Scenes and His "Harry Potter" Moment in NYC

Katie Henry — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 12:27:17 PDT

Alexander Skarsgard arrived in NYC this week and checked out SoHo yesterday before dropping by Regis and Kelly studios this morning. He got a warm reception from the audience and fans who were waiting in line for hours to get a glimpse of their favorite True Blood star. Regis and Kelly had fun with Alex, probing him about his childhood acting career and stripping down on set, and they even surprised him by flashing a photo of Alex accepting his honorary degree from Leeds University, to which he fired back, "I look like a character from Harry Potter." Alex kept the conversation lighthearted when it came to shooting scenes in the buff, and Skarsgard exclaimed "let's get naked!" and quipped that in his native Sweden clothing is always optional. Fans got to see an awful lot of Alex on Sunday's True Blood, when things finally started heating up between Eric and Sookie Stackhouse, played by Anna Paquin.