His title was senior director of vault operations at Universal Music Group (UMG). Aronson had worked on the Universal lot for 25 years. Shortly after the fire broke out, a 50-year-old man named Randy Aronson was awakened by a ringing phone at his home in Canyon Country, Calif., about 30 miles north of Universal City, the unincorporated area of the San Fernando Valley where the studio sits. To backlot workers, it was known as the video vault. The warehouse was nondescript, a hulking edifice of corrugated metal, but it was one of the most important buildings on the 400-acre lot.

But the fire crews were hindered by low water pressure and damaged sprinkler systems and by intense radiant heat gusting between combustible structures.Įventually the flames reached a 22,320-square-foot warehouse that sat near the King Kong Encounter. Hundreds of firefighters responded, including Universal Studios’ on-site brigade. It burned two sides of Courthouse Square, a set featured in “Back to the Future.” It spread south to a cavernous shed housing the King Kong Encounter, an animatronic attraction for theme-park visitors. It engulfed the backlot’s famous New York City streetscape. But the roof remained hot, and some 40 minutes after the workers left, one of the hot spots flared up. and, following protocol, kept watch over the site for another hour to ensure that the shingles had cooled.

That night, maintenance workers had repaired the roof of a building on the set, using blowtorches to heat asphalt shingles. 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. The fire that swept across the backlot of Universal Studios Hollywood on Sunday, June 1, 2008, began early that morning, in New England.

Master tracks