Back when Die Hard 3 was being filmed in New York City the opening of the film showed the explosion in Manhattan pictured above. Now this is a bit of movie trivia you will only hear in the Coltons Point Times.
On the 2nd floor of the building you see pictured in the center of the building was a post production film studio which I helped a friend of mine build, Chuck Hammer. Now Chuck was a former lead guitarist of a band of students from Syracuse University that went by the name the Lou Reed band. He then moved on to play lead for David Bowie before embarking on the audio and then video studio.
We built the studio for a National Geographic television project called Really Wild Animals and I was proud to say the television series earned 5 Emmy nominations and won one Emmy. It also became a multi-million dollar seller for National Geographic.
While we were producing the show the Die Hard boys needed a street front to blow up and we were located on Avenue of the Americas at 20th and 6th Avenue, an ideal location. Unbeknownst to us and even the building owner the Die Hard gang paid the building manager about $50,000 or something like that for the right to stage the expolsion out front one weeekend.
The next Monday our staff reported for work and the studio looked like an earthquake hit. Windows were blown out, equipment was strewn all over the floor and the place was a mess. Seems as if the pyrotechnic people underestimated the size of the explosion and it almost wiped out the entire building.
When the building owner found out they fired the manager who had pocketed the money and paid out several hundred thousand dollars for damages caused by the explosion that no one knew would happen. Life in the Big Apple was always filled with strange surprises.
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