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Movie Studio bills introduced in Nevada Legislature, Warner Bros. no longer involved in second proposal

Movie Studio bills introduced in Nevada Legislature, Warner Bros. no longer involved in second proposal

Yahoo20-02-2025
LAS VEGAS (KLAS) – Two bills to bring movie studios to Las Vegas have officially been introduced into the Nevada Legislature, but 8 News Now has learned Warner Bros. Entertainment is no longer a part of the second project.
Assembly Bill 238, which would put a Sony Pictures Studio in Summerlin, was introduced Monday, sponsored by assemblymember Sandra Jauregui and assemblymember Daniele Monroe-Moreno.
Senate Bill 220, which would lead to building a film studio at UNLV Harry Reid Research & Technology Park, was introduced Wednesday, sponsored by State Senator Roberta Lange.
Lange told 8 News Now while Warner Bros. was originally part of the bill's plan, the entertainment company did not have the same vision.
'It's really great to bring a new demographic,' Paula Lopez told 8 News Now.
Lopez spoke to 8 News Now about future changes she's looking forward to seeing in her Summerlin neighborhood.
'Hopefully driving won't be too bad,' Lopez said of the studio's future location. 'But I work east, so you know.'
The Summerlin Production Studios Project, a $1.8 billion plan between Sony Pictures Entertainment and Howard Hughes Holdings would feature 13 buildings including sound stages, production facilities, and mixed-use. It would be located near Flamingo Road and Town Center Drive.
AB238 would provide $80 million in film tax credits from 2028 to 2043 and require at least $400 million to be invested in Nevada.
According to the bill, 50 percent of photography days would have to take place in the state, and a film must be finished in 18 months.
Assemblymember Sandra Jauregui called this an opportunity to expand the economy.
'We have a real opportunity to do just that,' she told 8 News Now in Carson City. 'To bring in jobs and a new industry. Hey when hospitality slows down, it doesn't matter, because this industry is going to exist.'
Senate Bill 220, which would provide about $15 million in film tax credits per year over the same period, is similar with a slightly different focus; introducing college students to the industry.
'The centerpiece is UNLV and The Pipeline training, and creating workforce,' State Senator Lange said. 'CSN and NSU will also be involved.'
Though Warner Bros. is no longer involved, State Senator Lange said she is still working with Birtcher Development and Manhattan Beach Studios, which will act as a broker for future development.
State Senator Lange said her goal would be to eventually merge the two bills.
'I believe it's in the best interest of the state of Nevada,' she explained.
Lopez told 8 News Now she is looking forward to seeing the next steps forward.
'Some new life,' Lopez concluded. 'That maybe Nevada hasn't been open to before.'
State Senator Lange also said her bill would be union-built and union-operated.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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‘They set a man on fire and scrambled the RAF': The mad stories of Pink Floyd's album covers
‘They set a man on fire and scrambled the RAF': The mad stories of Pink Floyd's album covers

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‘They set a man on fire and scrambled the RAF': The mad stories of Pink Floyd's album covers

The story of Pink Floyd is a whirlwind of death, madness, bad blood, herculean guitar solos and towering egos. But one of the highest-profile casualties in the tumultuous history of the band that put the 'grrr' in progressive rock was the moustache of stuntman Ronnie Rondell Jr, half of which was famously singed during the 15 attempts it took to photograph the instantly iconic cover of the band's 1975 masterpiece, Wish You Were Here. As captured by regular Pink Floyd collaborator Aubrey Powell on the Warner Bros studio backlot in California, the image of a smiling Rondell with his business attire ablaze, shaking hands with another man, became immediately part of the band's mythology. There is an argument that it is just as well known as the band's music, which has gone in and out of fashion since the prog era drew to a close in the late 1970s. But now there is a bittersweet coda with the news that Rondell has died at the age of 88. 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'A load of rubbish,' is how guitarist David Gilmour characterised the record, which took form as the group were coming to terms with the exit of their original leader, Syd Barrett – shown the door after his out-of-control acid habit left him hollowed out and permanently frazzled. 'We were at a real low point… I think we were scraping the barrel a bit at that period,' said Gilmour. Scraping the barrel they may have been with songs such as the 13-minute Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast and Breast Milky (part of the side-one song cycle). But in one respect, the LP was boundary-shattering – and that, of course, has to do the sleeves designed by their regular collaborators, the aforementioned Powell and Storm Thorgerson, who worked as Hipgnosis (and who knew the Floyd from their early days in Cambridge). Thorgerson and Powell would later come to be regarded as masters of the art of album design, but in the early 1970s they still had the mindset of unruly undergraduates making it up as they went. Which is how they came to present Pink Floyd with the mocked-up album sleeve consisting of a photograph snapped by Thorgerson of a Holstein-Friesian named Lulubelle III. It was intended largely as a joke, but Pink Floyd loved its daring – no album or artist title, no band photograph. Their label, EMI, was less enamoured of the concept. 'Ah, Friesians,' said Len Wood, the boss of EMI Records. Still, he knew better than to get in the way of a band whose blend of artsiness and whimsy had already brought great success – and three weeks later, Atom Heart Mother was topping the charts. Dark Side of the Moon, 1973 Determined to improve on the botched and indulgent, as they saw it, Atom Mother Heart, Pink Floyd produced their masterpiece, Dark Side of the Moon. According to Roger Waters, it was the last time the band were all on the same wavelength, and tensions between him and guitarist Gilmour would be exacerbated by the success and fame that followed in the record's wake. But while the music was among the best the Floyd would commit to tape, part of the appeal also lay in the masterful artwork by Hipgnosis, then busy parlaying their association with Pink Floyd into a successful career designing album covers for everyone from Led Zeppelin to 10CC. Unusually for Hipgnosis, the famous image of a white beam of light passing through a triangular glass prism and splitting into a spectrum of colours is entirely a work of graphic design, with no additional photography. 'The idea itself was cunningly cobbled from a standard physics textbook,' Thorgerson said in 2003. Powell added: 'In this book was a photo of a prism on a piece of sheet music and sunlight coming in through the glass window. It was creating this rainbow effect.' The band loved it – to Thorgerson's chagrin, as it was the first of several mock-up album sleeves he had prepared. Didn't they want to see the other options, he wondered, at a meeting at EMI Studios in Abbey Road? Drummer Nick Mason would later dub him 'a man who couldn't take yes for an answer'. Wish You Were Here, 1975 Pink Floyd were slowly falling apart when they came to make their follow-up to Dark Side of the Moon. To the perpetually angst-ridden Waters, the title track was a lament both for the absent Barrett (unrecognisable when, bloated and confused, he visited the group during the recording sessions) and also for the fact that they were becoming strangers to one another. He was commenting, too, on how the record business turned musicians against one another while cheerfully ripping them off. That was the message that Powell and Thorgerson seized upon for the cover. 'There was a lot of anger, especially in Roger, about the record business,' said Powell. 'So we're talking about the absence of sincerity, about people being ripped off.' They had the perfect image in mind: two businessmen shaking hands, one on fire – symbolising the cynical nature of the music industry and how someone always ended up getting burnt in a deal. However, in the era before CGI or sophisticated animation, a picture of a burning man required a man to be literally set alight. This led them to Stunts Unlimited, where none of the resident stuntmen were up for the gig. 'Who wants to be on a record cover when we can be in The Towering Inferno?' said one. There was just one exception – veteran Rondell, who was excited to take part in what he knew to be a dangerous undertaking, staying on the spot while on fire ('You're standing still and fire moves'). A few days later, Rondell was on the Warner Bros set in Burbank, in a suit and wig. The clothes were covered in flame-retardant material while Rondell was smeared in gel. They took 14 shots, hoping to get the perfect image – but Powell wanted to press on. On the 15th time, the wind changed direction, setting ablaze one of Rondell's eyebrows and half his moustache. Animals, 1977 Hipgnosis had started to lose the run of themselves by 1977, and Pink Floyd's dark, uneasy Animals. They suggested a cover image of a child watching his parents copulate 'like animals'. Thanks but no thanks, said Waters, who had an idea of his own: a giant inflatable pig floating over the partly decommissioned Battersea Power Station in London. Tension was running high leading up to the shoot, though not for the traditional rock 'n' roll reasons. 'Storm and Roger's relationship by the time we did Animals was pretty fraught anyway,' Powell said, 'and actually not necessarily related to Animals. They were squash partners. And Storm was notorious for turning up late to every single meeting we ever had in our careers at Hipgnosis. And he did the same to Roger. He turned up later and later and later for squash games. In the end, one day, Roger left the squash court, walked out and said: 'That's the last time I'm ever playing with you.' That was a defining moment in Storm and Roger's disintegration in their friendship.' Undeterred, Floyd commissioned a 40ft inflatable pig – made by Ballon Fabrik, the German firm that had constructed the Zeppelin airships. On December 2 1976, they and Powell arranged for 14 photographers to snap the pig over Battersea Power Station. But having initially declined to inflate, the airborne pig then made a dash for freedom – when a cable snapped, it strayed into the Heathrow airport flightpath and two RAF fighters were scrambled to track it down (it eventually turned up in the field of a farmer in Kent). 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