FIC: For Immediate Release (Jurassic World, gen, PG)
TITLE: For Immediate Release
RATING: PG
FANDOM: Jurassic World
CHARACTERS: Claire Dearing, Lex Murphy
SUMMARY: Press for Jurassic World including a press release heralding the park’s opening, a Vanity Fair interview with Claire Dearing, and a New York Times op-ed by Lex Murphy.
AUTHOR’S NOTES: Written for methyltheobromine’s 2015 yuletide. Thanks very much to Carla for the beta.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
JURASSIC PARK REVAMP OPENS TO THE PUBLIC
Billionaire Simon Masrani’s revamp of John Hammond’s Jurassic Park will open to the public next week. The new park, Jurassic World, sits on the site of the old park on Costa Rica’s Isla Nubar. Jurassic World has repopulated many of the exhibits of Jurassic Park, including the famous tyrannosaurus exhibit. It has also added a number of new attractions, including a petting zoo with baby herbivores.
For more information, including ticket prices, visit jurassicworld.com
“The Woman Who Walks with Monsters: an Interview with Jurassic World’s Claire Dearing”
-Vanessa Park for Vanity Fair
Isla Nublar-known to locals as “The Island of the Clouds”-comes into view over the heads of throngs of excited children aboard one of the three cruise ships that make the journey from Costa Rica’s mainland every day. The island is lush, beautiful, and home to one of the most successful ventures in modern history.
An hour later, I am waiting for Claire Dearing in the lobby of one of Jurassic World’s impressive hotels. The lobby has marble floors; the front desk has huge bowls of exotic flowers between every computer terminal. Like Jurassic World itself, it’s a finely-balanced world of new world opulence and the raw beauty of nature.
Dearing emerges from an elevator and makes her way over to me. She is a striking presence; her copper bob is meticulously straight, and the grey Dior suit she’s wearing is both fashion forward and commanding. She walks in heels like she was born in them.
Dearing reaches me, and smiles. She says, “Welcome to Jurassic World.”
Dearing was born the younger of two children to businessman Richard Dearing, most famously of General Electric. By 22, Claire Dearing had graduated from Harvard Business School; by 27, she was responsible for singlehandedly turning tides on San Diego SeaWorld’s bad press, bringing in record earnings after years of fiscal drought. Six years ago, she was cherry picked by eccentric billionaire Simon Masrani to run his enormously successful theme park.
“Claire is an very capable woman,” Masrani explained. “There were some questions by the InGen board when I brought up her appointment-because of her youth-but her record speaks for itself.”
Masrani should know; the industrialist seems to have the uncanny ability to recognize true talent. He picks winners. From his Triple Crown winning stallion Berry Blue to physics wunderkind Alfie Mané, the 21-year-old engineer Masrani installed in his robotics interest out of his third year of MIT, Masrani’s selections are landscape changers. And so is Claire Dearing.
Under Dearing, Jurassic World has undergone a phase shift. What started as the grisly legacy of John Hammond’s original theme park has, under Masrani’s leadership, become one of the great landmarks of the world, a stop on the bucket list of everyone on the planet. But dinosaurs are old news now; it’s been more than 20 years since Hammond’s original breakthroughs in genetics that made Jurassic Park possible. Dearing has breathed new life into Simon Masrani’s Jurassic World by adding a luxury component to what was basically a zoo. Luxury hotels were constructed; five star chefs were lured onto Isla Nublar to create award winning restaurants in a part of the world gourmands used to ignore. Dearing forged partnerships with cruise lines to create dino-centric trips around Central America.
Within the past year, Dearing has overseen the installation of an enormous undertaking: construction of the 40 million gallon tank for gigantic Cretaceous carnivore mosasaurus. This addition to Jurassic World has resulted in attendance spikes and worldwide media buzz.
“The mosasaur is our first real foray into aquatic assets,” Dearing told me. “We have dozens of terrestrial species, and of course the animals in our aviary, but there’s 65 million years of underwater activity that we’ve yet to show to the public.”
And the public is hungry for it. Online polls from fan groups show aquatic dinosaurs as second to large, carnivorous lizards in popularity.
“People always want to see bigger assets,” Dearing said. “Bigger, scarier-more teeth.”
“Aquatic dinosaurs offer a new thrill. They are just as terrifying as their terrestrial cousins,” Jurassic World staff paleontologist Allison He explained. “The liopleurodon was the apex predator of the Jurassic period; it could grow up to 25 meters-that’s 80 feet-and had teeth as long as and sharp as a Swiss Army knife. Simply huge animals; next to this thing, the t-rex looks like a tinker toy.”
“Jurassic World’s lab is always working on more species,” Dearing told me. “We want to offer people true diversity-always something new, something different. Jurassic World is meant to be an all-encompassing experience.”
Toward that end, the park has added more interactivity. For example, the new mosasaurus tank is part ride; the stadium seating goes subterrestrial, dropping to eye level with the tank’s floor so that the audience can watch the animal in its natural habitat. In the tyrannosaurus paddock, viewers can walk inside a giant, glass-lined log to get closer to the t-rex, similar to the “shark tunnels” popularized by Ripley’s Aquarium of the Smokies in Gatlinburg, Tn. Construction is underway on similar immersive environments that bring park attendants as close to the dinosaurs as possible.
And what about Dearing herself? As opposed to her predecessors, Dearing has kept a low profile. She keeps a leash on herself; there are no tabloid stories of trysts with starlets or erratic motorcycle antics. When she appears in public for red carpet events, she is poised and perfectly primped. Her wardrobe is the envy, I am sure, of many executives at rival companies. A powerhouse in the boardroom and a princess on the red carpet, Dearing has the old world class of a Golden Age Hollywood actress.
But what about her personal life? Dearing has never been married, and she keeps any romantic entanglements close to the vest. When I ask her whether she’s seeing anyone, Dearing demurs: “I don’t really have time for that kind of thing.”
But certainly there are prospects willing to make time for her, this woman who walks with monsters.
The New York Times The Opinion Pages
Op-Ed Contributor Lex Murphy, “Jurassic World Poses Threat”
I was 13 when I visited Jurassic Park. It was 1993, and my grandfather, InGen industrialist John Hammond, had turned a lifelong fascination with genetics and the giants of the Cretaceous era into an animal attraction to share with the world. My brother Tim and I were to be among the first guests to the park.
It started out innocently enough. It was exciting, actually, to be flown in a helicopter to Costa Rica’s Isla Nublar-the island was beautiful, and it was incredible to descend through the clouds to the jungle below. I was excited, as always, to be included on one of my grandfather’s adventures; the man had an unrivaled imagination and an infectious enthusiasm for living in the world. I was never very interested in dinosaurs, but Tim insisted that would all change once I saw them firsthand.
What I saw firsthand did change my opinion of dinosaurs, but not for the better.
Dinosaurs are the most savage and dangerous creatures in Earth’s history, and my grandfather brought them to life. He had the best intentions, as I’m sure Simon Masrani does. But people died. Horribly. And it will happen again. 65 million years ago, nature created history’s most perfect killing machines, and Jurassic World has put them in a petting zoo. No matter how high the walls are built, these animals will find a way, this time onto an island filled with 20,000 people. These people will become victims of the dinosaurs; this eventuality is certain. The only question is when.
Lex Murphy is CEO of LexxCropp, a company that produces organic crops. She is a survivor of the original park disaster in 1993.