By Dr. Ted Baehr
Recently Tom Hanks and Tim Allen discussed that their 1995 groundbreaking movie TOY STORY was completely revised before it was released. As the renowned book THE PIXAR TOUCH by New York Times bestselling author David A. Price, notes, I was involved with the small group who started Pixar in the late 1970s. Their first experiment in movies was screened before several movie executives at a screening I arranged in 1977. The technology was groundbreaking, but technology doesn’t make a movie, and the story was weak. So, even the team that was going to become Pixar found their movie painful to watch.
Many years later, after they came together again in Northern California, they got Walt Disney Company and Apple mogul Steve Jobs to invest in Pixar. The chairman of Disney Studios, who teaches at many of my five-day HOW TO SUCCEED IN HOLLYWOOD (WITHOUT LOSING YOUR SOUL) workshops, held a screening around six months before TOY STORY was supposed to be released. Always forthright, I told them the movie wasn’t working. After several Entertainment Industry leaders who were much more important than me gave the same opinion, they reversed the roles of Woody and Buzz which changed the story significantly.
I screened the second version several times. Finally, about one week before it opened, I was invited to screen it with my Board of Directors. The Pixar team was editing furiously down to the opening day. I tell this story in my filmmaking classes to tell students they need to keep working and polishing their movie up until the last minute.
Of course, TOY STORY became a tremendous success, and the Pixar team developed what I call the Pixar Rule. They screen it for the members of the staff, and, if the movie they’re making doesn’t work for someone in some area, they try to fix it and see what they can do to make it better.
Naturally, Tom Hanks and Tim Allen, being the main talent on the project, had to live through the changes. However, behind the scenes, the changes Pixar made turned TOY STORY into a better movie that was extremely successful at the box office.
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