Toy Story 2 was one of the trickiest films Pixar ever produced. It was originally set to be a straight-to-DVD release (and video too), until the decision was made to go for a full cinema outing. But barely a year before release, the film was in trouble: as many at the firm were candidly appreciating, Toy Story 2 wasn't working.
John Lasseter, exhausted from directing Toy Story and A Bug's Life back to back, was asked to sort it out. He did—but the intensive year where the film was taken apart and put back together very much took its toll on Pixar. Changes were made in the aftermath of its hugely successful release.
Toy Story 2 had a happy ending for Pixar. It earned rave reviews, and took nearly $500m at the global box office.
And yet one command entered into a computer nearly derailed the entire project.
Writing in his book Creativity Inc, Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull recalled that in the winter of 1998, a year out from the release of Toy Story 2, somebody (he never reveals who in the book) entered the command '/bin/rm -r -f *' on the drives where the film's files were kept.
The object of said command is to remove everything from a given location, and to remove it quickly. It did its job.
"First, Woody's hat disappeared. Then his boots. Then he disappeared entirely," recalls Catmull. "Whole sequences—poof!—were deleted from the drive."
One of the film's technical directors, Oren Jacobs, watched it all happen in real time. His call to systems support started with him telling them to "pull out the plug on the Toy Story 2 master machine." When asked why by the person on the other end of the phone (a not-unreasonable question), Jacobs screamed "Please, God, just pull it out as fast as you can."
The plug was pulled, but not in time—90% of the film was gone, erased "in a matter of seconds."
And it got worse. A plan was quickly hatched to restore the data from a regular backup, which meant that only half a day of work would have been lost. But the backup system had failed. Pixar, incredibly, did not have a copy of the Toy Story 2 files on its servers. "To reassemble the film would have taken thirty people a solid year," Catmull recalled.
Toy Story 2 looked doomed.
Yet it was saved by something akin to blind luck. Galyn Susman was Toy Story 2's supervising technical director, and after she'd given birth to her second child, she'd been working from home. As such, once a week, she'd taken an entire copy of the film home with her.
A minute later, she was zooming home. Her computer was wrapped in blankets and put on the backseat of her car ("carefully"). In Oren's words, the computer was then "carried into Pixar like an Egyptian pharaoh."
While work had been lost, Susman's backup files limited the damage significantly. Furthermore, given the size of Pixar at the time—which was still years away from being the company big enough to merge with Disney—her computer may just have saved the firm (at least in the form that we know it). Unsurprisingly, Pixar put into place processes that stopped this ever happening again.
And, crucially, Toy Story 2 just about made its deadline.
Though he’s widely considered one of the most iconic musicians of the 20th century, Jimi Hendrix passed away as his career was really just getting started. Still, he managed to accomplish a lot in the approximately four years he spent in the spotlight, and leave this world a legend when he died on September 18, 1970, at the age of 27. Here are 10 things you might not have known about the musical legend.
1. Jimi Hendrix didn't become "Jimi" until 1966.
Jimi Hendrix was born in Seattle on November 27, 1942 as John Allen Hendrix. He was initially raised by his mother while his father, James “Al” Hendrix, was in Europe fighting in World War II. When Al returned to the United States in 1945, he collected his son and renamed him James Marshall Hendrix.
In 1966, Chas Chandler—the bassist for The Animals, who would go on to become Jimi’s manager—saw the musician playing at Cafe Wha? in New York City. "This guy didn't seem anything special, then all of a sudden he started playing with his teeth," roadie James "Tappy" Wright, who was there, told the BBC in 2016. "People were saying, 'What the hell?' and Chas thought, 'I could do something with this kid.’”
Though Hendrix was performing as Jimmy James at the time, it was Chandler who suggested he use the name “Jimi.”
2. Muddy Waters turned Jimi Hendrix on to the guitar—and scared the hell out of him.
When asked about the guitarists who inspired him, Hendrix cited Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Elmore James, and B.B. King. But Muddy Waters was the first musician who truly made him aware of the instrument. “The first guitarist I was aware of was Muddy Waters,” Hendrix said. “I heard one of his old records when I was a little boy and it scared me to death because I heard all these sounds.”
3. Jimi Hendrix could not read music.
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In 1969, Dick Cavett asked the musician whether he could read music: “No, not at all,” the self-taught musician replied. He learned to play by ear and would often use words or colors to express what he wanted to communicate. “[S]ome feelings make you think of different colors,” he said in an interview with Crawdaddy! magazine. “Jealousy is purple—‘I'm purple with rage’ or purple with anger—and green is envy, and all this.”
4. Jimi Hendrix used his dreams as inspiration for his songwriting.
Hendrix drew inspiration for his music from a lot of places, including his dreams. “I dreamt a lot and I put a lot of my dreams down as songs,” he explained in a 1967 interview with New Musical Express. “I wrote one called ‘First Look’ and another called ‘The Purple Haze,’ which was all about a dream I had that I was walking under the sea.” (In another interview, he said the idea for “Purple Haze” came to him in a dream after reading a sci-fi novel, believed to be Philip José Farmer’s Night of Light.)
5. "Purple Haze" features one of music's most famous mondegreens.
In the same interview with New Musical Express, it's noted that the “Purple Haze” lyric “‘scuse me while I kiss the sky” was in reference to a drowning man Hendrix saw in his dream. Which makes the fact that many fans often mishear the line as “‘Scuse me, while I kiss this guy” even more appropriate. It was such a common mistake that Hendrix himself was known to have some fun with it, often singing the incorrect lyrics on stage—occasionally even accompanied by a mock make-out session. There’s even a Website, KissThisGuy.com, dedicated to collecting user-generated stories of misheard lyrics.
6. Jimi Hendrix played his guitar upside-down.
Ever the showman, Hendrix’s many guitar-playing quirks became part of his legend: In addition to playing with his teeth, behind his back, or without touching the instrument’s strings, he also played his guitar upside-down—though there was a very simple reason for that. He was left-handed. (His father tried to get him to play right-handed, as he considered left-handed playing a sign of the devil.)
7. Jimi Hendrix played backup for a number of big names.
Though Hendrix’s name would eventually eclipse most of those he played with in his early days, he played backup guitar for a number of big names under the name Jimmy James, including Sam Cooke, Little Richard, Wilson Pickett, Ike and Tina Turner, and The Isley Brothers.
In addition to the aforementioned musical legends, Hendrix also helped actress Jayne Mansfield in her musical career. In 1965, he played lead and bass guitar on “Suey,” the B-side to her single “As The Clouds Drift By.”
8. Jimi Hendrix was once kidnapped after a show.
Though the details surrounding Hendrix’s kidnapping are a bit sketchy, in Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix, Charles R. Cross wrote about how the musician was kidnapped following a show at The Salvation, a club in Greenwich Village:
“He left with a stranger to score cocaine, but was instead held hostage at an apartment in Manhattan. The kidnappers demanded that [Hendrix’s manager] Michael Jeffrey turn over Jimi’s contract in exchange for his release. Rather than agree to the ransom demand, Jeffrey hired his own goons to search out the extorters. Mysteriously, Jeffrey’s thugs found Jimi two days later … unharmed.
“It was such a strange incident that Noel Redding suspected that Jeffrey had arranged the kidnapping to discourage Hendrix from seeking other managers; others … argued the kidnapping was authentic.”
9. Jimi Hendrix opened for The Monkees.
Though it’s funny to imagine such a pairing today, Hendrix warming up The Monkees’s crowd of teenybopper fans actually made sense for both acts back in 1967. For the band, having a serious talent like Hendrix open for them would help lend them some credibility among serious music fans and critics. Though Hendrix thought The Monkees’s music was “dishwater,” he wasn’t well known in America and his manager convinced him that partnering with the band would help raise his profile. One thing they didn’t take into account: the young girls who were in the midst of Monkeemania.
The Monkees’s tween fans were confused by Hendrix’s overtly sexual stage antics. On July 16, 1967, after playing just eight of their 29 scheduled tour dates, Hendrix flipped off an audience in Queens, New York, threw down his guitar, and walked off the stage.
10. You can visit Jimi Hendrix's London apartment.
In 2016, the London flat where Hendrix really began his career was restored to what it would have looked like when Jimi lived there from 1968 to 1969 and reopened as a museum. The living room that doubled as his bedroom is decked out in bohemian décor, and a pack of Benson & Hedges cigarettes sits on the bedside table. There’s also space dedicated to his record collection.
Amazingly, the same apartment building—which is located in the city’s Mayfair neighborhood—was also home to George Handel from 1723 until his death in 1759; the rest of the building serves as a museum to the famed composer’s life and work.
From September 27 through October 31, the original 1978 Halloween—directed by John Carpenter and produced by Debra Hill—will be returning to theaters, though it will look a little different. Hypebeast reports that the film’s cinematographer, Dean Cundey, helped remaster and restore a copy of the original film, giving this updated version better lighting and effects.
Upon its release on October 25, 1978, Halloween became one of the highest-grossing independent films of all time (it grossed $47 million domestically on a $325,000 budget), and kicked off a decade of copycat slasher films. In 2006, the Library of Congress chose to preserve Halloween in the U.S. National Film Registry. Last year, David Gordon Green directed Halloween, a “sequel” to the original. (Basically, the new Halloween ignored plots from 37 years of Halloween sequels and remakes.)
In 2020 and 2021, two more Halloweens, both starring Jamie Lee Curtis and directed by Green, will hit theaters worldwide. But between the end of September and Halloween, you’ll have a chance to see one of the greatest horror films of all time in theaters. (While watching you can look out for these Halloween goofs.)
Unlike a lot of classic movie re-releases, however, Halloween will not be shown at big chains like AMC. And the dates, times, and ticket costs will vary among venues, which will include select art house theaters, Rooftop Cinema Clubs, and event centers across North America. To find out if Halloween will be screening at a theater near you, go to CineLife’s site and type in your zip code.
