Creativity Inc.

When the Movie Disappeared

In the winter of 1998, a Pixar technical director typed the four characters that would nearly kill the company. /bin/rm -r -f asterisk. Recursive. Forced. No prompts. The command ran on the master drives of Toy Story 2, and Oren Jacobs watched two years of work vanish from his screen in seconds. Woody's hat, then Woody, then the bedroom, then everything. He screamed for someone to pull the plug. Too late.

The backup system, it turned out, had not been working for some time. Reassembling the film by hand would have taken thirty people a full year. The room went silent. Pixar's second movie no longer existed.

Then someone remembered Galyn Susman.

Galyn was the supervising technical director, and she had recently had her second baby. To survive the newborn months, she had quietly set up her home computer to mirror the production database once a week. A copy of nearly the entire film was sitting in her living room in San Anselmo. Two people drove there in the slow lane, wrapped the computer in blankets like a sleeping child, and carried it back into Pixar, as Ed Catmull puts it, "like an Egyptian pharaoh." The movie came back to life.

After the dust settled, three things happened in this order. They restored the film. They fixed the backup system. They restricted access to the delete command. What did not happen, and what Catmull insists is the most important thing, is this: nobody was fired. Nobody was even publicly named. To Catmull, finding the typist and making an example of him would have been "naïve and wrongheaded." The point was never the typo. The point was that the random was inevitable, the broken backup was a hidden failure waiting to detonate, and a fertile environment had let a tired parent set up an unsanctioned workaround that turned out to be the company's salvation.