10 Film Directors Who Totally Tricked The Studio
4. John Lasseter Let A Disney Boss Embarrass Himself In Front Of Walt Disney's Nephew - Toy Story
It truly is nothing short of a major miracle that Toy Story turned out as magnificent as it did, in turn making Pixar an overnight household name and reinventing the animated film as we now know it.
During the film's lengthy and painful development, however, Disney Studios boss Jeffrey Katzenberg aggressively insisted to director John Lasseter that the film have a more adult edge, with Woody (Tom Hanks) being more of a conventional villain character.
Lasseter had no choice but to relent, leading to the one of the darkest - yet ultimately most important - days in Pixar's history, better known as the infamous "Black Friday incident."
At Katzenberg's behest, a fully voice-acted animatic was screened in November 1993 for various Disney executives and also Roy E. Disney, the nephew of Walt Disney and son of Disney co-founder Roy O. Disney.
The scene was a far darker and more mean-spirited iteration of the sequence where Woody knocks Buzz (Tim Allen) out of Andy's window, with Woody bombarding the other toys with insults and basically coming off as an irredeemable tyrant.
Roy E. Disney was reportedly infuriated with the scene, to the extent that Peter Schneider, president of Walt Disney Feature Animation at the time, suggested the entire project be scrapped.
The prevailing sentiment was that Katzenberg's dictatorial oversight had taken the project away from Lasseter and the rest of Pixar, after which an embarrassed Lasseter was given just two weeks to re-work the script, this time with full support from a hands-off Katzenberg.
Though this was hardly a Machiavellian scheme on Lasseter's part to humiliate Katzenberg in front of the Disney brass, by having him fail so spectacularly in a room with them, the director was eventually allowed to make the more sweet-natured movie he always wanted to, and his career as a Pixar mainstay for two more decades was firmly cemented.