Toy Story

After the two writers Disney hired, who I will not name, had done all the damage they could to the script, we managed to get rid of them and get Joss to come in to do a draft. If you had just read the script for Buffy the Vampire Slayer you’d have hired him, too.

John didn’t want Joss to waste time with the crummy, kid-centered draft so a bunch of us had an intensive rewrite marathon to pound the script back into something sort of useful. It was pretty funny – a room with people hunched over a few laptops and Mac Classics, running different word processors, each working on a chunk of the script.

Joss took that and turned it into a cohesive script and, as you’d guess, came up with a lot of the great bits of dialogue. I don’t recall what all of them are, but I’m pretty sure "Oh, great. Now I have guilt!" was his.

The big rewrite that saved the picture after Disney shut it down was not done in script pages, but in boards and reels. That came later, and was the work of our story team, mostly John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, Joe Ranft, and Jeff Pidgeon.

Joss may well have fine-tuned the Sid character, but I’d also like to hear the source on that claim. In any case, it would have been a small part of what he did.

Personal anecdote: Joss was going off next to write Alien 4. So much was (and is) my dislike of Alien 3 (aka Alien and the Three Stooges) that I suggested he open with Ripley waking up in the shower. Joss just shuddered and said, "Oooh. Cold." See, Joss knows who to take notes from. And it’s not me.

One more note: I don’t know who came up with Woody’s line, "That’s not flying! That’s falling with style!" I wouldn’t be surprised if it were Joss. But I was there in Animation Dailies the day, very late in production, when we were reviewing the shot of Buzz and Woody flying. Buzz’s line there was, "Technically it’s gliding, but let’s not ruin the moment." Pete Docter piped up, "Uh... Shouldn’t he say it’s falling with style?" John’s face lit up. He and Pete stared at each other for a beat in a mutual head-slap moment sans the actual slapping. John immediately called for Pete to record the new line as scratch so the animator could finish the shot, and for an ADR session with Tim Allen. Some things are only obvious in retrospect.

Craig L Good, Pixar Camera Artist