• "The Beanie Bubble," directed by Kristin Gore and husband Damian Kulash, is streaming on AppleTV+.
• The movie tells the story of Ty Warner and the Beanie Baby craze while dramatizing some moments.
• Insider spoke with Lina Trivedi, who inspired a character in the film, to break down some pivotal scenes drawn from her life. Ty Inc.'s spokesperson denied some claims.

Beanie Babies really spilled onto a highway, but it was Teenie Beanies that caused a minor stir.

The movie opens with a tractor trailer dropping boxes of Beanie Babies onto a highway and drivers stopping to snatch up as many as they could.

In June 1999, Teenie Beanie Babies, miniature Beanie Babies that came with McDonald's Happy Meals, spilled out onto Interstate 285 in Atlanta, Georgia during rush hour. 

According to an Associated Press report, a supervisor for Georgia's motorist assistance agency saw "six or seven" people leaning from open car doors to snatch up Beanies from the ground. 

It didn't cause the absolute frenzy depicted in the movie. Only 30 Teenie Beanies were recovered from a total of two lanes.

The movie claims Ty Warner and his father dated the same woman. A representative for Ty Inc. says it's untrue.

In the film, Warner (Zach Galifianakis) recounts unwittingly sharing a girlfriend with his father.

"The Great Beanie Bubble," the book by Zac Bissonnette upon which the film is based, claims Ty Warner and his dad, Hal, "dated the same women on several occasions" with Warner's sister, Joy, claiming her brother was "jealous of his father's charms."

In the film, Warner also says his father beat him. The book describes their relationship as "bizarre and dysfunctional" with Joy claiming her father beat both of them with a belt, but only because their mother "demanded" he do it. According to Joy, Hal "hated" it. 

Additionally, the book claims Warner told a girlfriend his father "once locked him in a closet as punishment for showing affection to his mother."

A representative for Ty Inc. told Insider all of this "is totally false."

The film claims that Robbie, a character based on Patricia Roche, was Warner's neighbor and married when they first met and decided to launch Ty Inc. together.

That's all straight out of the book. However, unlike the movie, they didn't meet right as Warner's father died. They met because they were neighbors.

According to Bissonnette, Warner and Roche often hung out in his condo after she'd finish her convenience store job. The film suggests "Robbie" worked at a car mechanic shop.

In "The Beanie Bubble" movie, Warner gets the money to start Ty Inc. with Robbie after selling his father's antiques.

The book says it's not as clear where the money for Ty Inc. originated. His sister, Joy, accused Warner of selling their dad's antiques collection. Warner had told People magazine he inherited $50,000 in one of the only interviews he ever gave. 

The real Maya, Lina Trivedi, didn't join Ty Inc. when she was 17, but she did have to groom plush toy animals.

The movie claims that Maya (Geraldine Viswanathan) joined Ty Inc. in 1993 as a college freshman. Though Trivedi, who Maya is based on, did join Ty Inc. during college, she said she was a 19-year-old student when hired.

"I might've been a sophomore," Trivedi told Insider via phone. 

At the time, Trivedi was studying sociology at DePaul University. She had moved from Chicago to the suburbs and was looking for a job in the area to make her commute easier and found a non-descript ad in a newspaper for a telemarketing position.

"It didn't even say what it was," Trivedi recalled. "It said that they were looking for a telemarketer, and they had the location of where the job was at, and it said that it was flexible hours, and that was all that I really needed."

"I answered the ad and found out it was a toy company when I came to the interview, and pretty much got hired on the spot," said Trivedi, who started the next day as a salesperson taking orders before the first Beanie Babies came out.

In the film, Maya is told she would be expected to "tweeze and brush" the company's display plush cats located in the lobby. Before Beanie Babies, Ty Inc. sold plush toys, the first of which were Himalayan cats.

Though they didn't have any such lobby when she joined, Trivedi said that really was part of her job at times as she built a working relationship with Ty Warner.

"When they were doing photo shoots for the catalog, grooming the animals would be something that I helped with — trimming the fur around the eyes and blow drying," Trivedi said. "I learned a lot about just how to groom plush animals."

Ty Warner and Sheila (a character based on Faith McGowan) did not meet inside Warner's house.

The two actually met at a lighting store where he popped in seeking help.

Like in the movie, McGowan did actually stop by Warner's home to help him with some lighting suggestions and he was late, giving her a tour of the house when he arrived. In the book, McGowan claims Warner overshared about his previous relationship with Roche, depression, and cosmetic surgery he had.

The film claims a little girl designed a Beanie Baby, was given credit for it, and then had the credit taken away by Warner. A representative for Ty Inc. called the film's depiction a "gross distortion" of actual events.

In the film, one of Sheila's daughters, Ava Harper, gives Warner a drawing she made of a ghost Beanie Baby design. This becomes a huge plot point in the film when Ava's name is later removed from the tag in future versions of the plush.

"I remember the ghost was one that he kind of struggled with," Trivedi said of Spooky's creation and her recollection of how Faith McGowan's daughter, Jenna Boldebuck, helped bring the beanie to life. 

"I think that is accurate that Faith's daughter ended up kind of sketching how to create that design of the ghost so it can sit, so it works with the whole Beanie Baby design model," Trivedi added. "He did end up writing her name on the tags initially, and I think she even wrote the poem for it."

The ordeal is only mentioned briefly in Bissonnette's book, where it's stated that Warner "was impressed" with a sketch Jenna drew on a paper tablecloth. Instead of Jenna giving Warner the sketch, the book claims he "tore it off and put it in his wallet."

The Spooky hangtags initially read "Designed by Jenna Boldebuck," but two months later, her name was removed when Warner "changed his mind," according to the book.

Bissonnette reported that collectors paid up to $1,000 for discontinued versions of Spooky.

When asked about the creation of Spooky, the replacement of the design credit with Warner's own name, and a claim in the film that this occurred because Warner was "insecure," a Ty Inc. rep said, "This is a gross distortion of what happened – a Hollywood concoction, not the truth."

Trivedi really pitched the idea for the Ty.com website, but she wasn't its sole creator.

Maya approaches Warner in the film with the idea to create a website for the company, and that happened in real life, too. The film references Maya's sibling who helps her maintain the Ty.com site, but his contributions to building the site are minimized on screen.

Trivedi's brother really was hired to help her build and maintain the site. 

"It was just overwhelming for me to do everything by myself," Trivedi told Insider, adding she already knew she'd be able to work well with her brother "in an artistic endeavor" because they were in a band together at the time. 

Trivedi learned how to make a web page at DePaul University and utilized those skills to help build and launch Ty.com. With access to an unlimited company card, Trivedi also bought reference books to aid in their effort.

Trivedi estimates it took "a week or less" to make the first iteration of the site, which consisted of repeating bricks featuring one of the Beanie Babies, Quackers the duck, and Times New Roman font and blue links.

"It sucked. It was horrible," Trivedi laughed, reflecting on the initial site's simplistic design.

Ty Inc. didn't originally own the Ty.com domain.

Ty Inc. had to purchase the Ty.com domain from a man who reserved it for his child of the same name. 

"We had t-y.com and I remember telling Ty that we have to have Ty.com," Trivedi said. "We just can't do this on T 'dash' y. We had T-y temporarily. But I iterated to him how important it was to get Ty.com."  

While Bissonnette's book claims they spent about $150,000 and legal fees to purchase the domain, Trivedi said it was a bit more.

The movie suggests it was Maya's idea to retire Beanie Babies, creating a supply and demand. That's not exactly right.

When Beanie Babies aren't selling, the movie shows Maya give Warner the idea to retire them based on the idea that people are intrigued by the concept of limited-edition items.

Trivedi doesn't take credit for this, though, and the book doesn't credit her with that idea either.

According to Bissonnette, three brothers who sold Ty products came up with the idea to "retire" beanies while working a booth at a trade show after a popular Beanie Baby, Lovie the lamb, was being discontinued because of "supplier issues in China.

The brothers, Bryan, Chris, and Kevin King, recalled a time when they had seen other items retired. Instead of making retailers upset, the simple change in semantics caused intrigue. The brothers ran the idea by Warner at the show.

Trivedi utilized the Ty.com site to announce retirements.

She added: "What I think I did is just made that whole process exciting and interesting for people." 

Maya reads off a Beanie Baby poem she wrote for Stripes. Trivedi didn't just write many of the poems fans became familiar with — she pitched the idea for putting them inside the hangtags.

In the film, Maya reads off a playful poem for Stripes, a tiger Beanie Baby. It's not the tiger's real poem, but Stripes was the first of dozens of Beanie Baby poems Trivedi wrote.

While working on Ty.com, Trivedi says she came up with the idea for the four-sentence poems that accompany every Beanie Baby in their hangtag. 

"I was looking at the tag and how it said 'To:' and 'From:' I was just thinking nobody uses that. Nobody actually gives a Beanie Baby to someone and writes their name on it," Trivedi said. "How do we use that space to build some type of connection with people and tie it into content that we can have on our webpage that people will want to come look at and get excited about?"

Trivedi said she pitched Warner on every Beanie Baby getting a birthday and personal poem and he asked her to create a mock up. 

"I took Stripes and I had Photoshop 1.0," Trivedi said, laughing. "I made a mockup of a tag and how I was envisioning it looking. I wrote Stripes within a couple minutes."

Trivedi printed it out and took it to Warner. Excited, he asked Trivedi to write a poem for every Beanie Baby they had at that point ("85 or 87," according to Trivedi) in about 24 hours.

The poems weren't written in a day. According to Trivedi, it was more like three days, and she enlisted her brother to help write some.

"I think I did 137 over the whole time that I was there," she said.

Unlike Maya, Trivedi didn't have a cubicle at Ty Inc.

The film shows Maya having her own cubicle in the center of the Ty Inc. office, but Trivedi said that wasn't the case.

"My office — or I shouldn't say office," Trivedi said with a laugh. "It was like a corner of a warehouse. My work area was very isolated from a lot of things."

A Ty Inc. representative refutes the film's claim that the Beanie Baby creator was obsessed with his appearance and plastic surgery.

About midway through the film, Warner discusses getting "another face-lift" with his fiancée, Sheila.

In "The Great Beanie Bubble" book, Faith McGowan recounted a time Warner had surgery "because he was concerned that his eyes didn't match" and how he convinced her to get surgery to correct a "slightly open bite." In the film, Sheila refuses to get surgery when Warner makes a comment about her nose.

"Mr. Warner has had one facelift. The rest of this is false," a Ty Inc. representative told Insider via email.

Ty Warner really turned down calls from Steven Spielberg's office.

The film claims Warner turned down a Barbie tie-in with Mattel and calls from Spielberg's office, only accepting a partnership opportunity with McDonald's to put tiny versions of Beanie Babies into Happy Meals.

"Every major brand reached out to make some type of connection," Trivedi said. "I remember Steven Spielberg. There were even like ice cream brands and cereals and all kinds of stuff."

According to news reports, former US trade rep Charlene Barshefsky really tried to bring Beanie Babies from China back to the US after a trip with President Clinton.

The film briefly shows a news report claiming that the former US trade rep tried bringing beanies back to the country after a trip to China with President Clinton.

According to The Washington Post, Barshefsky tried to bring home 40 Beanie Babies after the trip. At the time, she had two young daughters. 

Ty Inc. had placed a one Beanie per family limit on people re-entering the United States. 

Ty Warner really did throw a massive company party where employees were awarded the equivalent of their salaries as bonuses, plus a rare Beanie Baby.

According to Bissonnette's book, 250 Ty Inc. employees gathered for a holiday party on December 12, 1998 to celebrate the company surpassing $1.4 billion in annual sales.

Warner announced that every employee would receive a Christmas bonus equivalent to their annual salaries as a reward for the company's performance.

The film also shows every employee with a special purple Beanie Baby. Whether or not that's supposed to be the coveted Princess Diana bear, which debuted in 1997, is unclear in the movie.

In reality, Warner gave every employee a Beanie Baby called #1 Bear, a signed and numbered bear that had the number sewn onto its chest. Only 253 of them were produced, according to the book.

Trivedi was paid $12.50, not $12 by the end of her time at Ty Inc.

The film claims Maya gunned for a role as chief operating officer at Ty Inc. and instead someone else named Blaine was hired for the role. Warner only offered Maya a raise to $20 an hour.

"At that point, I felt that the contributions that I made to the company were undeniable, the effects of what I did couldn't be disputed," Trivedi said of when Warner was starting to set up a company board. "I had asked for a raise for myself, as well as my brother, and we weren't able to get what we asked for. So I left."

According to Bissonette, Trivedi asked for a salary of $120,000.When speaking to the author for his book, Trivedi said she learned he interviewed the person who wouldn't meet the salary number she wanted.

"He, as well as some of the other people there, just didn't really understand the focus that Ty had on the website and the internet. And they thought I was a fad," Trivedi said of her understanding of why she wasn't paid more.

Trivedi added: "It was hurtful because I put so much of myself into what I did there. It felt like a part of me. It was like a breakup."

In the film, Trivedi leaves Ty Inc. after the holiday party in 1998. In real life, she had already left the company the previous year.

Trivedi did not go on to work for the Pokémon company. She's currently working with AI.

The movie ends claiming that Maya left Ty Inc. to start working with the creators of the popular trading cards.

Trivedi told Insider that bit wasn't true, but said her daughter was "going to be so excited about that" because she's "really into" Pokémon trading cards, video games, and movies.

Today, Trivedi wants to continue carving out a space for women in tech. She is the cofounder of an AI start-up, Joii.AI. Currently, Trivedi is working with a longtime friend on a program to tackle loneliness and social disconnection through technology. Trivedi said they want to create an AI that users would "train to emulate their patterns and how they communicate and how they talk to one another for the purpose of connecting with the people they're closest to."

Faith McGowan, who Sheila is based on, most likely did not sell a bunch of Spooky beanies to become rich. She did sell her #1 Bear.

The film claims Sheila sold original versions of the Beanie Baby with her daughter's name on the Ty hangtag to buy a house, car, and secure future college tuition for her kids. But that probably didn't happen in real life for McGowan.

The book never says whether or not McGowan had access to a bunch of the originals to sell.

Instead, McGowan sold her first #1 Bear for $10,000 to create an emergency fund.

The real Robbie, Patricia Roche, really did run Ty UK.

The position made her rich and, just as the film claims, she was on a list of highest-paid female executives in England. According to Bissonnette, Roche did $67 million in sales in 1999. 

Roche and Warner parted ways in 2004 and that was the last time she saw him. She received a letter from him at her wedding three years later, per the book.

Ty Warner really did buy a hotel. Today, he owns multiple luxury hotels and golf courses.

The film briefly mentions in passing that Warner "bought a hotel" and that's true.

Warner purchased the Four Seasons in New York and in Santa Barbara in 1999 and 2000, respectively.

A total of seven hotels, golf courses, and resorts are listed under the Ty Warner Hotels & Resorts brand.

Warner was really convicted of tax evasion, but avoided going to jail.

In 2013, Warner was charged with tax evasion for allegedly having money in an offshore account.

Warner pleaded guilty the same year and avoided going to jail. Instead, he paid more than $53 million in a civil penalty as well as about $27 million in back taxes and interest. The following year, he was sentenced to two years' probation and 500 hours of community service for at least three Chicago high schools in addition to another $100,000 fine.

Now 78, Warner never married or had kids.

A representative for Ty Inc. sent the following statement from Warner to Insider in response to the film's release: 

"I applaud the filmmakers for capturing the unprecedented energy and excitement – though not the facts – surrounding the original release of Beanie Babies 30 years ago. The movie is, by its own admission, partly fiction. But, like the filmmakers, I am in the business of dreams, and I admire their creative spirit. To the fans and collectors of Beanie Babies who have been there for the last three decades, thank you for all the love you have shown."

Warner also announced Ty Inc. will give away free Beanie Babies at screenings of "The Beanie Bubble" at theaters in the US and UK to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Beanie Babies. Thirty-seven US theaters will receive Patti II Platypus Beanie Babies. Peanut II, Squealer II, and Snort II will be given out at 17 UK theaters.

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