Hadoop: HDFS in a bad state

I managed to get to the position where I could not copy files to my HDFS:

$ hadoop fs -copyFromLocal movies.input.txt movies.input.txt 
09/10/16 21:20:43 WARN hdfs.DFSClient: DataStreamer Exception:
org.apache.hadoop.ipc.RemoteException: java.io.IOException:
File /user/user/movies.input.txt could only be replicated to
0 nodes, instead of 1

Formating my HDFS didn't help. http://localhost:50070/dfshealth.jsp was reporting that I had no live nodes. In the end I blew away my /tmp/hadoop-user directory and followed up with a hadoop namenode -format for good measure.