Lasseter had first brought an inanimate object to life at CalArts when he’d made an animated short called The Lady and Lamp. It had generated excitement among the faculty and his peers and had won him the first of two Student Academy Awards. But now the Disney executive’s reaction to his vision for animation was decidedly less encouraging.
“Tell me something, Mr. Lasseter,” said Richard Coyle, after Lasseter finished his pitch. “Who told you to spend all this time and money developing a computer-animated movie?” Lasseter had all but ignored the tongue-lashing Coyle had given him three years ago.
“Well,” Lasseter replied, “no one, sir.”
“Right,” Coyle said, “no one. And this computer animation—what will it mean for the artists we currently pay to draw our cartoons?”
“They’ll be as important as ever,” Lasseter explained. “Computers don’t actually draw anything. They are just tools that allow artists to do more with their drawings.”
“So they don’t replace people?”
“Not at all.”
“And I suppose that means they don’t save us any money?”
“Well, no, but—”
“And I suppose they don’t save us any time, either?”
“No,” said Lasseter, “they don’t. The point of computer animation isn’t to save time and money. It’s to—”
“Very well, Mr. Lasseter,” said Coyle coldly. “You’ll be hearing from us shortly.”
Coyle was true to his word. Less than ten minutes after the meeting, Lasseter’s office phone rang.
“Mr. Lasseter, this is Ed Boone and I work for Richard Coyle. It’s been decided that computer animation is only useful to the extent that it’s quicker and cheaper than traditional animation. Since at this time it plainly is neither quicker nor cheaper, your development of The Brave Little Toaster will cease immediately.”
Lasseter gazed at the little toaster he’d placed on his office shelf for inspiration. He considered tossing it into the trash, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Besides, the cancellation of his Little Toaster project wasn’t much of a surprise—he’d known deep down all along that it was something of a long shot.
But if Lasseter had expected his project to be shut down, he never expected what happened next.
“Since it’s not going to be made,” Boone said, “your project at Disney is now complete. Your position at Disney is terminated, and your employment with Disney is now ended.”
Woodside, California
May 28, 1985
When Mike Murray picked up the phone, his friend Steve Jobs could barely speak he was crying so hard. “It’s over,” said Jobs. Those were his only words. A moment later, Murray heard a click, and the phone went dead.
Murray immediately jumped into his car and rushed over to Jobs’s house in Woodside.
Murray knocked on the front door. No answer. He looked into one of the windows. There was no sign of Jobs—or anyone else for that matter. The massive foyer was completely empty. Jobs was such a perfectionist that it was almost impossible for him to find furniture that suited his artistic sensibilities. As a result, he had failed to furnish most of the rooms in his seventeen-thousand-square-foot mansion.
Murray knocked louder. Still no answer.
Finally, he ran to the backyard and peered into one of the Spanish Colonial Revival’s fourteen bedrooms. There he saw his friend lying motionless on a mattress with no bed frame in an unfurnished room.
Murray pounded on the glass door until his friend, to Murray’s great relief, sat up.
Steve Jobs was still alive, but that was about the best that could be said of him. He was despondent. His reputation was in shambles. And his career appeared to be finished.
“It’s over,” Jobs told Murray. “They’ve taken away all of my operational duties. Sculley won, and I’m out.” Like John Lasseter, Steve Jobs had lost his dream job.
Two years earlier, Apple’s board of directors had demanded that Jobs bring in a seasoned CEO, and Jobs had immediately set his sights on recruiting Pepsi’s CEO, John Sculley. Jobs had been wowed by Sculley’s marketing genius, but he hadn’t realized that Sculley would take a fast-and-cheap approach to product creation. Jobs, on the other hand, was a perfectionist unwilling to spare any expense in making products that he believed would not only be profitable, but would also make history.
What followed was a thunderous clash of wills. Jobs insisted on perfection; Sculley insisted on making money—preferably quickly. Jobs tried to maneuver around him but it all came to a head when Jobs tried to stage a coup and force Sculley out of Apple. Sculley rallied support for his leadership, fought off Jobs’s attack, and finally, once it was clear the company wasn’t big enough for both of them, kicked Apple’s founder to the curb.
What had once looked like a match made in heaven—between the great Steve Jobs and the legendary John Sculley—turned out to be made in hell.
Skywalker Ranch
Woodside, California
January 30, 1986
“My people tell me you’re going to buy my computer graphics division,” the legendary George Lucas said over the phone to Steve Jobs.
For a second Jobs detected a note of optimism in Lucas’s voice, which otherwise sounded sad and desperate. The Star Wars creator had been trying for a year to sell this particular part of his Lucasfilm empire. The small division of forty employees made and sold hardware and software for high-resolution, computer-generated images, but it hadn’t found much of a market for its $125,000 Pixar Image Computer.
Lucas, who was going through a difficult divorce, was trying to liquidate unprofitable divisions like this one. Besides, he’d always found something troubling about the motley group of computer scientists who had built the Pixar computer: They seemed obsessed with the dream of making a computer-animated movie. Lucas was a special-effects aficionado, but he’d never cared much for cartoons.
“Yes, George,” replied Jobs, “we’re going to call it Pixar, after that computer your geniuses have built.”
More than twenty venture capitalists had turned down Lucas’s offer to sell the division, as had a long line of manufacturing companies. Siemens had considered using the Pixar Image Computer for its CAT scanners. Philips Electronics had thought about using it for MRIs. And Hallmark Cards had been interested in using it for color printing and scanning. While all of them had ultimately passed, they’d at least given the idea more thought than had Jeffrey Katzenberg, the head of Disney’s Motion Pictures division. Katzenberg had bluntly told Lucas, “I can’t waste my time on this stuff. We’ve got more important things to do.”
Lucas had been only a few weeks away from simply shutting the whole operation down when Steve Jobs had offered Lucasfilm $5 million for it. That was $10 million less than Lucas had wanted, but it was $5 million more than he’d get by simply closing it down.
“Well, let me warn you, Steve,” said Lucas, “you’re buying a computer company run by a small group of people who don’t have much interest in computers. They’re only working on hardware and software so that they can use it to one day make a movie. They all want to be Steven Spielberg!
“There’s an animator there named John Lasseter who’s got his very own one-man animation division that is something of a sideshow. They hired him as an ‘interface designer,’ I guess so that I wouldn’t realize there was an artist in the middle of all my computer scientists.”
Jobs had met the bespectacled, Hawaiian-shirt-wearing Lasseter during his tour of Pixar, and he’d immediately warmed to the twenty-eight-year-old animator. Jobs didn’t share Lasseter’s smiling, childlike, huggable demeanor, but he could identify with Lasseter’s perfectionism, his love of art, and his bold, audacious dreams. Unbeknownst to George Lucas, Jobs wasn’t buying Pixar in spite of the cozy relationship between their computer scientists and their creative dreamers; he was buying the company because of it.
“That’s okay,” said Jobs. “I’ve always been interested in combining art and t
echnology. I think those folks share the same passion.” Jobs paused and then added, almost as a confession, “I’m not buying Pixar so I can make a movie, but maybe we can make some shorts to show off the technology. Those are talented people, and I’m going to give them every chance to show me what they can do.”
Three days later, Jobs found himself signing another legal document. It was longer and more complicated than the partnership agreement he signed a decade ago. But, like the previous contract, he hoped that this one would give him a new platform upon which to the change the world.
Point Richmond, California
April 5, 1988
The Pixar offices on the outskirts of Point Richmond did not occupy valuable real estate. Crime was rampant in this little pocket of California, north of San Francisco. Many of the surrounding buildings had broken windows. People said only half-jokingly that B&K Liquors, just a stone’s throw away on West Cutting Boulevard, stood for “Bleed and Kill.” Just past the liquor store was a Chevron refinery whose periodic explosions required frequent “shelter in place” drills at the small computer start-up Steve Jobs had bought two years ago.
Despite the surroundings, the mood of the employees at the Pixar offices was usually buoyant. The young, creative prodigies making state-of-the art computers and designing cutting-edge software felt lucky to be there. They were excited about what they were building together.
But today the mood was as bleak as the abandoned warehouses that surrounded their building. Pixar had lost millions of dollars every year since its creation, and everyone knew—or at least guessed—that there was a limit to Steve Jobs’s patience.
As Jobs sat at the head of a conference table, his management team, one by one, suggested ways to save money and stop the bleeding. Salaries would be cut. Some employees would lose their stock options. Others would lose their jobs entirely.
Jobs didn’t relish inflicting pain on Pixar’s team, which had swelled from forty employees to about one hundred, but today he was showing no mercy. He had bought Pixar for $5 million, immediately invested another $5 million, and, in the two years since, had spent another $10 million out of his own pocket. Less stubborn men might have already given up on Pixar, but Jobs had stuck with his team. So far.
Just before he was ready to adjourn the meeting and send his managers back to deliver the bad news to the staff, Jobs heard a soft, tentative voice speak up from the other end of the room.
“Steve, I’m almost afraid to ask this, but I’d like to make a short film,” John Lasseter said. “It would show what our technology is capable of, and it could be good advertising for us. But . . . it’ll cost almost three hundred thousand dollars.”
Jobs sat in silence. He had always liked Lasseter. But there was no business rationale for spending $300,000 on a cartoon when his computer company was already hemorrhaging money.
While Lasseter continued to make the case for his project, Jobs thought about his adoptive father, Paul, a high-school-educated mechanic and carpenter. Paul Jobs loved to build beautiful wooden furniture in their garage. It was there that Paul had shared his passion for perfectionism with his son, teaching Steve how to make perfectly symmetrical and smooth parts for a piece of furniture, including the bottom, which would likely never be seen.
Steve Jobs had learned plenty in that garage long before he and Steve Wozniak started building their first computer in it. Now, in John Lasseter, he saw the same dreamy aspiration for beauty and perfection that his adoptive father had imparted to him.
Jobs was snapped back to the present by the silence in the room. Lasseter had finished his pitch, and everyone was looking at Jobs to see if he would scream at the animator, or perhaps even fire him. After all, it took a lot of nerve to ask for a $300,000 investment on a day when every other part of the company was making draconian budget cuts.
Finally, Jobs broke the silence. “Are there any storyboards?” There was skepticism in his voice, but with that one sentence he had opened the door just a crack.
Fifteen minutes later, Lasseter had the storyboards on the wall and was acting out the different characters. The film was about toys that have human emotions. They experience hope and fear, joy and sorrow as they strive to fulfill their greatest desire: to be played with and loved by children.
Lasseter had titled the animated short Tin Toy and had chosen one of his favorite vintage toys, a wind-up, one-man-band named Tinny, to play the protagonist.
By the time Lasseter had finished going through the storyboards, Jobs could see the passion in his eyes and the excitement all over his childlike, chubby face. More important, Jobs saw graceful artistry in the simple story. He saw magic in the feelings Lasseter would convey through five dialogue-free minutes of Tinny’s trials and tribulations. And he saw—for the first time—the power of combining traditional storytelling techniques with Pixar’s pioneering technology.
Only a handful of people in the world understood that transformative potential. For seven years, the group had included John Lasseter.
Now it included Steve Jobs as well.
“Just make it great,” Jobs said to his animator. “All I ask of you, John, is to make it great.”
Hollywood, California
February 15, 1989; March 29, 1989
Ten months after Jobs told Lasseter to “make it great,” Tin Toy’s realistic emotions and breathtaking computer graphics earned it a nomination for Best Animated Short by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Six weeks later, it won an Academy Award.
Point Richmond, California
May 31, 1990
The phone rang in John Lasseter’s office and Jeffrey Katzenberg, the new head of Disney Motion Pictures, was on the other end. More precisely, it was Katzenberg’s secretary calling to see if Lasseter was available to talk with the studio chief.
“Hold on, just a moment.” Lasseter got up to close the door of his small office at Pixar. He peered down the hallway to see if anyone was around who could listen in on his conversation. Winning the Oscar had changed little about Pixar: Its offices still felt like a summer camp; the employees still wore tennis shoes and rode through the hallways on scooters; they still slept in their offices to meet a deadline and drew on the walls to illustrate their latest ideas; and the company was still bleeding money.
The Oscar, however, was about to change things for John Lasseter. Or at least it could have.
“Yes, I can speak to Mr. Katzenberg now,” Lasseter said. Katzenberg’s reputation as one of Hollywood’s toughest, most unpleasant bosses preceded him, but today Katzenberg was putting on the charm.
“Look, we can beat around the bush here or we can get down to business. I want you to come back to Disney. You’re a breathtakingly talented storyteller and this is where you belong.” He paused before adding, “And your salary will be quadruple what it is now.”
The line went silent as Katzenberg’s offer hung in the air. Financially, it was a tempting proposal for a man with a growing family, and it also would return him to the job he had always dreamed of as a young boy. But as he sat in his cramped Pixar office, surrounded by his vintage toys and protected by a patron who had made clear that he would keep writing checks despite the doubtful business rationale, Lasseter looked up at the ceiling and knew what he had to do.
“Jeffrey, I can go to Disney and be a director, or I can stay here and make history.”
For four years, Steve Jobs had stuck with John Lasseter. And now, John Lasseter was returning the favor.
Anaheim, California
January 16, 1991
“If I had it my way,” said Jeffrey Katzenberg, “we wouldn’t be doing this.” The already chilly atmosphere in the room at Disney Studios felt as if it had just dropped another ten degrees.
It was an odd way to begin a meeting about the movie Disney had agreed to produce with Pixar, Lasseter thought, but Katzenberg was an odd man. Balding, skinny, and nerdy, he ran Disney Animation like a dictator. His early successes with The L
ittle Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast had caused his confidence to swell into an obnoxious arrogance.
“It’s clear that the talent here is John Lasseter,” Katzenberg continued. “And John, since you won’t come work for me, I’m going to make it work this way.”
Lasseter wondered why Katzenberg was insulting the Pixar team at his first meeting with them, but he let it go. Beggars can’t be choosers, he figured, and since Pixar was broke, that would make him the beggar. The contract between the two companies gave Disney the power to shut down production at any time, which meant that if Pixar wanted its movie to be made, it would have to put up with Jeffrey Katzenberg.
True to the rumors about his management style, Katzenberg continued. “Everybody thinks I’m a tyrant. Well, I am a tyrant. But I’m usually right.”
The message was clear, at least in Lasseter’s mind: I am the great Jeffrey Katzenberg. This is the great Walt Disney Studios. And you people don’t know what you’re doing.
“So,” Katzenberg said in conclusion, “do you think you can work with me, John?”
“I’d like to, Jeffrey,” he said. “That’s why we’re all here. We have an idea for a movie, and we’re awfully excited that Disney might be a part of it.”
Thinking briefly about how far he’d come since the last pitch he’d made to a Disney executive, Lasseter looked around the table at his small team. These people were family to Lasseter, and the characters they had created together were like their children. He was a little nervous about sharing “his children” with Katzenberg, but he also knew he had little choice. If they were going to make a movie, it had to be with Disney.
“How would you like us to begin?” asked Lasseter.