Dreamers and Deceivers (36 page)

On the other side of the desk, Coyle’s eyes narrowed. When Lasseter finally finished his pitch, Coyle stared at him in silence for what seemed like an eternity before he spoke.

“Let me tell you something, John. You are a
junior
animator. It’s not your job to think big, expensive thoughts. Our audience is a bunch of kids who couldn’t care less about ‘character development’ and ‘plot strength.’ Just do what you’re told. And if you don’t like our way, there’s a line of people out the door who would be happy to take your place.”

Lasseter was speechless. And crushed. In that moment he realized that his dream had never been to merely
work
at Disney; it had been to create movies like Walt himself had made. But now Lasseter was beginning to understand that when Walt had died, the magic he’d brought to the movies that bore his name had died right along with him.

Anaheim, California

September 16, 1983

In a conference room at the intersection of Mickey Avenue and Dopey Drive, John Lasseter showed his bosses at Disney Animation a pitch he’d been working on for months. His proposal was to combine computer-generated sets with traditionally animated characters for a movie based on the classic short story by Thomas M. Disch,
The Brave Little Toaster
.

Lasseter’s vision for the film was based on three of his most deeply held beliefs: first, that animation could appeal to both children and adults alike by tapping into ageless themes and emotions; second, that computer animation could add unimagined visual richness to cartoons;
and third, that inanimate objects, like toasters, could be depicted to have real emotions, and that the depiction could be used not just for comic effect—as Walt Disney had done—but for dramatic effect as well.

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 technology. 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.