Dreamers and Deceivers (38 page)

“I want to take Pixar public a week after
Toy Story
premieres in November,” Jobs told Sonsini.

“Are you crazy? Who’s going to buy stock in a company that’s never made a profit?”

“I’ve been called crazy many times before,” said Jobs. “And maybe sometimes I was a little crazy. But it takes a bit of insanity to change the world.”

There was more to Jobs’s impatience than a simple penchant for risk. He was already thinking beyond
Toy Story
, and he didn’t want Pixar to be financially dependent on Disney any longer. He refused to allow Katzenberg, or anyone else, to interfere with John Lasseter’s work ever again. But that kind of leverage would require a lot of money.

The kind of money that even Steve Jobs didn’t have.

The kind of money that could only be raised with a successful IPO.

Sonsini pleaded with Jobs. The company had lost $8 million last year; what kind of a crazy person would think investors would buy stock in a company like that?

Jobs looked Sonsini in the eye and pointed his thumb at his chest, “This kind.”

Offices of Robertson, Stephens & Company

San Francisco, California

November 29, 1995

Steve Jobs looked out the window at San Francisco Bay, raised a glass of Odwalla carrot juice, and toasted Pixar’s imminent IPO with the underwriters who had initially shared Larry Sonsini’s skepticism over Pixar going public,

“To beautiful movies,” he said. “To people and computers that will change the world. And to another insanely great company!” It was almost the same toast he had given when Apple went public.

Ten days earlier,
Toy Story
had premiered at Los Angeles’s historic El Capitan Theatre. The
Washington Post
’s film critic wrote that “to find a movie worthy of comparison you have to reach all the way back to 1939, when the world went gaga over Oz.”
Newsweek
called it a “marvel” that “harnesses its flashy technology” with “rich characters” and “a very human wit.” A reviewer for
Entertainment Weekly
gushed, “I can hardly imagine having more fun at the movies than I did at
Toy Story
.”

In an almost unprecedented consensus for a feature film, not a single movie critic gave
Toy Story
anything less than a glowing review. And the public agreed:
Toy Story
enjoyed the most successful Thanksgiving weekend in box-office history.

The only group left to weigh in was investors who were about to have an opportunity to buy Pixar stock. The shares started trading at $22, the exact price Jobs had insisted on when his underwriters had recommended $14. Ultimately, it didn’t matter where the share price started; it only mattered where it finished.

As soon as Pixar went on sale, the price of the shares began to rise. And rise. And rise some more. After just thirty minutes, Pixar’s price had more than doubled, and by the end of the first hour, it was approaching $50 per share. The quantity of purchase orders throughout the day was so great that trading frequently had to be paused.

When the closing bell finally sounded, the stock had settled at $39 per share—nearly 80 percent higher than where it had been when trading commenced. Steve Jobs was no longer a multimillionaire.

He was now a billionaire.

Far more important to Jobs than the money was the leverage Pixar would now enjoy over Disney and Jeffrey Katzenberg. “Right now,” Jobs said to Lasseter as they sipped their glasses of juice, “there are only two significant brands in the film industry—’Disney’ and ‘Steven Spielberg.’ I want to establish ‘Pixar’ as the third.”

Lasseter smiled. “You know, Steve,” he said, “you only gave me one order when you signed off on producing
Tin Toy
. Do you remember what it was?”

“ ‘Make it great, John,’ ” Jobs recalled. “ ‘All I ask is that you make it great.’ ”

Lasseter put his arm around Jobs and, with a twinkle in his eyes and a smile on his boyish face, the most talented animator since Walt Disney told the most innovative entrepreneur of Silicon Valley, “We’re not going to stop now.”

EPILOGUE

In 1997, Steve Jobs accepted an invitation from Apple Computer to return as its CEO. The year before, Apple had lost more than a billion dollars. In 2012, it became the most highly valued public company in the history of the world.

Around the same time Jobs returned to Apple, Disney Animation began to produce a string of forgettable animated duds, from
Treasure Planet
to
Brother Bear
. The enormity of Disney’s troubles dawned on its CEO, Bob Iger, in 2005 when he watched a parade through Hong Kong Disneyland and realized that not a single character marching in the parade had appeared in a film made in the last ten years. The only exceptions were the characters from Disney’s partnership with Pixar.

Market analysts had previously wondered how Disney would survive after Steve Jobs cut off contract talks for a new partnership between the two studios. Now, watching Woody and Buzz parade through Hong Kong Disneyland, Bob Iger was asking himself the same question.

By 2005, Pixar had made
Toy Story
,
A Bug’s Life
,
Toy Story 2
,
Monsters Inc.
,
Finding Nemo
, and
The Incredibles
. Each film had been critically acclaimed and had taken computer animation technology to a new level. Not incidentally, each film also took in more than $500 million at the box office. Polls reported that mothers of young children trusted the Pixar brand even more than Disney’s.

When Iger returned from Hong Kong, he called Steve Jobs and offered to buy Pixar, lock, stock, and barrel. His thinking was simple: The Walt Disney Company’s empire couldn’t survive without beloved new characters coming out of its animation division, and the animation division couldn’t survive without Pixar.

After relatively brief negotiations between Jobs and Iger—whom Jobs found much easier to deal with than the previous head of Disney, Michael Eisner—Disney bought Pixar for $7.4 billion. At Disney’s insistence, the deal required that only one Pixar employee join Disney: John Lasseter. Three decades after Lasseter had tried to return Disney animation to its glory days, Disney paid Pixar 10 percent of their market capitalization largely for the privilege of bringing Lasseter aboard to do exactly that.

“You know, John,” Steve Jobs had told his friend over dinner during one of the most exhausting and trying days of producing
Toy Story
, “when I make a computer for Apple, it has a life span of three years. In five years, it’s literally a doorstop. But if you do your job right then what you’re creating can last forever.”

Today, the original Pixar Image Computer can only be found at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, but the characters created by the artists who worked with it and its progeny will be a part of our memories, our imaginations, and our culture to infinity . . . and beyond.

UPTON SINCLAIR

STATION A

PASADENA, CALIFORNIA

August 29, 1929

John Beardsley

610 Rowan Bldg.,

Los Angeles, Calif.

Dear John:

I will write you a few notes about the matter concerning which we were talking last night.

When I went to Boston the last time in October 1928 I was completely naïve about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, having accepted the defense propaganda entirely. But I very quickly began to sense something wrong in the situation. There was an air of mystery about the Boston anarchists, and I saw they had something to conceal. Then in Sacco’s cross examination I detected what to seemed to be a slip in his alibi. I began asking catch questions, and ultimately I got the admission from one of the leading defense witnesses that his testimony had been framed. I got a virtual admission of the same thing from another witness. It became certain to me that Sacco at least had been concerned in the dynamitings which had occurred in New England just after the war, and I supposed that this was what was being hidden from me. I remained of the opinion that both men had been unquestionably innocent of the crime of which they were accused. Their trial had manifestly not been a fair one, and on that basis I was prepared to defend their right to a new trial. That was my state if mind at the time that I agreed with The Bookman for the serial publication of “Boston.”

But on my way to Denver, where I had arranged by telegraph to meet Fred Moore, I turned the matter over in my own mind, and doubts began to assail me. Alone in a hotel room with Fred I begged him to tell me the full truth. His reply was, “first tell me what you have got.” I decided to take a chance at the worst, and I told him that I knew that the men were not merely terrorists, but that they were guilty of the holdup. His reply was, “Since you have got the whole story there is no use my holding anything back,” and he then told me that the men were guilty, and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them. He said that there were quite a group of terrorist anarchists who had been supporting the movement by various kinds of pay-roll holdups, and that all the practises were well known to Carlo Trsca and Gurley Flynn.

This naturally sent me into a panic. I telegraphed Seward Collins of The Bookman saying that I could not write the book, and I cabled half a dozen translators and publishers abroad canceling arrangements which I made for serial publication. But on my way to Los Angeles I thought the matter over, and I realized certain facts about Fred Moore. I had heard that he was using drugs. I knew that he had parted from the defense committee after the bitterest of quarrels. Sacco in a letter had addressed him as, “your implacable enemy.” Moore admitted to me that the men, themselves, had never admitted their guilt to him; and I began to wonder whether his present attitude and conclusions might not be the result of his broodings on his wrongs. This first thing I did when I got to Los Angeles was to see Lola Moore, Fred’s former wife, who had divorced him. She had been all through the four or five years of the case with him, and she expressed the greatest surprise, when I told her of Fred’s conclusion, saying that he had most positively not been of that opinion when had dropped the case and left Boston.

I faced the most difficult ethical problem of my life at this point. I had come to Boston with the announcement that I was going to write the truth about the case. If I had dropped the project it would have been universally said and believed that it was because I had decided the men were guilty. I had, of course, no first hand knowledge of the framing of their guilt, but I did have first hand knowledge of the framing of testimony. I decided that I would write the story on the basis of telling exactly what I knew. I could portray all sides, and show all the different groups and individuals telling what they knew and what they believed. I would take my stand on the point that the men had not been proved guilty, and that their trial had not been fair. That was all that the law required in order to prevent the execution, and it was all that my thesis required.

I put the problem up to Floyd Dell who happened to come out here, and he read the chapters which I had so far completed, and said that what I was doing was exactly correct. Of course, word spread among the committee in Boston what I was doing, and they flew into a panic, and I had a long string of horrified and indignant letters and telegrams. They strenuously denied that there had ever been any perjury in the case—which, of course, I knew to be perfectly absurd. They also denied that Sacco had ever been a terrorist—though on this point I was finally able to back Gardner Jackson down. I saw him in New York before the book went to press, and we went all over various scenes line by line, and argued for hours. Gardner admitted that I was all right about Sacco, but he claimed that I was doing Vanzetti an injustice. Charles Boni had listened to our discussion. I asked him his opinion, and he said that Gardner had admitted everything that I was claiming, and a little more. Vanzetti as a pacifist was a perfect absurdity, because I talked with a Socialist whom he had chased with a revolver, and young Brini told me of having witnessed a similar scene as a child in his home.

The rumors of Sacco’s guilt were very general in the Italian colonies in Boston, and there is no possible question that these rumors, brought to Thayer and Fuller and Lowell in a thousand forms by the police, were the real reason for the execution. When I was in New York last fall I made another effort to satisfy my own mind about the problem. I asked Roger Baldwin, who is, himself, an anarchist, and knows the whole crowd. He told me there was no possible doubt of the guilt of Sacco and Vanzetti, and that the militant anarchists had financed themselves that way for years, both here and abroad. They never took the money for themselves, but only for the movement, and this constituted them idealists and heroes from the point of view of extreme class war theories.

I then took this proposition to Robert Minor, who was an anarchist up to the time of the Russian revolution, and who knows the whole movement. Bob said that he had heard these rumors from the beginning, and had investigated them carefully, and was convinced that they were not true about Sacco and Vanzetti. He said he has never known a class war case of this sort in which there were not similar rumors, and people who will tell you all about it from the “inside.” Sometimes they are started by police agents and sometimes by a certain type of weak mined person who takes a pleasure in having the real inside story about a sensational mystery.

So you see that in the end I don’t really know any more about the thing than I did in the beginning, and can only take my stand as I did in “Boston,” upon the thesis that men should not be executed upon anybody’s rumors.

This letter is for yourself alone. Stick it away in your safe, and some time in the far distant future the world may know the real truth about the matter. I am here trying to make plain my own part in the story, and the basis of my seemingly contradictory moods and decisions.