When the NeXT computer finally went on sale in mid-1989, the factory was primed to churn out ten thousand units a month. As it turned out, sales were about four hundred a month. The beautiful factory robots, so nicely painted, remained mostly idle, and NeXT continued to hemorrhage cash.
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CHAPTER NINETEEN
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PIXAR
Technology Meets Art
Lucasfilm’s Computer Division When Jobs was losing his footing at Apple in the summer of 1985, he went for a walk with Alan Kay, who had been at Xerox PARC and was then an Apple Fellow. Kay knew that Jobs was interested in the intersection of creativity and technology, so he suggested they go see a friend of his, Ed Catmull, who was running the computer division of George Lucas’s film studio. They rented a limo and rode up to Marin County to the edge of Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch, where Catmull and his little computer division were based. “I was blown away, and I came back and tried to convince Sculley to buy it for Apple,” Jobs recalled. “But the folks running Apple weren’t interested, and they were busy kicking me out anyway.”
The Lucasfilm computer division made hardware and software for rendering digital images, and it also had a group of computer animators making shorts, which was led by a talented cartoon-loving executive named John Lasseter. Lucas, who had completed his first Star Wars trilogy, was embroiled in a contentious divorce, and he needed to sell off the division. He told Catmull to find a buyer as soon as possible.
After a few potential purchasers balked in the fall of 1985, Catmull and his colleague Alvy Ray Smith decided to seek investors so that they could buy the division themselves. So they called Jobs, arranged another meeting, and drove down to his Woodside house. After railing for a while about the perfidies and idiocies of Sculley, Jobs proposed that he buy their
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Lucasfilm division outright. Catmull and Smith demurred: They wanted an investor, not a new owner.
But it soon became clear that there was a middle ground: Jobs could buy a majority of the division and serve as chairman but allow Catmull and Smith to run it.
“I wanted to buy it because I was really into computer graphics,” Jobs recalled. “I realized they were way ahead of others in combining art and technology, which is what I’ve always been interested in.” He offered to pay Lucas $5 million plus invest another $5
million to capitalize the division as a stand-alone company. That was far less than Lucas had been asking, but the timing was right. They decided to negotiate a deal.
The chief financial officer at Lucasfilm found Jobs arrogant and prickly, so when it came time to hold a meeting of all the players, he told Catmull, “We have to establish the right pecking order.” The plan was to gather everyone in a room with Jobs, and then the CFO
would come in a few minutes late to establish that he was the person running the meeting. “But a funny thing happened,” Catmull recalled. “Steve started the meeting on time without the CFO, and by the time the CFO walked in Steve was already in control of the meeting.”
Jobs met only once with George Lucas, who warned him that the people in the division cared more about making animated movies than they did about making computers. “You know, these guys are hell-bent on animation,” Lucas told him. Lucas later recalled, “I did warn him that was basically Ed and John’s agenda.
I think in his heart he bought the company because that was his agenda too.”
The final agreement was reached in January 1986. It provided that, for his $10 million investment, Jobs would own 70% of the company, with the rest of
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the stock distributed to Ed Catmull, Alvy Ray Smith, and the thirty-eight other founding employees, down to the receptionist. The division’s most important piece of hardware was called the Pixar Image Computer, and from it the new company took its name.
For a while Jobs let Catmull and Smith run Pixar without much interference. Every month or so they would gather for a board meeting, usually at NeXT
headquarters, where Jobs would focus on the finances and strategy. Nevertheless, by dint of his personality and controlling instincts, Jobs was soon playing a stronger role. He spewed out a stream of ideas—some reasonable, others wacky—about what Pixar’s hardware and software could become. And on his occasional visits to the Pixar offices, he was an inspiring presence. “I grew up a Southern Baptist, and we had revival meetings with mesmerizing but corrupt preachers,” recounted Alvy Ray Smith. “Steve’s got it: the power of the tongue and the web of words that catches people up. We were aware of this when we had board meetings, so we developed signals—nose scratching or ear tugs—for when someone had been caught up in Steve’s distortion field and he needed to be tugged back to reality.”
Jobs had always appreciated the virtue of integrating hardware and software, which is what Pixar did with its Image Computer and rendering software. It also produced creative content, such as animated films and graphics. All three elements benefited from Jobs’s combination of artistic creativity and technological geekiness. “Silicon Valley folks don’t really respect Hollywood creative types, and the Hollywood folks think that tech folks are people you hire and never have to meet,” Jobs later said. “Pixar was one place where both cultures were respected.”
Initially the revenue was supposed to come from
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the hardware side. The Pixar Image Computer sold for $125,000. The primary customers were animators and graphic designers, but the machine also soon found specialized markets in the medical industry (CAT scan data could be rendered in three-dimensional graphics) and intelligence fields (for rendering information from reconnaissance flights and satellites). Because of the sales to the National Security Agency, Jobs had to get a security clearance, which must have been fun for the FBI agent assigned to vet him. At one point, a Pixar executive recalled, Jobs was called by the investigator to go over the drug use questions, which he answered unabashedly. “The last time I used that . . . ,” he would say, or on occasion he would answer that no, he had actually never tried that particular drug.
Jobs pushed Pixar to build a lower-cost version of the computer that would sell for around $30,000. He insisted that Hartmut Esslinger design it, despite protests by Catmull and Smith about his fees. It ended up looking like the original Pixar Image Computer, which was a cube with a round dimple in the middle, but it had Esslinger’s signature thin grooves.
Jobs wanted to sell Pixar’s computers to a mass market, so he had the Pixar folks open up sales offices
—for which he approved the design—in major cities, on the theory that creative people would soon come up with all sorts of ways to use the machine. “My view is that people are creative animals and will figure out clever new ways to use tools that the inventor never imagined,” he later said. “I thought that would happen with the Pixar computer, just as it did with the Mac.” But the machine never took hold with regular consumers. It cost too much, and there were not many software programs for it.
On the software side, Pixar had a rendering program, known as Reyes (Renders everything you
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ever saw), for making 3-D graphics and images. After Jobs became chairman, the company created a new language and interface, named RenderMan, that it hoped would become a standard for 3-D graphics rendering, just as Adobe’s PostScript was for laser printing.
As he had with the hardware, Jobs decided that they should try to find a mass market, rather than just a specialized one, for the software they made. He was never content to aim only at the corporate or high-end specialized markets. “He would have these great visions of how RenderMan could be for everyman,”
recalled Pam Kerwin, Pixar’s marketing director. “He kept coming up with ideas about how ordinary people would use it to make amazing 3-D graphics and photorealistic images.” The Pixar team would try to dissuade him by saying that RenderMan was not as easy to use as, say, Excel or Adobe Illustrator. Then Jobs would go to a whiteboard and show them how to make it simpler and more user-friendly. “We would be nodding our heads and getting excited and say, ‘Yes, yes, this will be great!’” Kerwin recalled. “And then he would leave and we would consider it for a moment and then say, ‘What the heck was he thinking!’ He was so weirdly charismatic that you almost had to get deprogrammed after you talked to him.” As it turned out, average consumers were not craving expensive software that would let them render realistic images.
RenderMan didn’t take off.
There was, however, one company that was eager to automate the rendering of animators’ drawings into color images for film. When Roy Disney led a board revolution at the company that his uncle Walt had founded, the new CEO, Michael Eisner, asked what role he wanted. Disney said that he would like to revive the company’s venerable but fading animation department.
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One of his first initiatives was to look at ways to computerize the process, and Pixar won the contract. It created a package of customized hardware and software known as CAPS, Computer Animation Production System. It was first used in 1988 for the final scene of The Little Mermaid, in which King Triton waves good-bye to Ariel. Disney bought dozens of Pixar Image Computers as CAPS became an integral part of its production.
Animation
