The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company by David A. Price
The Pixar story owes more to Silicon Valley than Hollywood. And that's entirely appropriate since Pixar started out as a hardware/software vendor. Pixar's nominal mission was building machines and software that would create new standards for graphics-intensive apps in fields like industrial design and medical imaging.
Well, sort-of. It's complicated.
It's hard to think of a road to success more twisted and less predetermined than the one traveled by Pixar. After the success of the first Star Wars film, George Lucas aimed his tractor-beam at a team of east coast academics who were making some big strides in the area of computer graphics.
Lucas wanted to modernize film production and special effects work. The shiny, futuristic worlds of Star Wars and Blade Runner were put together with "wire, tape and rubber bands." Not a lot had changed since the days of George Melies.
Disney's Tron may have latched onto the sci-fi revival Lucas started, but the effects work in the first three Star Wars films had more in common with the mechanical wonders of George Pal and Ray Harryhausen.
Initially at least, Lucas was apparently more interested in developing digital technology as an editing and compositing tool. The idea that you might be able to create an entire film - a whole world even - without a physical camera was something of an afterthought.
The problem was Lucas never really knew how to monetize what was essentially a highly specialized research and development team. Pixar was burning through a lot of cash with little to show for it besides a series of clever animated demo films with zero commercial prospects.
But the animated shorts are the real starting point - technically and emotionally - that led slowly and surely to Toy Story, the Incredibles and Finding Nemo backpacks.
Most computer graphics demo films at the time were strictly eye-candy - visual displays of dense theories and research papers - but with former Disney animator John Lasseter on their team, the Pixar demos were major crowd-pleasers, actual films with stories and characters.
Lucas bailed after an expensive divorce and the mounting costs associated with Skywalker Ranch.
Enter Steve Jobs. Jobs was recently ousted from Apple and had a boatload of cash and a lot of time on his hands to micro-manage. The problem was that no one seemed too interested in what Pixar had to sell. Jobs and company had a vague notion that if they created a toolbox of advanced graphics and animation tools somebody would find a way to use them.
Pixar might have ended up a niche hardware company selling whiz-bang boxes to industrial design and medical imaging firms if Lasseter's animated shorts didn't attract so much attention. Maybe Steve Jobs had a vision of Pixar technologies eventually becoming some kind of PC standard but most of the folks there wanted to make feature films from the start. Even the die-hard techies saw this as the ultimate endgame.
Jobs comes across as a bit of a tool in the book but that's not really anything new. Maybe my notion of the Mac vs. Microsoft schism always paints Mr. Turtleneck as some kind of contemplative Flash Gordon at war with Bill Gates Ming the Merciless, but the dude was a scheming bastard from day one. He basically dicked all the early Pixar folks into giving up their equity stakes in exchange for his continuing to bankroll the operation. Like I said, this book is really more about the biz machinations of Pixar, not the creative vision and Jobs' is front and center for most of it. John Lasseter isn't exactly absent here but his importance to contemporary Pixar is something that developed over time as the company changed focus.
Jobs may have come to the table with business acumen and determination but guys like Lasseter are what made Pixar what it is today. I thought I heard rumblings about Lasseter doing his own book a few years back. Let's hope we can hear his take on the Pixar story eventually.
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