“Well,” said Katzenberg, “why don’t you start with the title?”
Lasseter paused and smiled. That was an easy one.
“It’s called Toy Story.”
Anaheim, California
September 10, 1993
It was a big day for John Lasseter. He had always dreamed of making a real movie and now he was working with a real movie star: Tom Hanks, the man who would be giving voice to Toy Story’s main character, a cowboy named “Woody.” Hanks stood in a small studio, its walls covered in foam and a lone microphone positioned above a music stand that held the script. Lasseter and the Pixar team watched from behind thick, soundproof glass. What was supposed to be one of the most memorable days of his life was quickly turning into one of the most disappointing.
“Who said your job was to think, spring-wiener?” Hanks’s Woody said to Slinky Dog. “If it wasn’t for me, Andy wouldn’t pay attention to you at all.”
Tom Hanks, almost unrecognizable from the weight he had lost for his role as an AIDS patient in Philadelphia, delivered the lines like a pro. In the scene they were working on, Woody throws his fellow toys out of the bed. In a later scene, Woody’s jealousy of Buzz Lightyear, their owner Andy’s new favorite toy, grows so intense that Woody pushes Buzz out the window, before coolly remarking, “Hey, it’s a toy-eat-toy world.” And in still another instance of insult “humor,” Woody tells Mr. Potato Head, “You want to be Mr. Mashed Potato Head? You button your lip!”
In the sound studio with headphones over his ears and a microphone hanging in front him, Hanks did his best to make Woody charming, even when Woody was behaving badly. But, after a while, Hanks peered through the glass looking for Lasseter, the smile vanishing from his face. “This guy’s a real jerk,” Hanks said.
Lasseter grimaced as he thought back to how Woody had evolved over the last two years. He had started out as a small tin wind-up toy, then he’d become a GI Joe–style soldier, and finally he had taken on the persona of a cowboy. But Woody had evolved in other ways as well, many of which worried Lasseter. When Pixar showed the Disney team new storyboards and early footage, Katzenberg kept demanding that Lasseter make Woody more “edgy.” Katzenberg issued edict after edict, tossing much of the Pixar team’s vision for the story out the window and insisting on a Woody who was devious, resentful, bellicose, a little spooky, mildly violent, and sometimes downright cruel. At one point in Katzenberg’s version of the story, a Slinky Dog toy asks a fellow toy, “Why is the cowboy so scary?”
Katzenberg explained to Lasseter and the team that there were two reasons for his edits. First, he believed Woody had to start out as the bad guy so that he could grow and evolve as a character. And second, he wanted a movie that appealed to adults as well as children.
Lasseter found Katzenberg’s reasoning highly dubious. Woody was the main character, and if he didn’t have heart, the movie wouldn’t have heart. Walt Disney had once said that “adults are only kids grown up,” and he’d endeavored to make movies that “create a believable world of dreams that appeals to all age groups.” That’s what Lasseter wanted to do with Toy Story. He didn’t want to talk down to kids, but he didn’t want to talk over their heads, either. His vision was to appeal to the child in everyone—to awaken that sometimes-sleeping, yet beautiful and universal spark of innocence and idealism.
That’s not, however, how Toy Story was turning out. And now, as Lasseter listened to Tom Hanks record Woody’s lines, he felt horrible about it. He was embarrassed by his movie, which, in reality, was no longer his movie.
For the second time in his life, Disney Animation had broken John Lasseter’s heart.
Anaheim, California
November, 19, 1993
John Lasseter sat in the private screening room on the Disney lot, surrounded by his Pixar animation team and Disney’s top executives. The first half of Toy Story had been produced, and it was finally time for Katzenberg and his deputies to screen it.
As Lasseter watched Woody in action, he was sure he was watching one of the most loathsome protagonists in cinematic history. It wasn’t long before everyone in the room agreed. The movie lacked any semblance of humor, emotion, or charm.
And, with that, it looked like Toy Story, and perhaps Pixar itself, were finished.
Point Richmond, California
December 1, 1994
“Please wake me up when you arrive in the morning,” Lasseter wrote on a Post-it note he put on his secretary’s desk.
It was 5 A.M., and he was planning to get a few hours of sleep on the couch in his office, just like he had every day since Thanksgiving. His bloodshot eyes had dark circles beneath them. He settled into the cushions and closed his eyes. Images of toy cowboys and spacemen raced through his mind.
Two and a half weeks earlier, after Disney had officially shut down production on Toy Story, Jobs and Lasseter had visited Katzenberg and successfully persuaded him to give Pixar one last chance. “Let us rewrite the script,” Lasseter had pleaded. “Give us three more weeks. At this point, you’ve got nothing to lose.”
The same could not be said for Pixar. If they couldn’t fix what was broken, Pixar would be facing enormous financial pressure. Even Jobs’s deep pockets may not be able to save them any longer.
Lasseter believed he had found a solution, but it meant scrapping Katzenberg’s edits and restoring Woody’s character to the Pixar team’s original vision for it. Lasseter decided to keep Woody’s early resentment of Andy’s affections for Buzz Lightyear, but he found ways to tone down Woody’s animosity and put it into better context. He started the movie with a new sequence, which was eventually set to the song “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” that showed the emotional bond between Woody and Andy before Buzz arrived. He removed all of Woody’s insults and domineering orders to his fellow toys, and transformed him into a wise, kindhearted platoon leader of a band of brothers.
When Buzz replaces Woody as Andy’s favorite toy, a musical montage pulls at viewers’ heartstrings as the relationship is seen from the point of view of Woody, who has lost not just his position at the top of the toy hierarchy, but his best friend Andy as well. And, although Woody is disappointed about losing his friend, he no longer resorts to violence. Instead of Woody’s pushing Buzz out a two-story window, Buzz is accidentally knocked out the window by a swinging Luxo lamp.
Lasseter felt incredible pressure to save Toy Story, but he also felt the joy of liberation. For years, Steve Jobs had given him unlimited creative control over movies like Tin Toy and Knick Knack, then Jeffrey Katzenberg had taken it all away. Now Lasseter had it back—and he was determined to never lose it again.
San Francisco, California
July 20, 1995
The film was being completed at a pace of about three minutes per week. One hundred and seventeen computers ran twenty-four hours a day churning out 110,000 frames that took anywhere between forty-five minutes and twenty hours to render.
During that painstakingly slow process, Jobs screened every minute of every scene—repeatedly. He loved to invite his friends over to his Woodside mansion to watch and rewatch the latest cuts. They all saw a lot of potential in the fractions of scenes they previewed, but Jobs knew that his friends didn’t see what he did. They couldn’t put it all together in their minds.
Not that Jobs cared. He had never spent much time worrying about what other people thought, and he was used to others being blind to possibilities that struck him as obvious.
In less than ten years, Jobs had lost $50 million on Pixar. Time and again, John Lasseter had come to him asking for another check to keep the company afloat, and time and again Jobs had given it to him. Jobs had pushed and challenged the Pixar team and sometimes lost his temper with them, but he had always supported them.
It had recently become easier for Jobs to write Pixar additional checks. It wasn’t because he had more capital—he had already spent on Pixar half of the money he had earned from cashing out his Apple stock ten years ago—but becaus
e Jobs now knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that Toy Story would save Pixar. The last screening had even warmed Katzenberg’s ice-cold heart.
It was Jobs’s faith in Toy Story that eventually led to this visit to his longtime lawyer, Larry Sonsini, in San Francisco. Sonsini had been an unlikely choice to help Jobs take Apple public back in 1980, but the success of that IPO had propelled Sonsini into the top ranks of West Coast securities lawyers. Now Jobs was back with another proposal.
“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.
Appendix
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 fram
ed. 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.