Imagine: How Creativity Works

  Uzzi’s data clearly demonstrates that the best Broadway shows were produced with intermediate levels of social intimacy. A musical

  produced at the ideal level of Q (2.6) was two and a half times more likely to be a commercial success than a musical produced with a low Q (3.2). It was also three times more likely to be lauded by the critics. This led Uzzi to argue that creative collaborations have a sweet spot: “The best Broadway teams, by far, were those with a mix of relationships,” Uzzi says. “These teams had some old friends, but they also had newbies. This mixture meant that the artists could interact efficiently — they had a familiar structure to fall back on — but they also managed to incorporate some new ideas. They were comfortable with each other, but they weren’t too comfortable.”

  Low Q

  Ideal Q

  High Q

  The most creative teams aim for the sweet spot of Q.

  Uzzi’s favorite example of intermediate Q is West Side Story, one of the most successful Broadway musicals of all time. In 1957, the play was seen as a radical departure from Broadway conventions, for both its willingness to tackle social problems and its extended dance scenes. At first, West Side Story might look like a play with a high Q, since several of its collaborators were already Broadway legends who had worked together before. The concept for the play emerged from a conversation among Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, and Arthur Laurents. But that conversation among old friends was only the beginning. As Uzzi points out, West Side Story also benefited from a crucial injection of unknown talent. A twenty-five-year-old lyricist named Stephen Sondheim was hired to write the words (even though he’d never worked on Broadway before), while Peter Gennaro, an assistant to Robbins, provided many important ideas for the choreography. “People have a tendency to want to only work with their friends,” says Uzzi. “It feels so much more comfortable. But that’s exactly the wrong thing to do. If you really want to make something great, then you’re going to need to seek out some new people too.”

  1.

  The screenwriter William Goldman in his memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade famously declared that “the single most important fact of the entire movie industry [is that] NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.” To demonstrate his point, Goldman cited a long list of Hollywood flops and surprise successes. For instance, one of the highest-grossing movies in history, Raiders of the Lost Ark, was offered to every studio in Hollywood, and every one of them turned it down except Paramount: “Why did Paramount say yes?” Goldman asks. “Because nobody knows anything. And why did all the other studios say no? Because nobody knows anything. And why did Universal, the mightiest studio of all, pass on Star Wars…? Because nobody, nobody — not now, not ever — knows the least goddam thing about what is or isn’t going to work at the box office.” Hollywood, in other words, is like a slot machine: every movie is a blind gamble.

  Pixar Animation Studios is the one exception to Goldman’s rule. Since 1995, when the first Toy Story was released, Pixar has created eleven feature films. Every one of those films has been a commercial success, with an average international gross of more than $550 million per film. These blockbusters have also been critical darlings; the studio has collected twenty-four Academy Awards, six Golden Globes, and three Grammys. Since 2001, when the Oscars inaugurated the category of Best Animated Feature, every Pixar film has been nominated; five of those films have taken home the statue.

  The only way to understand Pixar’s success is to understand its unique creative process, which has slowly evolved over the course of its thirty-year history. Before Pixar was a movie studio, it was a computer manufacturer. The roots of the company date to 1980, when the director George Lucas started a computer division within Lucasfilm, his movie production firm. At the time, Lucasfilm was flush with profit from Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, and George Lucas was interested in exploring the possibility of using these new machines to create cinematic special effects. (All of the effects for Star Wars had been done manually; the lightsabers, for instance, were painted onto each frame of film.) And so, in 1980, Lucas hired Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, two computer scientists who specialized in the creation of digital imagery.

  Although Lucas was funding this avant-garde research, he showed little interest in using special effects in his films. In fact, the first cinematic application of this new technology came in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, when the camera swooped onto the surface of a distant planet. “That was our big break,” Smith remembers. “It took a long time to make just a few seconds of film, but I was jazzed right to the teeth about what we’d done. We showed that even these slow machines could make something that looked pretty remarkable.”

  But Catmull and Smith weren’t content to work on short digital illusions; they wanted to make their own feature film, an animated movie that would be created entirely on the computer. Unfortunately, Lucas had no intention of letting his scientists become filmmakers. As a result, Catmull and Smith had to shroud their animation project in secrecy. Their first hire was a Disney animator named John Lasseter, who was given the vague official title of user-interface designer. Catmull and Smith had been working on a short cartoon called The Adventures of André and Wally B — it featured a character being woken by a pesky bumblebee — and Lasseter immediately made several major changes. He replaced the rigid geometry of circles and squares with more varied shapes and injected some comedy into the interactions of André and the insect. “It was very clear from the beginning that John was a master storyteller,” says Catmull, who is the current president of Disney Animation Studios and Pixar. “He had a skill set that we desperately needed. And so we basically listened to everything he had to say.”

  While André was a technical triumph — it’s widely celebrated for spurring interest in computer animation among the major Hollywood studios — George Lucas was getting tired of funding a bunch of computer geeks and their expensive mainframes. Enter Steve Jobs. At the time, Jobs was still smarting from being forced out of Apple, and he saw the computer division at Lucasfilm as a potential investment. But Jobs wasn’t that interested in animation. He was drawn to the Pixar Image Computer, a $135,000 machine capable of generating complex graphic visualizations. (Catmull and Smith justified their cartoons as marketing tools that showed off the power of the hardware.) In 1986, Jobs bought the computer division for $10 million from Lucasfilm. The new company was named after its only product: Pixar.

  Unfortunately, the expensive computers were a commercial flop. (“We were just a little too far ahead of the curve,” says Smith. “People weren’t ready to spend that much money on a computer that could only produce pictures.” ) Jobs was forced to extend a personal line of credit to Pixar, which was losing millions of dollars every year. Meanwhile, Catmull and Smith were scrambling to bring in revenue, if only to keep their creative team together. The two scientists soon came up with a plan: they would start producing commercials. While the technology wasn’t yet ready for a feature film — the computers were still too slow — the Pixar machines could efficiently render fifteen-second television spots. Before long, Lasseter was animating ads for Listerine, Lifesavers, Volkswagen, and Trident gum. It wasn’t particularly fulfilling work, but it paid the bills.

  Despite these financial struggles, a unique creative culture was developing within Pixar. This culture was defined by the free flow of ideas, by the constant interaction between computer scientists and cartoon animators. At first, these interactions were a byproduct of the technology, which remained so fraught with problems that each short film became an endless negotiation. Was this irregular shape possible to animate? What could be done about motion blur? How could a facial expression become more expressive? Because Pixar was inventing its own art form, every aesthetic decision had technical consequences, and these would then require more artistic tweaks. “In those early days, we had no idea what we were doing,” says Bobby Podesta, a supervising animator. “We were groping in the dark. That meant we needed to consta
ntly consult the computer guys — ‘Can you do this? What about this?’ — and then push them when they said it couldn’t be done. It became this never-ending conversation where we were all trying to figure out what was even possible.”

  To help sell the hardware, Pixar continued making short films. The most impressive was Tin Toy, a story about a wind-up toy running away from a baby. Lasseter was inspired to make the short after watching a home video of his nephew: “The video was half an hour of him just sitting there, playing with his toys,” Lasseter says. “Everything he picked up went into his mouth, and he slobbered all over it. I thought, Ahh, imagine what it must be like to be a toy in the hands of a baby. That baby must seem like a monster. And that idea is where Tin Toy came from.” Tin Toy was such a critical success — it became the first computer-animated film to win an Oscar — that Disney Studios decided to collaborate with Pixar on a feature film, one that would also revolve around the emotional relationship between a toy and its owner. The working title of the movie was Toy Story, if only because nobody could think of anything better. “This was our big break,” says Catmull. “But it was also pretty intimidating. We were used to making short commercials, not an eighty-two-minute film.”

  At the time, Disney pressured Pixar to create a separate production company for Toy Story. This was standard Hollywood procedure: “Everybody told us that when you made a movie, you formed a company within a company and separated out the cultures,” Catmull says. “We’d never made a movie before, so what did we know? We came up with a name” — the production company was going to be called Hi-Tech Toons — “and even printed up stationery. But then I went to John [Lasseter] and showed him the logo and stuff, and he said ‘That’s a really bad idea.’ So we canceled the plans. We told all the Hollywood people we were going to do it our way.”

  The reason Pixar decided against an independent production company was that it didn’t want to place any constraints on the interactions of its employees. Pixar realized that its creativity emerged from its culture of collaboration, its ability to get talented people from diverse backgrounds to work together. (Lasseter describes the equation this way: “Technology inspires art, and art challenges the technology.”) While the studio was determined to hire gifted animators and ingenious computer scientists, it was just as determined to get these new hires to interact with one another and with older, more experienced employees. The meritocracy needed to mingle. Of course, the only way to cultivate this kind of collaboration — the right level of Q — was to have everyone in the same building, and not scattered among various spinoffs and independent entities. “The modern Hollywood approach was to put together a team for one project and then disband the team when production was finished,” Catmull says. “But we thought that was dumb. When it comes down to it, the only way to make a good movie is to have a good team. The current view in Hollywood, in contrast, is that movies are all about ideas, and that a good idea is rarer and more valuable than good people. That’s why there are so many copycat movies: everyone is chasing the same concept. But that’s a fundamentally misguided approach. A mediocre team will screw up a good idea. But if you give a mediocre idea to a great team and let them work together, they’ll find a way to succeed.”

  2.

  Pixar Animation Studios is set in an old Del Monte canning factory just north of Oakland. The studio originally planned to build something else, an architectural design that called for three buildings, with separate offices for the computer scientists, animators, and management. While the layout was cost-effective — the smaller, specialized buildings were cheaper to build — Steve Jobs scrapped the plan. (“We used to joke that the building was Steve’s movie,” Catmull says. “He really oversaw everything.”) Before long, Jobs had completely reimagined the studio. Instead of three buildings, there was going to be a single vast space with an airy atrium at its center. “The philosophy behind this design is that it’s good to put the most important function at the heart of the building,” Catmull says. “Well, what’s our most important function? It’s the interaction of our employees. That’s why Steve put a big empty space there. He wanted to create an open area for people to always be talking to each other.”

  But Jobs realized that it wasn’t enough simply to create an airy atrium; he needed to force people to go there. Jobs began with the mailboxes, which he shifted to the lobby. Then he moved the meeting rooms to the center of the building, followed by the cafeteria and coffee bar and gift shop. But that still wasn’t enough, which is why Jobs eventually decided to locate the only set of bathrooms in the atrium. “At first, I thought this was the most ridiculous idea,” says Darla Anderson, an executive producer on several Pixar films. “I have to go to the bathroom every thirty minutes. I didn’t want to have to walk all the way to the atrium every time I needed to go. That’s just a waste of time. But Steve said, ‘Everybody has to run into each other.’ He really believed that the best meetings happened by accident, in the hallway or parking lot. And you know what? He was right. I get more done having a bowl of cereal and striking up a conversation or walking to the bathroom and running into unexpected people than I do sitting at my desk.” Brad Bird, the director of The Incredibles and Ratatouille, agrees: “The atrium initially might seem like a waste of space . . . But Steve realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.”

  And it’s not just the atrium; the atmosphere of interaction is evident all across the campus. When I visited the studio, during the final, frantic days of production on Toy Story 3, it seemed as if every common space echoed with conversation. There was, as Jobs predicted, plenty of chatter inside the bathroom (I eavesdropped on two animators talking about the dirt on Lotso the Bear’s fur while washing their hands at the sink.), but there were also crowds talking in the coffee bar about the Randy Newman soundtrack, and large groups sharing jokes over plates of Thai curry at the Luxo Café. I saw people collaborating in the art gallery and listened to animators talk shop while sitting in their Barcaloungers. (In the evenings, the social activity transitions to the bars — there are eleven drinking holes on the Pixar campus.) And then there’s Pixar University, a collection of 110 different classes, from creative writing to comic improv, that are offered to all employees. The classes are filled with a diverse group of students, so John Lasseter might learn how to juggle in the atrium alongside a security guard. The Latin crest of Pixar University says it all: Alienus Non Diutius, which means “alone no longer.”

  The sociologist Ray Oldenburg referred to such gathering spots as “third places,” which he defined as any interactive environment that is neither the home (the first place) nor the office (the second place). These shared areas have played an outsize role in the history of new ideas, from the coffeehouses of eighteenth-century England where citizens gathered to discuss chemistry and radical politics, to the Left Bank bars of modernist Paris frequented by Picasso and Gertrude Stein. The virtue of these third places, Oldenburg says, is that they bring together a diversity of talent, allowing people to freely interact while ingesting some caffeine or alcohol. What makes the Pixar studios so unique is that these spaces have become part of the office itself. There are cubicles and desktops, of course, but there are also whiskey lounges and espresso bars. The end result is a workplace filled with the clutter of human voices, the soundtrack of an effective third place.

  While such interactions might seem incidental and inefficient — the kind of casual encounters that detract from productivity — Pixar takes them extremely seriously. The studio knows that the small talk of employees isn’t a waste of time, and that those random conversations are a constant source of good ideas. This is because Pixar has internalized one of the most important lessons of group creativity, which is that the most innovative teams are a mixture of the familiar and the unexpected, just like those Broadway artists making West Side Story. (The company 3M and Google both promote a similar etho
s by emphasizing horizontal interactions.) Although most people at Pixar work in tight-knit teams, the culture of the studio encourages them to chat with colleagues working on completely unrelated projects. “We think a lot about the geography of where people are sitting and how the offices are laid out,” Anderson says. “Part of my job [as a producer] is to make sure everyone is smooshing together. If I don’t see lots of smooshing, I get worried.” If Anderson knows that an animator will be working on a technical aspect of the film, she’ll place him at the end of a corridor filled with computer scientists. If a writer is struggling with a scene involving a certain character, then Anderson will make sure the writer bumps into the animators drawing that same character. “The assumption is that a few of those random talks in the hallway are going to be really useful,” she says. “Most of them won’t be, of course. They’ll just be talking about their kids or football or whatever. But every once in a while that random conversation is going to lead to a breakthrough.”