by Adam Fisher
Alvy Ray Smith: So when David DiFrancesco and I got booted out of Xerox we had already cast our lots together for an NEA grant. And suddenly we didn’t have the basic instrument which was the frame buffer, the picture memory. Dick had the first one in the world, so we had to find the next one. We knew there was one was being built in Utah, so we went there and they looked at us, a couple of hippie freaks. They said, “You know we’re Department of Defense funded, but there was a rich guy who came through here and bought one of everything in sight—including the frame buffer.” It turned out to be Alex Schure out on Long Island.
Ed Catmull: He had this school funded by government money for Vietnam vets returning from Vietnam.
Alvy Ray Smith: New York Tech, or the “New York Institute of Technology,” as they are very careful to say these days.
Ed Catmull: And it was, at that time, not a particularly strong technical school except that he was willing to fund this lab. We weren’t really connected with the school other than being on the same property. And then the equipment arrived and we set up a computer room there and started programming. Then two more people showed up: this is Alvy Ray Smith and David DiFrancesco. So Alvy then became my third hire.
Alvy Ray Smith: We got ourselves out there and he snapped us up. He didn’t snap David up, he snapped me up. David again didn’t have a job.
Ed Catmull: It was a while later before I even hired David. So we had this equipment, and Alex would come in every day because he was just so excited about it. He also had an animation studio.
Alvy Ray Smith: So then Jim Clark shows up, and we hire him to build a head-mounted display for us. Because we all thought it was such a cool idea and he’d built the one at Utah, and so we wanted one of those. So he agreed to come. And Jim picked it up immediately that he wasn’t going to last.
Jim Clark: I was fired from NYIT, which led to my going to Stanford.
Alvy Ray Smith: He went off under this cloud—which was unfair in our opinion—to build a geometry engine and start Silicon Graphics and all that.
Butler Lampson: Jim Clark was at Xerox PARC, as an intern. He was obviously a hotshot, and had cool ideas about how to do graphics.
Jim Clark: I saw the Alto. I saw bitmap graphics the same year that Steve came through. Steve Jobs said, “I am going to put this into a personal computer,” and they made that little quaint box with the little tiny screen with bitmap graphics. I looked at the Alto and thought, This is boring. It’s just moving bits around! Why aren’t they doing 3-D graphics? I left that summer with a project that I began to implement, which subsequently led to Silicon Graphics. And Ed was, at that very moment, in negotiations with George Lucas to be hired.
Steve Jobs: Now George Lucas, who produced the Star Wars film trilogy, was a smart guy, and at one point when he had a lot of money coming in from these films, he realized that he ought to start a technology group.
Ralph Guggenheim: You have to understand this was ’79. So this was about a year or year and a half after the first Star Wars film came out in the summer of ’77. Everyone in the world thinks that George Lucas has got to be the most advanced, the most technological, superlative filmmaker ever. The visual effects in Star Wars were incredible.
John Lasseter: When that movie started you were swept away. By the end I was just shaking.
Ralph Guggenheim: That little computer-animated scene at the end with Luke shooting down the Death Star? It was astounding!
Jim Clark: We all left New York Institute of Technology pretty much en masse.
John Lasseter: Ed Catmull was hired in 1979 and asked to do three projects, with a fourth added by Ed. They were insane ideas at the time: digital nonlinear film editing, digital sound editing, digital optical printing, and 3-D computer animation, which is something that Ed brought with him.
Ed Catmull: For the first year I wasn’t allowed to bring anybody. They’d only had one successful film, and they didn’t want to overreach.
Ralph Guggenheim: George didn’t give Ed the go-ahead to hire anybody until Return of the Jedi came out in May of 1980, because if the film had opened poorly he didn’t want to be committed to spending a lot of money on a research group.
Ed Catmull: Finally, we were allowed to hire people, and so I brought in Alvy Ray Smith to head up the graphics group. And I brought in Andy Moorer to head up digital audio, and then Ralph Guggenheim from New York Tech to head up video editing. Andy Moorer built a digital audio processor, and then with Ralph we built a digital editing system.
Ralph Guggenheim: Just after Labor Day 1980, I show up at our office, which was not much of an office for a computer research group. It was in a renovated Laundromat in San Anselmo that George Lucas owned. So here we are in this Laundromat and we are supposed to write these papers, and the great irony is, there’s not a computer in sight anywhere in this building!
Alvy Ray Smith: So we decided to build this machine for George. It was basically a supercomputer for images.
Ed Catmull: The computer division was basically R&D. We were not part of Industrial Light and Magic. We had made some special effects. We did a minor special effect for the third Star Wars film, and then this major effect, which was for Star Trek II.
Tom Porter: The genesis effect for Star Trek II—that was a very technical piece of work. It was a bunch of camera movements. There were no characters walking around. There were no performances. There was no notion of character animation.
John Lasseter: The computer animation world at the time was primarily in university research labs. It was mostly TV commercials and mostly quite awful. Everything was made of stone and glass and very reflective and all that, because most of the stuff was being done by the people who created the software, and they loved mixing crazy imagery and then putting computer music to it.
Alvy Ray Smith: We decided we were going to show up at the next conference and show to the world that we did character animation—not flying logos and not special effects, but character animation. That’s what we wanted to do: deliver the first character animation.
Ed Catmull: We weren’t interested in flying logos. We wanted to have characters and objects come to life. And this is where John is the master.
John Lasseter: They brought me in to work on the very first 3-D computer animation of a character.
Alvy Ray Smith: And we knew what was going to happen. It was going to be an amazing event. And George Lucas was going to see it!
John Lasseter: It was called The Adventures of André and Wally B.
Alvy Ray Smith: The idea was that an android named André wakes up in this gorgeous landscape—and we knew we could do beautiful landscapes by then—and the sun is going to rise and he’s going to rise and stretch and welcome the new world of full character animation. It’s a terrible story. It’s really corny.
John Lasseter: I was the very first traditionally trained animator in the world who worked with computer animation. And I just blossomed! I thought to myself, You know what? I can make an object move around and give it personality and emotion through pure movement. It was so exciting: Every day you would go to work and there would be something new on the monitor, on the screen. Wow! That’s great!
Alvy Ray Smith: John really saved my bacon.
John Lasseter: André and Wally B. was a massive step forward. It was very cartoony, and people loved that. I remember one guy, who worked with a computer graphics company, coming up to me after a screening to ask what software I used to get the humor in!
Alvy Ray Smith: George hated it. And it just proved to him that we couldn’t do animation. We were a bunch of techies. Also about that time it was falling apart at Lucasfilm. George is chasing Linda Ronstadt around. Clearly his wife had already left. And in fact, as soon as he got divorced I went to Ed and said, “You know, George never really got us. And we’ve got forty people here that we need to support. He doesn’t have the money. He’s lost half his fortune overnight. He can’t afford us anymore. He’s going to fire us.”
Ralp
h Guggenheim: The management at Lucasfilm kept coming in and saying, “Look, we are going to shut this down because George can’t afford to spend more money on you research guys.”
Alvy Ray Smith: And one of the first questions to each other was, “Well, what are we going to do?” I knew we couldn’t do a movie. You know I had just done the numbers. I had run them as tightly as I could. And I got the wrong answer.
John Lasseter: Ed’s dream, even though he was doing all this other stuff, was always to do a computer-animated feature film.
Alvy Ray Smith: Everything was off by one crank of Moore’s law—Moore’s law being a factor of ten every five years. We needed another order of magnitude. We needed another five years. We couldn’t do a movie for five years so what were we going to do for five years? We had a prototype called a Pixar Image Computer. Let’s make a business out of that!
Ed Catmull: I thought, Okay, there is some basis for doing a Silicon Valley sort of start-up.
Alvy Ray Smith: Now this is two complete nerds saying this, we had no idea how to do a hardware manufacturing company. So we call up Jim Clark and he says, “It’s easy, but it will take you about a year to get it.”
Jim Clark: How do you tell a good friend: “Hey, you have got a shitty idea!” I was not going to tell them that.
Smith and Catmull had a prototype product—the Pixar Image Computer—and a plan that would allow them to spin out from Lucasfilm and continue on as an independent company, but they still needed a backer. The writing was on the wall at Lucasfilm. If they didn’t find a funder quickly, Lucas would simply cut his losses and fire the entire group. They crossed their fingers and reached out to Alan Kay.
Alan Kay: Alvy Ray called me up on the phone and said, “We’d like to get out of here. Have you got any ideas?” And I said, “Yeah, I do. I’ll go over and talk to Steve.” He was at NeXT then.
Alvy Ray Smith: Alan Kay was the chief scientist at Apple, before Steve got kicked out.
Alan Kay: So I went over and talked to Steve, and then I guess the next week or two weeks later Steve and I took a limo together up to San Rafael, and basically I spent a long time explaining to Steve just exactly who these people were.
Alvy Ray Smith: Alan Kay brought Steve up to Lucasfilm to meet us.
Alan Kay: They weren’t like any of the people he had working for him at Apple. This was like the first team. These are like first-class people of extreme talents: Take a good long look at what they are doing and see what you think and you know, don’t fuck around with these guys.
Ralph Guggenheim: Steve came up and saw what we were doing with the image computer and was very impressed.
Steve Jobs: Apple had been doing stuff with graphics at some level for ten years, but it was all 2-D. The 3-D stuff that Ed and his team were doing was way beyond what anybody else was doing. It was very exciting.
Tom Porter: What Steve appreciated in us was that we were looking out ten years. We had a clear goal: photorealistic imagery.
Ralph Guggenheim: He was probably putting together ideas for his NeXT machine and he thought, It can’t be a $100,000 box with ten circuit boards like you guys have now, but if we can shrink it down to maybe one card in my new computer? This could be awesome! This could really give me a competitive edge over anyone else in graphics. And he understood the value of being able to do graphics.
John Lasseter: Initially it was pure software and computer hardware that he was interested in.
Ralph Guggenheim: The animation thing? Pffft. He had no interest whatsoever.
Tom Porter: It wasn’t reachable. It wasn’t two or three years away.
Ralph Guggenheim: The story I was told was that there was a conference call between Steve and the execs at Lucasfilm, and you can imagine execs in a conference room with a speakerphone on the middle, and Steve’s on one end of the phone and all of these execs are trying to negotiate with him at the other end. Steve says something like, “I’ll give you five million dollars for the thing. I’m going to have to put in another five million dollars. That’s my offer!” And one of the execs undoubtedly said, “What! Five million? That’s not nearly enough.” And I was told that Steve said, “Fine, go fuck yourself!” and instead of going and fucking themselves they took the offer and they closed the deal.
George Lucas: We lost a ton of money on the computer division.
Yet, thanks to Jobs’s $10 million investment, the R&D group survived. It spun out from Lucasfilm to became an independent company: Pixar.
John Lasseter: Pixar had two lives: For the first ten years it was more of a technology company.
Tom Porter: At Pixar, in those early days, there were seventy people—that grew to be 120 people.
Ed Catmull: The Pixar Image Computer was the product when Pixar became a company.
Tom Porter: They were trying to figure out how to sell this thing for medical imaging, for satellite imaging.
Ralph Guggenheim: We were making short animated films on the side in the service of selling the box, and in service of building the reputation of the company, and in service of our own secret mission to make a feature-length film using computer animation.
Alvy Ray Smith: We sold a lot to three-letter agencies who did unknown things with them in DC, and to Disney.
Ralph Guggenheim: Disney were buying Image Computers to do their cel painting for them.
Ed Catmull: CAPS is what they called it.
Alvy Ray Smith: The problem was it was a bitch to program. The second problem was Moore’s law was going so fast in the background that by the time we got everything out to market, the standard computers—like a SUN or Silicon Graphic workstation—were fast enough to do it.
Tom Porter: Then Photoshop was written by the Knoll brothers, one of whom was at Industrial Light and Magic, who saw what the Pixar Image Computer could do and thought, This could be done on a Mac!
Alvy Ray Smith: But for a short number of years in there it was the fastest machine on the planet but we didn’t sell enough of them to carry the company.
Ed Catmull: Steve didn’t know anything about how to run our business; and neither did we. None of us had ever done this before. And because we didn’t have venture capitalists involved, nobody knew how to find the right people. We didn’t know what it meant to find a good sales or marketing person. We were all completely ignorant; and in a high-stakes game. So we had to learn a lot. And we made a bunch of mistakes.
Alvy Ray Smith: We’d run out of money. We did it about four or five times. We should have been dead. Any other company would have shut the doors.
Ed Catmull: I learned a lot, a great deal, and Steve learned a lot. Each of us were learning. And with all these mistakes, we came close to failing.
Alvy Ray Smith: Steve could not withstand the embarrassment of failing on his first event out of Apple. He just couldn’t. It was so embarrassing, so he would just write another check and eventually he had put $50 million in.
Ed Catmull: There were some really difficult times. And there were times that any one of us almost gave up.
Alvy Ray Smith: Steve tried again and again to sell the company. I wrote the business plans. If anybody had come in and made him whole on the $50 million he would have been out of there overnight. We should have gone broke.
Ed Catmull: And there were times it was, Okay, I can’t believe this is happening.
Ralph Guggenheim: Luxo Jr. was nominated for an Academy Award.
John Lasseter: Our short film from 1986 called Luxo Jr. is only a couple minutes long, and we were so limited by the lack of computer power that we couldn’t even give the characters a background. We just locked the camera down and had this wood floor that faded off to nothing.
Tom Porter: I doubt Luxo Jr., an artistic piece, rang any bells for Steve Jobs. There wasn’t any money in it. There wasn’t computing in it. Frankly, Luxo Jr. is not very high in visual complexity. It was a nice badge of honor, no question. But that in and of itself wasn’t the breakthrough.
Ralph Guggenh
eim: The next year Tin Toy won the Academy Award. Luxo Jr. and Tin Toy were huge hits and a big success for everybody except our computer hardware sales guys. They were pissed. We were getting all this credit for our animation but not for the hardware product. Even Steve was getting frustrated.
Ed Catmull: So Beauty and the Beast came out in 1991 and used all the software that we had written for CAPS and it was an incredible success. ’Ninety-one was also the year Terminator 2 came out, which also used our technology. So all of a sudden the two big moneymakers of the year made heavy use of technology and the whole industry just like yanked their head around: “Holy cow! Something is changing here!”
Clive Thompson: It marked a very weird shift in filmmaking. When you shoot a regular movie, you shoot with a camera, and all you get is what the camera’s eye sees. If you want to change things in postproduction, all you can really do is work with what light hit the camera lens. The thing that was revolutionary about Pixar is they were essentially generating an entire world—a virtual world—where they can move the camera anywhere they want, because it’s a virtual camera which they can fly around anywhere they want. So, they can shoot a scene, and look at it, and then decide, “Hey, let’s put the camera somewhere else.” Thus the camera becomes just another postproduction element. That’s a very jargon-y way of saying you create the scene—and then you figure out how you are going to look at it. That’s revolutionary, that’s a complete inversion of the way Hollywood movies had worked.