To Pixar and Beyond

by Lawrence Levy

  “Don’t worry about Pixar’s location yet,” she suggested. “I wouldn’t dismiss the opportunity out of hand. Check it out. It’s not time for a decision yet.”

  I arranged a meeting at Pixar and a few days later set out for my visit. As I approached San Francisco on Highway 101, I could see its impressive skyline appear before me: the rolling hills densely filled with homes, the broad cluster of shining office buildings in the financial district, the low clouds on the coast side that would burn off later in the day. It was a dramatic and stunning approach. As the highway split into two directions, one leading through the city toward the Golden Gate Bridge, the other heading onto the Bay Bridge toward Berkeley on the other side of the bay, I moved to the right lanes for the Bay Bridge.

  The beauty of the city suddenly gave way to the reality of the clogged lanes merging onto the Bay Bridge. As I drove over the aging spans, I couldn’t help but think of the Loma Prieta earthquake that five years earlier, in 1989, had caused part of the bridge to collapse, killing one person among the almost sixty who died in that earthquake. The surreal images of the slice of road that had fallen down from the top part of the bridge became alarmingly fresh as I thought about crossing that bridge every day. Once across, I could see the traffic build up on the other side of the road as the cars coming into San Francisco stopped at the long line of tollbooths. The backup seemed to last for miles. This would be my drive home. My worst fears were confirmed. How could I take a job with a commute this horrendous?

  It was small consolation that if I did this drive every day, I’d certainly have time to listen to the radio. Bill Clinton was president and the Democratic Party had just lost control of Congress in the midterm elections. The news was abuzz about a coming showdown between Congress and the president. There was also plenty of good music to hear. My car radio had been playing Whitney Houston, Boyz II Men, Mariah Carey, and Céline Dion. Elton John’s “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” from the past summer’s smash film The Lion King was also a hit. But no matter how much I was interested in the news, or enjoyed pop music, my plan was not to sit in the car listening to them for two or three hours a day.

  Even worse, as out of the way as Point Richmond was, there was nothing to make up for it in terms of scenery. When arranging the interview, I had heard Pixar’s after-hours answering machine proudly proclaim that Pixar was “across the street from the refinery.” That was no understatement. Pixar was literally across the street from a Chevron oil refinery. I could see the tall smokestacks and mass of machinery and pipes.

  Things did not appear much better as I pulled into Pixar’s parking lot, in which spaces were scant. Pixar was in a one-story, ordinary office building with no remarkable features. Its lobby was equally unremarkable, small, poorly lit, with a display case against one wall that showcased some of Pixar’s awards. It could not have been more of a contrast from the contemporary, sleek offices where Steve worked at NeXT. As I entered the main door, I thought to myself, “This is it? This is Pixar?”

  My host for the day was Ed Catmull, cofounder of Pixar. Pixar’s other cofounder, Alvy Ray Smith, had left the company a few years earlier. Ed had been recruited by George Lucas in 1979 to start the computer division of Lucasfilm that would eventually be spun off as Pixar. As Ed’s assistant walked me back to his office, I noticed how dreary the place seemed: a worn carpet, plain walls, and poor lighting. Ed’s office was a good size, with a wall of windows on one side and a large bookcase on the other. I glanced at books on math, physics, animation, and computer graphics. Ed had a desk at the far end of the office, and a couch at the other. He invited me to sit on the couch, and he pulled up a chair to sit across from me.

  Ed was a little shy of fifty, with a slight build and a thin beard. He had a quiet, even demeanor, authoritative and inquisitive at the same time. He asked me about my background and experience, told me a little of Pixar’s history, then the conversation turned to Pixar’s present situation.

  “As you know,” Ed said, “we’re making a feature film due out in November. We’re also selling RenderMan software and making commercials. But we don’t really have a business plan for building the company. We could really use some help sorting that out.”

  “How does Pixar fund its business now?” I asked.

  Ed explained how it was very much just month to month. Disney paid for film production costs while sales of RenderMan software and animated commercials brought in some revenues. That wasn’t enough to cover Pixar’s expenses, though.

  “How do you cover the shortfall?” I asked.

  “Steve,” Ed explained. “Every month we go to Steve and tell him the amount of the shortfall, and he writes us a check.”

  That caught me by surprise. I understood that Steve was funding Pixar, but I hadn’t expected it to be in the form of a personal check each month. Normally an investor puts in enough money to last six months, a year, or even more. Going to an investor every month for money was unusual, and probably not much fun, judging from my knowledge of investors in companies that were running out of cash.

  Ed shifted just a bit in his chair and added, “It’s not an easy conversation to have with Steve.”

  “Not an easy conversation” was an understatement. Ed explained that getting Steve to approve Pixar’s spending could be torturous. I got the sense that Ed had grown to dread it.

  “Why is it so hard?” I asked.

  “When Pixar was spun out from Lucasfilm, Steve wanted to invest in a hardware company,” Ed explained. “We were developing a high-end imaging computer. Animation was merely a way to showcase the technology. In 1991, we shut down Pixar’s hardware division.”

  This was my first real glimpse into the details of Pixar’s history. My meeting with Steve had focused more on the future than the past.

  “Steve never had his heart set on a company that was telling stories,” Ed went on. “He’s resisted it. It’s been a struggle to keep investing in story and animation.”

  I had not realized that Pixar had morphed so drastically away from Steve’s initial vision. Pixar’s history was starting to look a lot more checkered than I had imagined.

  “So, he doesn’t support what you’re doing?” I asked.

  “He does now,” Ed said. “Steve was on board when we negotiated with Disney to make a feature film. He was a big help in making it happen. But he still gets frustrated at having to keep funding the rest of Pixar.”

  “How much has he invested in the company?” I asked.

  “Close to fifty million,” Ed said.

  Fifty million! That was a huge number by Silicon Valley start-up standards. No wonder Steve griped when he had to put in more.

  I enjoyed talking to Ed. He wasn’t pulling any punches with me on our first meeting, even though what he was saying wasn’t making me feel great about this opportunity. Pixar felt like a company that had meandered from here to there but never found its way. Why would I join a company that had been struggling for sixteen years and whose payroll was paid every month out of the personal checkbook of its owner? If I became CFO, it would be me going to Steve for that money every month. That didn’t seem like a lot of fun.

  I found Ed to be thoughtful, smart, and easy to talk to. His reputation in the computer graphics industry was stellar; he was definitely someone from whom I could learn, and with whom I’d enjoy working. But that wouldn’t be enough. I had not realized how dire Pixar’s financial situation was. It had no cash, no reserves, and it depended for its funds on the whim of a person whose reputation for volatility was legendary. True, I didn’t yet have an offer for this job, so it wasn’t as if I even had a choice to make. But I felt myself less and less certain that if I did, it would make any sense to take it.

  It was also becoming clear that even if Steve had embraced Pixar’s moves into doing more stories and content, he hadn’t set out to do that. I knew that his well-publicized efforts to make a new computer at NeXT had failed. I hadn’t known that his original vision for Pixar had also flou
ndered. This meant that both of Steve’s bold attempts to make computers after his departure from Apple had gone nowhere. It felt like he had two strikes against him. One more and he might be out for good.

  We were interrupted by Ed’s assistant, who put her head in the doorway.

  “The screening room is ready,” she said.

  “Let’s head over there,” Ed said. “We’ll show you what we’ve been doing.”

  2

  Good Soldiers

  The entrance to Pixar’s screening room was an unremarkable door in one of the main hallways that ran through Pixar’s offices. Behind it was a windowless, darkened auditorium. The room was about the size of a small theater, like one might find at the back end of a local cinema multiplex. At one end, to the right, was a big screen. At the other end, to the left, was a room with a window, behind which I imagined was a film projector. It was what was in between that was surprising. Instead of traditional rows of viewing seats, the room was filled with rows of old couches and armchairs. It looked like someone had picked up furniture left at the end of driveways to be given away and had dumped it all in this room. It seemed comfortable, the kind of place where you might take an afternoon nap, but was this the mission central of a studio doing serious work?

  “This is our screening room,” Ed noted. “Every day the animators gather here with John Lasseter to review their latest work on our film.”

  Ed invited me to take a seat and said he’d like to show me some of Pixar’s earlier work first. The lights went down and two of Pixar’s short films were played on the big screen, Luxo Jr. and Tin Toy. Luxo Jr. was about the relationship between two lamps, a parent and a child. Tin Toy was about a one-man-band toy trying to escape from a baby. It had won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1988. Both of these films were a marvel of computer graphics and whimsy. They illustrated the beginnings and the evolution of computer animation. They had elements that were simple about them, even crude, but I found myself drawn into the plot, actually rooting for a lamp and a toy.

  Next up was the main event, a screening of a few minutes from the beginning of Pixar’s first feature-length film project. Ed explained that it didn’t have a final name yet but went by its working title, Toy Story. There were many caveats.

  “Keep in mind that not all the scenes you will see are completed,” Ed cautioned. “Some of the animation isn’t done, so you’ll see a few characters moving across the scene as solid blocks. The lighting isn’t complete, so you’ll see dark or awkwardly lit spots. And not all the voices are final; some are makeshift stand-ins by Pixar employees.”

  With that, the lights in the room went black, I settled into my armchair, and the film began to roll.

  “Pull my string. The birthday party’s today,” were Woody’s first words. Woody, a computer-animated cowboy doll sitting on the computer-animated bed of his computer-animated owner, Andy.

  In the next few minutes, in this ramshackle theater, in this unremarkable building across from an oil refinery, in this company that was hanging by a shoestring, I witnessed a level of creative and technical wizardry that I could never have imagined.

  The beginning of the film takes place in the bedroom of a little boy named Andy whose birthday party is that day. The bedroom is a typical boy’s room, with blue wallpaper dotted with white clouds and toys strewn all around. Except for one detail. When the humans aren’t around, the toys come alive. And today they are in a panic over being replaced by Andy’s new birthday presents.

  Woody, Andy’s favorite toy, is the ringleader, trying to calm everyone down. There is a moment when Woody sends a troop of little green army men to scout out Andy’s birthday presents. In this sequence, the army men are approaching the door of Andy’s kitchen when they hear Andy’s mom coming and must freeze in place so she does not see they are alive. Andy’s mom opens the door, notices that Andy has carelessly left his now-lifeless plastic army men strewn all about, accidentally steps on one of them, and kicks the rest aside. In that moment, when she steps on that soldier . . . in that moment as I sat in that theater . . . in that moment something happened that I would never have imagined. I cared about that plastic soldier.

  I cringed at seeing the soldier injured, and I needed to know if it was okay. A few seconds later, the toy army men are up and about again. The stepped-on soldier is wounded but okay. He tells the others to go on without him, only to hear his comrade say, “A good soldier never leaves a man behind,” and he carries him to safety.

  “My goodness!” I thought to myself. “What is this?”

  The clip ends when the toys first meet Buzz Lightyear. Andy brushes aside Woody from the prime spot on Andy’s bed and puts Buzz there instead. Woody is trying to act as if everything is fine, telling the other toys that they just have to make friends with the new toy. As Woody approaches Buzz, we see Buzz come alive for the first time.

  Buzz blinks his eyes and says, “Buzz Lightyear to Star Command. Come in, Star Command.” Buzz believes he is an astronaut on a mission. Now, here I am sitting in my armchair as the audience. I have just bought into the delusion that these toys are real. And now I’m believing that this one toy, Buzz Lightyear, is himself delusional for not realizing he is just a toy.

  This was insane.

  As the clip came to an end, Ed looked over at me. “What do you think?” he asked.

  “Ed, I hardly know what to say. This is extraordinary. I’ve never seen anything like it. The leap from the short films to here is remarkable.”

  “Thank you,” Ed replied. “We’ve got a very long way to go to finish the film but you can begin to see what it might look like.”

  “This is going to amaze audiences,” I added excitedly. “They’ll have no idea what to expect. It’s fantastic.”

  “I hope so,” said Ed. “We’ve got a lot riding on it.”

  The lights went up and I found myself back in the makeshift screening room, still sitting in an old beat-up armchair. But for ten minutes I’d been transported somewhere else. Andy’s room. A world where toys lived. Had feelings. Had problems. I had no idea who was behind it all, but somewhere in this building there were magicians at work.

  “Can I show you around?” Ed asked.

  “Of course,” I replied. I didn’t know if I’d be working here or not, but I certainly didn’t want to pass up the chance to see how this magic was done.

  The first stop was Pixar’s animation department. We walked into a large open space filled with cubicles, each of which had been built and designed by its occupant to reflect his or her artistic sensibility. The area looked like a cross between a college dorm and a Halloween theme park. It was littered with old furniture, artwork, and odd collections of toys, balls, colored lights, anime, models, posters, comic books, and all manner of paraphernalia. Each animator sat in a space of his or her own design, in front of one or sometimes two large computer monitors. Some of the animators had full-length mirrors on the wall nearby.

  “Why the mirrors?” I asked Ed.

  “Animation is really all about acting,” Ed explained. “Before the animators animate a character on screen, they will often act out the part in front of a mirror so they fully understand the movements they need to create on screen.”

  Ed walked me to Pixar’s storyboard department where rows upon rows of large cork boards were filled with index cards on which appeared hand-drawn scenes from the movie. Each storyboard represented a sequence from the film, and there seemed to be an endless number of them stacked against every wall, and every spare scrap of space. The quality of each drawing was remarkable, and there were thousands of them, all drawn by hand, all telling a little piece of the film’s story.

  Then we visited the film lab, a darkroom almost filled from wall to wall by a mysterious machine that sat in the middle. The machine looked like a flat, metallic table with a large microscope type of device on it. It was an imposing machine, something you’d expect to see in a big university or government lab. I couldn’t quite under
stand its purpose, something to do with transferring images to film. Apparently it had been hand-built by Pixar.

  I was then taken to a room called the renderfarm, whatever that meant. It was a huge bank of computers whose function, apparently, was to draw the computer-generated images that made up each frame of the film.

  “Just one of these images can take hours to render,” Ed explained, “and we have to do over a hundred thousand of them for the film.”

  The scale and detail of what I was observing were staggering.

  Ed then brought me back to the animation area, and we sat down at a table that had been set up in one corner. Here I was to meet John Lasseter, Pixar’s creative lead. John had directed Pixar’s short films, and he was the director of Toy Story.

  John was maybe a couple of years older than me. I was struck by his bright and boyish sensibility. He wore jeans and a Hawaiian shirt, was a little stocky, with short, slightly receding hair. He had a twinkle in his eye, as if he were perpetually at the ready to play a prank.

  “Thank you for coming to visit,” John started, graciously. “Steve seems excited that you might be a great fit. I’d love to hear about what you’ve been doing.”

  And with that John listened attentively as I described my career so far. I told him about my law practice, and how I’d left to join one of my clients. John was interested in why I left.

  “I enjoyed practicing law,” I explained, “but it could be a grind, and I didn’t love billing my time in six-minute increments. I looked at my start-up clients and to me they were on an adventure. One, Echelon Corporation, was developing sensors to make buildings smart. It was exciting technology; I yearned for the kind of adventure they were on.”