The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [34]
Tomorrow he would talk publicly of his lofty vision of a computer that could revolutionize higher education, a noble goal, and no one would doubt his sincerity. Tonight, though, he spoke of his own dark personal vendetta, which was equally honest.
He locked his praying hands and he spoke bitterly about Apple.
“We’re going to get our revenge,” he told them.
“We’re going to kick their ass.”
While Steve Jobs was maniacally focused on Next, he also owned a second company that received very little of his time or attention. Ironically, this other entrepreneurial venture, which the Next executives referred to condescendingly as “the hobby,” would consume far more of Steve’s money. And ultimately it would prove far more important and enduring. It would be the source of his resurgence and his salvation.
It was called Pixar.
Like Next, it was a child of divorce. While Next was founded out of the painful separation of Steve Jobs and John Sculley, Pixar was an orphan of a company, put up for adoption as part of the marital split between the legendary movie director George Lucas and his brilliant editor, Marcia Lucas. Steve Jobs became Pixar’s new parent and benefactor.
George and Marcia had met in Los Angeles in the late 1960s, soon after he completed film school at the University of Southern California. They were working together on a documentary, huddled in the editing room for many nights before George summoned the courage to ask her out. From the start they were a very odd couple. George was painfully quiet, inward, aloof, brooding, perpetually burdened by worry. Marcia was personable, outspoken, and uninhibited, a funny, sharp-tongued dynamo. On their first date, she told him to “lighten up.” Through fourteen years of marriage, he never really did.
In the 1970s, Marcia became known as one of the most talented film editors in Hollywood. She was especially admired for her editing of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Taxi Driver for the director Martin Scorsese. When she collaborated with George, their opposite personalities worked magic in the creative process. She cut George’s American Graffiti, turning reels of raw footage of improvised scenes into a coherent and surprisingly compelling narrative, and she won an Oscar for her work on the first Star Wars movie. As George’s business partner and close adviser, she was instrumental in his success, but the intensity and stress of working together on the Star Wars trilogy was devastating to their marriage. Before the release of Return of the Jedi, George told a writer from Rolling Stone: “It’s been very hard on Marcia, living with somebody who is constantly in agony, uptight, and worried, off in never-never land.”
A week before the theatrical debut of Jedi, George called together his staff. As George and Marcia held hands and cried, they said that they were seeking a divorce.
According to California law, they had to split their marital property fifty-fifty. George wanted to keep ownership and control of their burgeoning empire, the alternative Hollywood that they had labored together to create in the celluloid hinterlands of northern California: the movie studio, Lucasfilm, and the special-effects house, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), and the state-of-the-art postproduction facilities at Skywalker Ranch.
While George wanted the companies, Marcia wanted the money. Her half of the assets were worth an estimated $25 million to $50 million.
Now, he had his precious companies, but George desperately needed a way to come up with some cash. Was there some part of the business that wasn’t essential, something that he could spin off into a separate enterprise and sell for really good money?
Maybe. Lucasfilm had a small band of computer graphics geniuses who weren’t making profits. They were visionary types who dreamed of reinventing the animated movie. Instead of hundreds of animators slaving away with their pencils and ink