The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [35]
In 1985, while he was still at Apple, Steve Jobs heard that George Lucas was trying to sell this computer operation. Steve was interested. He drove north over the Golden Gate Bridge and another fifteen miles to the offices of Lucasfilm in San Rafael. The company was in a crummy part of town, a warehouse district on the fringe of the Little Mexico ghetto. Clusters of illegal immigrants stood on the sidewalks, hoping that someone would drive up in a van or pickup truck and take them to construction sites to work for the day. As the last batches of unhired hands still loitered there, the Lucasfilm employees took to the pavements to buy cheap tacos and rice-and-bean burritos from the “roach coaches.” Lucasfilm and ILM were housed in nondescript, unmarked buildings. They had tried putting up a sign during the Star Wars years but the crazy science-fiction fans would come by, snooping for the tiniest clues about what was going to be in the next movie. Now there was no sign and no indication that movie wizardry took place in the unglamorous locale. George Lucas himself and a few of his colleagues worked miles away in the baronial splendor of Skywalker Ranch, a neo-Victorian mansion with a wood-paneled library and stained-glass skylights, removed from the suburban banality of San Rafael, secluded on hundreds of acres of the unspoiled scenic majesty of the tall redwoods and the rolling foothills. It was an almost feudal arrangement: the lord in his manor, his serfs in the squalid town.
• • •
WHEN STEVE JOBS VISITED LUCASFILM, he had a revelation.
He was astonished by the beautiful high-resolution images he saw on the computer screens. He later told his Next colleagues that he had the same kind of “holy shit” reaction seeing the graphics at Lucasfilm as when he first saw the laser printer in the laboratories at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. He knew that it was going to be hot. Xerox had lacked the foresight or the will to commercialize its breakthroughs, so Steve had seized them for Apple. Now he was in a remarkably similar situation, another chance to capitalize on many years of brilliant research that had been supported by others at great expense.
It was déjà vu! It was history repeating itself!
George Lucas had lured the greatest minds in computer graphics but he couldn’t afford to pay for the realization of their vision. Steve could come in for the slam dunk!
Steve wanted it.
George was asking $30 million.
Steve said: Let me know if the price drops.
Months passed. Lucas recruited another buyer, a consortium of General Motors and the Philips electronics company, but the deal fell through. And he needed the money now.
Steve shrewdly negotiated the price down to a desperation offer of $10 million.
In February 1986 he bought the business and incorporated it as “Pixar.”
• • •
PIXAR WAS A TIGHTLY KNIT GROUP of some four-dozen people, mostly refugees from academia. Many of them had been working together since the 1970s, a nomadic tribe of high-tech gypsies moving from one multimillionaire’s think tank to another’s. They were like Molière’s troupe or some other merry band of theatrical performers in the Renaissance, who would find a duke or count to be their patron, then put on their comedies and tragedies and improvisations for his amusement for a few years until he tired of their style of acting and they had to go calling at the château in the next province. After six years with Count Lucas, they were switching their allegiance to the noble and generous Baron Jobs.
The merry band had two leaders, whose experiences, personalities, and ambitions would play a vitally important role in Steve Jobs’s future.
One was Alvy Ray Smith, a big, tall, bearded bear