The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [41]
“Sure, we do it every day.”
• • •
RALPH WENT OVER to Ed and Alvy.
“I just got a call from George Lucas,” he told them.
Alvy reacted swiftly.
“Don’t say anything,” he instructed. “Close the door.”
They needed to maintain total secrecy from Alex Schure. Alex was always terribly fearful that someone would steal away the research and technology that he had paid for. The last time someone tried to walk out on Alex, there was almost a fistfight at the lab.
Alvy remembered the situation vividly:
Alex had hired a young Ph.D. named Jim Clark. (Years later, Jim would become one of the wealthiest and most famous figures in American business as the founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape Communications.) For his dissertation at the University of Utah, Jim had created gear for mounting a computer display at eye level, the forerunner of the “virtual reality” headsets that would gain popularity in the 1980s. Alex hired him to come to Long Island and build a new version of his gadget.
Alvy liked Jim and thought of him as a “homeboy,” since they had grown up only sixty miles apart: Alvy in eastern New Mexico, Jim in western Texas. Jim was a brilliant Ph.D., but he still had the mentality of a tough kid from a hardscrabble rural town. He was a big, imposing man who had been kicked out of high school for being a ruffian, which is an impressive accomplishment in west Texas, a place that is uncommonly tolerant of ruffians.
There was raw aggression and clear mistrust between Jim Clark and Alex Schure. Jim decided to leave. He used a word processor to compose letters to Stanford and other universities, asking for an academic position.
One day Alex came into the lab and held up a printout of the letters.
The bastard was spying on them! He must have had a mole!
“You’re fired,” Alex said.
Jim reacted violently. He threatened to tear up the computer lab.
Alvy was certain that Jim was about to throw a punch at Alex. He rushed over to restrain his friend, to calm him down. He got there just in time to prevent an assault.
For his part, Jim Clark says that he was “really pissed” when he “found out that Alex was spying,” but denies the face-to-face confrontation.
• • •
THAT EPISODE WAS still vivid in their memories as they closed the door to the lab.
George Lucas had called Ralph.
Coincidentally, that same morning Francis Ford Coppola’s people had called Alvy.
They needed to act swiftly and secretly. Alvy and Ed drove into town, rented an old typewriter, then went to Ed’s apartment and very carefully composed their letter to Lucasfilm. “We knew that it was the most important letter of our lives,” Alvy recalls.
They flew to California to make their pitch to the Lucas people. George himself, ever reclusive, didn’t attend. And Alvy began going to San Francisco to hang out for weekends at Francis Ford Coppola’s twenty-eight-room Victorian mansion atop a hill overlooking the bay. The windows framed picture-postcard views of the Golden Gate Bridge. Francis ran avant-garde films in the screening room. There were drugs everywhere. Alvy would watch as Francis maintained several overlapping conversations while cooking spaghetti. Francis felt a sense of competition with his friend George Lucas. He tried to hire Alvy, but Coppola seemed buffeted by intense highs and lows, and his energy was driven too much by cocaine.
They decided to go with George.
They knew that Alex Schure would react violently when he found out, so they came up with a clever scheme for deception. Instead of moving directly to Lucasfilm as a group, they would all take interim jobs as a cover, essentially “laundering” themselves. They were going into a misleading “holding pattern” before landing at their final destination. Alvy Ray Smith and David di Francesco went to the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena before ultimately joining up again with Ed Catmull at Lucasfilm. Ralph Guggenheim worked for a few months at a documentary film company in Pittsburgh before heading to northern California.
By 1980 they all were together at Lucasfilm. Their office was