The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [43]
Essentially, Disney was trying to automate what had long been considered women’s work. In earlier eras there had been a blatantly sexist division of labor: the men had the more glamorous, creative jobs of drawing the characters while the lower-paid “ink and paint girls” handled the meticulous grunt work. The women were sequestered in a separate building on the Burbank lot, and Walt himself seldom saw them.
In the new scheme, computers would be the cheap labor.
The approach, which they called the Computer Animation Production System (CAPS), would quickly prove a clear success, saving huge amounts of time and money, although Disney’s people were quiet about it. “For a long time, Disney wouldn’t admit to the world that it relied on computers,” Alvy recalls. “They thought it would take away the magic.”
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THE DISNEY PROJECT, like the Star Trek effect, was a beginning step toward the creative merger of computers and film. In the mid-1980s Ed Catmull still dreamed of creating a full-length movie entirely on the computer, with the kind of three-dimensional animation that he had pioneered in his student film so many years earlier. He and Alvy recruited a small team of artists to work on demonstrations of 3-D graphics. The technology was painfully tricky, requiring a skillful illustrator to learn to become an adept programmer as well. You needed someone whose left brain and right brain were both exceptional. Even then, it took at least a month, and often two or three months, to make a single picture that was akin to a well-composed still photograph. They created a few stunningly vivid images—a pool table, a bouncing ball, the country road to Point Reyes on the Pacific coast—but it was slow, arduous work. The notion of making even a very short film still seemed intimidating.
At a conference Ed met a Disney animator, John Lasseter, who wasn’t afraid to talk computers. John’s obvious brilliance was balanced by his exceptionally warm, compelling personality, and his almost childlike exuberance. His peers thought of him as one of Disney’s most promising young talents. John took Alvy into the Disney archives and said conspiratorially: “What do you want to see?” Alvy had always loved the dancing hippo scenes from Fantasia and the pink elephant scenes from Dumbo. He was charmed when John pulled out the original sketches and the final animation cells from the movies.
John was disenchanted by the decline of animation at Disney. His frustration peaked after he worked on a test clip (forty-five seconds in all) for a film version of Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book Where the Wild Things Are. The animators drew the characters by hand, in 2-D, but they used computers to create dramatic 3-D backgrounds. John was terribly excited by the experiment, but Disney’s executives—complacent with the old way of doing things—were nonplussed.
In 1985 John Lasseter switched to Lucasfilm to make short animated films using all the hardware and software tools that had been developed over the past thirteen years by Ed and Alvy and their band.
There was one problem: George Lucas desperately needed to sell their operation.
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GEORGE HAD TWO BUSINESS MANAGERS, named Doug and Doug, whom Alvy thought of as “corporate dweebs.” The Dougs wanted to lay off almost all of the forty-five people in the computer group while Lucas searched for a buyer for the technologies they had created.
Ed and Alvy were appalled. They had put together a remarkable team of people and thought it would be a “sin” to force them to disperse. They mulled founding their own company and taking the whole team with them. But they knew and cared very little about business. “We were a couple of naive technoids,” recalls Alvy. He thought of himself as defiantly “anticorporate.