The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [47]
“The strategy was to promote the technology,” recalls Andy Cunningham. “We didn’t do anything to position John Lasseter as a ’star.’ He was a kid doing fun stuff.”
Steve Jobs went to Siggraph and he was pleased by the popularity of Luxo Jr., but what really excited him about Pixar was the hardware. From the earliest days at Apple, Steve had always been a hardware guy. That was his real interest, his overriding obsession. He wanted Pixar to sell lots of computers. The machine was supposed to be the real star.
Nonetheless, John Lasseter became an underground celebrity, a minor hero in the insular subculture of animated filmmakers. He secured his reputation the following year at Siggraph with Red’s Dream, a short film about a little red unicycle that is abandoned in the back corner of a bicycle store on a rainy night and dreams about performing in a circus. Red’s was longer and much more complex and virtuosic than Luxo, and it had an almost surrealistic beauty. Once again, John’s work was the convention’s unchallenged hit.
John spent much of his time traveling around the world to animation festivals, reveling in his newfound notoriety. He loved the boondoggle aspect of it all. He also hung out in Los Angeles, maintaining his connections in the Hollywood animation scene. Despite his growing profile, his Pixar colleagues still thought of him as a humble, easygoing guy. He played on the Pixar softball team in its weekly games in the Lucasfilm league. They’d play at Skywalker Ranch on George’s beautiful baseball diamond, a fanatically well-maintained field in the lush foothills, and afterward they’d all go out to a greasy hamburger joint in San Rafael. John was a rare talent but he was one of the gang.
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EVEN AS AN ABSENTEE OWNER, Steve Jobs exerted an undeniable influence. On a rare visit to Pixar’s offices, Steve talked about chips and computers with the Ph.D. engineers, who were visibly awestruck and adoring of him. “I’d watch him address our employees, and the look in their eyes was love,” recalls Alvy Ray Smith. “He’d have them twisted around his finger. He’s seductive to the nth degree. When I wasn’t subject to it, I used to love to see him enter a roomful of strangers and just take it. Steve has that talent. I think that it’s a talent of the tongue. The closest thing is a TV evangelist. And Steve is aware of it.”
Alvy and Ed would drive down to Next headquarters in Palo Alto to brief Steve and talk strategy. Beforehand they would work hard to come up with their own clear agenda so they could prevent Steve from taking over. They knew how compelling Steve could be. They agreed on a silent warning signal: if one of them seemed to be falling for Steve’s seductiveness, the other would tug on an ear.
Their visits were supposed to happen once a week but wound up taking place only once a month. Steve would make them wait for at least twenty minutes, but then once they had his attention, he would focus intensely for two hours. While Ed and Alvy protected their close control of Pixar’s decisions about technology, they deferred to Steve about marketing and strategy. They didn’t know anything about marketing, but that was Steve’s forte.
And Steve had a really big idea: he wanted to make the Pixar computer useful to people other than the most brilliant computer scientists. But who? They devoted an especially vigorous effort to create interest in the medical community: Pixar’s engineers wrote special software so that radiologists could archive their x rays on the machine. Surgeons could use the computer to create 3-D visualizations of the inside of a patient’s body without the need for invasive surgery.
Steve masterminded a tremendous push for sales. In the company