The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [57]
Steve always had profound faith that as computers got better and better, their magic would become accessible to regular folks. His faith usually proved visionary, but in this case he was embarrassingly wrong, or at the very least he was decades ahead of his time, which is too far ahead for an investor pouring millions of his own dollars into a company.
“The fundamental problem was that the market for 3-D was always small because it’s highly sophisticated,” says Adobe’s John Warnock. “It’s just hard stuff, extremely hard, but that’s why the Pixar engineers get off on it. Artists usually don’t relate to it. Three-D is a different mindset. You have to be a storyteller, cameraman, modeler, artist, and a mathematician as well to some extent. You have to create algorithms and procedures. If you’re Ed Catmull you can do that stuff, but if you’re almost anyone else, you can’t.”
Looking back, John Warnock says that what Steve Jobs was trying to do at Pixar was like “trying to mass produce a Stradivarius.” A virtuoso like Midori could play one of the perfectly crafted violins and produce tones of subtle, nuanced beauty. But giving Strads to millions of music students wouldn’t make them into Midoris. And giving Pixar’s software to everyday artists wouldn’t make them into Oscar winners like John Lasseter.
One of Steve’s most cherished beliefs was that people could do great things if you gave them great tools, which was a noble sentiment, and often true, but it was also true that in many fields people also needed extraordinary talent and hard training to do great things. That was the case with 3-D computer art, but Steve stubbornly persisted. “Steve was always trying to figure out why the Adobe model didn’t work for Pixar,” recalls Pam Kerwin.
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IN THE LATE 1980S Steve had wanted to kill Pixar’s five-person animation team because it didn’t turn a profit. They saved their jobs by winning the Oscar for Tin Toy in the spring of 1989, but even afterward, Steve implored them to find a way to make money. Ralph Guggenheim, who managed the small group, came up with a strategy: They would hire themselves out to make television commercials, which would bring in plenty of cash while they kept improving the state-of-the-art in 3-D animation. Then they would try to produce a half-hour television special, probably for the Christmas season. And eventually, they would fulfill Ed’s dream—now entering its third decade—of making a feature-length film with computers.
Steve approved the plan. It also appealed to the ambitions of John Lasseter, who was being recruited relentlessly by his former employer, Disney. John was still in his thirties, and he told Ralph that he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life winning the Oscars for short films. He wanted a chance to win for best director of a feature film. Ralph’s plan gave them a way to sustain themselves until they could break into features.
As John worked on his next wonderfully creative short for Siggraph, Knick-Knack, which carried forward his obsession with children’s toys, Ralph negotiated a deal with a San Francisco advertising studio called Colossal Pictures. Despite its grandiose name, Colossal was actually a smallish startup, but it had gained notoriety for its “blendo” technique of blending animation with live-action video. Pixar could craft the animation while Colossal shot the live actors and then combined it all into a seamless creation.
They signed the deal in July 1989. The following month, the Pixar crew went to the Siggraph convention, where Steve was scheduled to receive an award for computer graphics visionary of the year and to give an acceptance speech. Steve refused to show up for the rehearsal of the awards ceremony, so Lisa MacKenzie, a Pixar marketing executive, went in his place. Later, when it came time for his actual speech, Steve wasn’t there.
Lisa’s boss, Barbara Barza, began to panic.
“Where’s