The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [73]
Karen picked up her copy of The Wall Street Journal and saw a front-page story about Next. The article was a brutal put-down. It said that Steve was taking “a steep fall from a very lofty perch. His NeXT workstation seems destined to become a high-tech museum relic. He himself is fighting to show that he still matters in the computer industry.”
Karen saw Steve as he prepared to go onstage in front of a thousand people.
He had read the article.
“It could have been worse,” she said, trying to lighten the mood.
“Yeah,” he shot back. “If you were me.”
• • •
IT DID GET WORSE. The following day Steve and Laurene and their nanny made a report to the Palo Alto police about the man who was harassing them, Burrell Smith. Their nanny said that she had seen Burrell ride up to the house on a bicycle and throw a cherry bomb, which exploded against the wall. Steve filed for a temporary restraining order to keep Burrell from coming within one hundred yards of his family, nanny, home, car, and office.
Burrell was arrested and taken in handcuffs to the Palo Alto municipal court.
A judge issued the restraining order.
• • •
THE NEXT LAYOFFS proceeded bitterly. Some three hundred people cleared out of the headquarters by the bay. The place became a “wasteland,” recalls Emily Brower, a public relations executive.
In September, a bunch of salvagers and used-furniture dealers went to the Next factory for an auction of its contents. They bid on 715 lots that were laid out on the barren cement floor. They bought the Herman Miller chairs, the trash cans, the paper shredders, all the surplus Next Cubes and laser printers and oversized computer monitors.
Steve’s dream was being liquidated.
• • •
IT GOT WORSE AND WORSE. Soon after the blowup at Next came the great trauma at Pixar.
The crisis snuck up on them. The work on Toy Story had been going extremely well. The director and creative visionary, John Lasseter, reported to Jeffrey Katzenberg at Disney. Their relationship was harmonious and productive. “John really respected Jeffrey and Jeffrey really respected John,” recalls Pam Kerwin. As John’s team developed the story, they sketched out hundreds of storyboards, which they pinned to the walls all over the building. Then they would film a series of storyboards, making a “reel” to get a crude approximation of what the actual film would look like. John would go to Burbank and play the reel for Jeffrey, filling in the voices for all of the characters and acting out their physical gestures and movements. These “pitches” were one of the most vital parts of the whole process, the key to honing the storyline. John was a masterful actor, emotional and compelling, and he looked for those same talents in his animators. Their art wasn’t just being able to draw well, it was making the drawings come alive with vivid characterization. “When John hires people, he doesn’t care if you had formal training in animation or computer graphics,” says Alvy Ray Smith. “He wants to know if you can act.”
John’s team started with high-level plot concepts, which they constantly changed, deepened, and refined depending on Jeffrey’s reactions to the pitches and reels. Jeffrey was a superbly instinctive editor, with an unerring ability to find the weaknesses in a plot, but he wasn’t a script doctor. He didn’t presume to fix the flaws that he pinpointed. “Jeffrey could tell you that something wasn’t working but he wouldn’t be able to tell you why,” says Pam Kerwin. “He would say, ’This stuff isn’t working for me,’ not ’Do this instead.’”
As John went back again and again to Burbank, Jeffrey remained unhappy.
The story just didn’t work.
The problem was that the hero, Woody, wasn’t an appealing character.