The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [76]
The coproducer of Toy Story, Ralph Guggenheim, was convinced that until the production neared its completion, Steve didn’t really appreciate the film’s extraordinary potential.
Then, in January 1995, came the crucial moment that changed Steve’s thinking. Disney was staging a press conference in Manhattan to create some advance hype for the animated films it would debut later in the year: Pocahontas, which was scheduled for a summer premiere, the best time for releasing animated films, and Toy Story, which would open on Thanksgiving weekend.
John Lasseter and Ralph Guggenheim flew to New York for the event. They were overwhelmingly impressed by the costly setup. Disney had erected what Ralph thought of as “an unbelievable huge fucking tent” right in the middle of the Great Lawn in Central Park. Inside there was a ninety-nine-seat screening room. The movie screen was surrounded by cutouts of Disney’s most famous creations—Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Pluto, Snow White, the Seven Dwarfs—as well as images of Woody and Buzz Lightyear. Their inventions had already been enshrined in the pantheon of Disney’s beloved characters!
“My God!” Ralph exclaimed.
At the far end of the tent they saw the “green room,” the lounge for VIPs, decorated with beautiful furniture. Waiters in white jackets would serve canapés there. In the tent’s clear plastic center, a podium was set up for the press conference, which would be hosted by the mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani. That was the kind of pull that Disney exerted.
They called Steve in California and told him to get on a plane.
The next day, the Disney brass showed up in full force: The big chief, Michael Eisner. The link to history, Roy Disney. Joe Roth, the new studio boss, who replaced Jeffrey Katzenberg (who had clashed with Eisner and left to become the cofounder of DreamWorks SKG). Peter Schneider and Tom Schumacher, the heads of feature animation.
Steve Jobs joined them in the screening room.
They watched a sneak preview of clips from Pocahontas. The director gave a talk. The heroine’s lead animator explained the artistry that went into the film. The composer Alan Mencken sat at a piano and performed what promised to be another batch of hit songs.
“It was a tour de force presentation,” Ralph recalls.
Then Ralph and John got up and talked for twenty minutes about Toy Story. They showed one of the most memorable sequences from the movie: a bunch of little plastic green army men statuettes escape from their bucket and march through the bedroom.
Steve was incredibly excited. The mayor, the Disney brass, the press conference: it all validated the movie’s worth. Despite the many years that had passed, Steve was still insecure in his own aesthetic judgments and relied on informal surveys of other people. The Disney guys were the gurus of animation, and here they were, promoting Pixar’s film along with their own grand production. It was exactly the validation that Steve needed.
“Steve went bonkers, he was just so excited,” Ralph recalls. “That was the moment when Steve realized the Disney deal would materialize into something much bigger than he had ever imagined, and that Pixar was the way out of his morass with Next.”
It was the great revelation for Steve: finally, he saw how he would redeem his career. He realized that his salvation would come not from Next, his own creation and passion, but from Pixar, his supposed “hobby,” the frustrating money sink of a company that he had wanted to close down, the asset that until then he had still wanted to sell off.
The Central Park event went so well that Michael Eisner asked John and Ralph to fly back to California with him and his wife, Jane, on their private Gulfstream jet.
After nine years of struggle and uncertainty, Pixar had finally arrived.
• • •
NO LONGER RESIGNED to merely watching the Pixar drama from off in the wings, Steve thrust himself forward as an actor on center stage. He stripped the title