The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [83]
Now, the money wars were destroying all of that. Pixar had been such an idyllic creative and social environment. Now it was turning into a business.
The foursome of Ed, John, Ralph, and Bill felt so bad about the rift that they considered giving some of their own shares to their colleagues. But there were legal and tax complications, so it turned out that they couldn’t easily redistribute their newfound wealth.
Ralph felt that he was caught in the middle: his colleagues resented him for his rich windfall, but his strident lobbying on their behalf provoked the anger of his temperamental boss. “I thought that I was fighting the good fight, but I lost face with Steve,” he recalls.
Steve had been especially parsimonious with Pam Kerwin, who had made a vital contribution to the company. Pam produced the two interactive Toy Story software packages for young children, which had seventy-five minutes of original computer animation, nearly as much as the seventy-seven minutes that John Lasseter had created for the actual movie. Her people had exhausted themselves to finish the PC products in time for the release of the film. Pam often stayed at the office all night and slept for no more than fifteen minutes at a stretch. She motivated dozens of people to put in brutal hours. And now Steve was trying to shaft her!
Pam told him that she had received an offer to become the CEO of another company, and she was going to accept it.
Steve tried to talk her out of leaving. He met her on a Sunday and took her on a long walk. He knew that it would look very bad for Pixar if one of the company’s officers, a vice president, were to quit right before the IPO.
“Stay here for your fuck-you money,” he told her.
He gave her a big raise in salary, and she stayed.
• • •
WHILE THE PIXAR PEOPLE were fighting over all the money they were sure that they were going to make, the honchos at Disney were fiercely divided in their opinions about Toy Story and its financial prospects.
Michael Eisner hated the title, which he thought was “too juvenile.” The Disney marketing executives disagreed with him. They thought it was a great title, descriptive and succinct. (Besides, wasn’t the movie supposed to appeal to children?) Eisner’s new No. 2, Michael Ovitz, was downbeat on the picture, too. Toy Story had been Jeffrey Katzenberg’s baby, and now that Jeffrey had turned into a traitor, the Disney bosses brutally denigrated his judgment. Their criticisms seemed at least somewhat justified when they screened a sneak preview for a test audience and no one laughed at the opening scene. John Lasseter had to rush to create a replacement during the final frantic weeks before the premiere.
One of the key players at Disney, the public relations executive Terry Press, was highly enthused by Toy Story and thought it would be a huge hit. She told Mike Ovitz that it would earn $150 million in domestic box-office receipts. Ovitz laughed at her. She also clashed with the Disney executive who licensed children’s toys and other consumer products around the movie characters. Astonishingly, Disney’s toy people said they didn’t “get” Toy Story! They disliked the fact that many of the film’s stars—Mr. Potato Head, the Green Army Men—were existing toys rather than new properties that were owned by Disney. Still, they didn’t rush to fill the store shelves with figurines of Woody or Buzz Lightyear. The film was about to open, but there were hardly any Toy Story toys for kids.
Disney’s marketing honcho, Dick Cook, was a lonely believer in the film, and he put together a $100 million campaign, with the vast majority of the money coming from partners like Burger King and Frito-Lay, which sponsored the promotional tie-ins.
Steve Jobs was awestruck by Disney’s marketing power:
One hundred million dollars!
And Disney’s top guys didn’t even like the movie.
• • •
IT HAD BEEN twenty-three years since Ed Catmull made his first crude computer-animated film. Now he was about to see the realization of the dream that had driven his entire career.