5

My Big Break

By the end of April 1995, I felt my honeymoon period at Pixar should be coming to an end. I had walked and talked around its hallways and offices for long enough. I wanted to move forward, to find a toehold somewhere. But I was having a hard time doing so. It felt like I was meandering around the base of the mountain instead of actually climbing it.

It didn’t help that there was a growing fear within the company that its first film, now officially named Toy Story, would not be finished on time. People worried about whether we were too far behind in the animation, lighting, rendering, and other myriad details required to finish the film. For as much as I wanted to move forward, I had to finish my homework. I needed to understand the risks surrounding the completion of Toy Story, and I had far more to learn about how films make money.

Toy Story’s release date was set for November 22, 1995. That triggered a whole set of must-hit dates for the delivery of the film: completion of the songs and music, development of the marketing campaign, and many other details involved in preparing the film for release. Pixar was marching into a place no company had ever been. This was the first computer-animated feature film ever attempted, and, as I was beginning to realize, the challenges were staggering.

One of those challenges involved the need to create every single detail that the audience sees, literally everything. For example, in live-action filmmaking you don’t have to think about where the sky will come from. Shoot any outdoor scene with a camera, and the sky will be there. Background buildings and trees will be there. The leaves on the trees will be there. The wind rustling the leaves on the trees will be there. Live-action filmmakers don’t have to think about the leaves on the background trees. But in animation, there is no sky, no trees, no leaves, and certainly no gentle breeze rustling those leaves. There is just a blank screen on a computer. If you want anything on that screen, you have to give the computer instructions to draw it.

There are challenges even more daunting than these. We take for granted elements in our reality like light and shadow. We never think to ourselves, “How did that shadow get there?” or “How come that part of the fence is sunlit and that part isn’t?” But if lighting and shadow are off, even a tiny bit, in a photo or portrait, we notice it immediately. It looks weird to us. In computer animation there is no light, no shadow. It all has to be created.

Even this pales in comparison to something as seemingly innocuous as skin. A live-action filmmaker never has to worry about skin. Touch it up with a little makeup perhaps, but it will be there. Yet skin is one of the most complex things to create artistically. It is full of details—color, hair, blemishes, folds, and texture—and it is very difficult to capture the way light interacts with skin. These are nuances we never think about, but they are glaringly obvious when they are missing. Ed told me that without these careful details, skin would look like “painted rubber.”

Pixar had set up entire departments dedicated to these challenges. There was a lighting department, a team whose sole function was to get the computer to generate lighting and shadows correctly. There were technical directors who were dedicated to projects like leaves and sky and skin.

Bill Reeves was the company’s top technical leader and the supervising technical director on Toy Story. Many of the trickiest challenges landed on his desk. Bill had been with the team all the way back to its days at Lucasfilm. He had red hair, thin-rimmed glasses, and a quiet demeanor. I sat in his office one day to see how he felt about finishing the film. His office was plain, a big computer screen on his desk, and not terribly well lit.

“I don’t know if we can do it,” he told me flat out. “The number of details we have to complete is enormous. But we’re going for it. We’ve had tough challenges before.” Bill conveyed a sense of calm confidence. He was worried, but not panicking.

“How would you assess the risk?” I asked.

“That’s hard to say,” he said. “There’s risk. Our best people are working night and day. Animation is a few weeks behind. Lighting too. And we’re trying to finish the humans, Andy and his mom. The skin, clothes, and facial features are challenging. But we’re on it.”

I began to fathom how these technical challenges imposed enormous constraints on the film. I learned that there was a reason the film was specifically about toys, and not about animals or people. Toys are made of plastic. They have uniform surfaces. No variation. No skin. No clothing that needs to wrinkle with every movement. Toys have geometries that are much easier to create with computers. For similar reasons, the opening scenes of the film take place inside Andy’s bedroom. The bedroom is a square box. Its features—bed, dresser, fan, window, door—are more geometric than outdoor features. Easier to draw. Much easier to light.

Audiences would be in the last ten minutes of Toy Story before they saw the scenes that were far more technically challenging. There was a big outdoor chase scene at the end of the film in which Woody and Buzz are in a toy car trying to catch a moving truck. Imagine if that scene took place in streets with leafless trees, or carless roads. It turned out that part of the genius of Toy Story was not just the brilliance of the story and characters; it was crafting them amid almost impossible constraints. This built up more and more pressure on finishing the film. The hardest elements were being saved for last. Was it possible to get them done at all?

Some of the challenges were so technical that I would never have thought to even ask about them. For example, Pixar had a tiny department run by David deFrancisco, a brilliant graphics and film pioneer whose office consisted of two small, windowless rooms. One of those rooms looked like a high school lab, the other a photography darkroom. This was Pixar’s photoscience department. I had never heard the term photoscience, but people at Pixar were worried about it.

To understand what all the fuss was about, I went to visit David. He was about ten years older than me, soft-spoken and understated, with a beard, glasses, and a professorial manner. David explained that the task of the department was to solve the problem of transferring computer images to film.

Pixar did computer animation. There were no cameras. No film. Just images on computer screens. But the only way to watch a film in a movie theater was to play it on a film projector. Pixar’s computer images had to find their way onto celluloid if they were to be seen by the public. That was David’s job. In order to accomplish it, he invented a machine to transfer computer images to film. This was the mystery machine I had seen during my first interview. It sat in the middle of a darkroom and looked like a huge slab of metal on which sat a giant microscope-like device. Into that machine came every single computer image of a Pixar project, where it was painstakingly recorded onto film.

David and I sat in this small, darkened room, with this huge machine in the middle. “So,” I asked, like the slowest student in class who was finally beginning to catch on, “this one machine has to record over a hundred thousand frames of Toy Story onto film?”

“Exactly,” David replied.

“And it all has to happen in the right sequence, and with the right color and tone so it looks consistent?”

“Right again.”

“And this is the only one?” I asked. “If this breaks down or a part fails, there’s no backup?”

“Yes, that’s right. This is the only one in the world. We have almost enough spare parts to make a backup, but we haven’t really focused on that. It would take a while to assemble.”

“What happens if this one breaks during production?”

“It can’t,” David blurted, then paused to correct himself. “Obviously, it could. But that would be a disaster. There would be no film that would be delivered and shown in the theaters. It’s not an option.”

The more I learned, the more the magnitude of what Pixar was attempting to do dawned on me. Making Toy Story was not just finishing another film. It was more like climbing Everest or landing on the moon for the first time. Computers had never been pushed to this level of artistry before. Pixar had more than one hundred of the most powerful computer workstations available just to draw the final images that would appear in the film. Each frame of the film took anything from forty-five minutes to thirty hours to draw, and there were around 114,000 of them. Pixar was embarked on a lonely, courageous quest through terrain into which neither it nor anyone else had ever ventured. The summit was just beginning to poke out from behind the distant clouds, and no one was certain how thin the air would get. This was hardly a fertile environment in which to raise money to finance Pixar.

The more I understood the challenges with finishing Toy Story, the more I wondered where my toehold for moving Pixar forward might come.

“I’m starting to wonder if Pixar will get Toy Story finished,” I mentioned one night at dinner, thinking aloud.

“Why is it so hard?” Jason, my nine-year-old, wanted to know.

“Getting the story right has taken a long time,” I explained. “Toy Story was almost shut down because Disney didn’t like it. It’s also very hard to finish all the animation, colors, and details of each frame in the film.”

“Why didn’t Disney like it?” Jason asked.

“They thought Woody was too mean,” I said. “So Pixar made a lot of changes. They turned the film into an adventure story. Those changes really delayed the film, though.”

“Who’s your favorite character?” Sarah, my seven-year-old, asked.

“Buzz Lightyear is really funny,” I said. “So is Rex, the dinosaur.”

“I like Slinky,” declared Sarah, who had seen the first part of the film.

A cute slinky dog. Of course. Judging from my children’s interest in the film, if Pixar did get this finished, kids everywhere were going to fall in love with it.

In the meantime, while the company bent under the pressures of finishing Toy Story, I had to understand the financial implications of Toy Story’s release. I had done some back-of-the-envelope calculations based on the Disney contract, but they were only educated guesses. To even think about the viability of animated feature films as a business strategy, I needed to understand precisely how those films would generate revenues. The questions were simple enough: How do films make money and who gets it? Put another way, if I buy a movie ticket and popcorn, who gets the dollars? The movie theater? The film studio distributing the movie? The people who made the movie? As a chief financial officer, it was almost embarrassing not to know these basics.

To learn more about this, I called Tim Engel, who was in charge of finance at Walt Disney Animation Studios. He was part of the management team that had created Disney’s recent successes, including Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King. I had been introduced to Tim recently and he seemed very open and helpful.

“I’m trying to understand the financial details of how these films work,” I explained to Tim. “Would you have someone at Disney who might be able to help me with that?”

“I’d love to help you,” he replied. “But our financial models for films are proprietary. We don’t share them.”

I wasn’t completely surprised by Tim’s answer. I well knew that companies were protective of their business models. I was hoping I might get Disney to make an exception.

“But we need to understand the way our films make money,” I said. “That will also help us going forward as we map out the future films under our agreement.”

“The royalty reports we provide you will show you where the revenues came from,” Tim suggested.

Disney was obligated to provide these reports to Pixar to show how they calculated Pixar’s share of the film revenues.

“That won’t help us now, though,” I went on. “We won’t see those reports until long after Toy Story is released, at least a year from now. And my understanding is those reports won’t contain nearly enough information.”

I knew from my lawyer days that the information in royalty reports could be scant, and they often needed auditing to verify their accuracy.

“Is there anything you can do to give us more detail now?” I asked. “We’ll agree not to share it with others. We just need a start to develop our own projections for how our films will perform.”

“I’m sorry,” Tim said. “We’ve just never given them out. I could give you a sample royalty report from another film if that’s helpful.”

It wasn’t. It wouldn’t be close to what we needed. This wasn’t Tim’s fault either. I thought about escalating the issue higher within Disney. But with the pressures of finishing Toy Story, I didn’t want to start a skirmish over information Disney had no obligation to provide. I was stymied. The numbers mattered. Without them I would not find the foothold I wanted. I wouldn’t even be able to do my job.

As I processed the risks of not finishing Toy Story, and worried about where I was going to get the numbers I needed to understand Pixar’s business, one more challenge began to rear its head, this time having to do with Steve.

“I’d like to start coming up to Pixar more often,” Steve said on the phone one evening. “Maybe once a week, or every two weeks.”

Steve had spent almost no time at Pixar during the nine years he had owned it. He didn’t even have an office there. He had founded NeXT in 1985, right after leaving Apple, and although he took over Pixar in 1986, he had worked full time at NeXT all those years.

Steve didn’t say why he wanted to spend more time at Pixar; he certainly didn’t need a reason to spend more time at the company he owned. I figured he was sensing possibility, and wanted to be closer to it. With a film coming out, there was more action than there had been in a while. The problem was that after I had heard admonition after admonition to keep Steve away from Pixar, it wouldn’t help my cause that shortly after I started, Steve now wanted to increase his presence there. I wasn’t sure how to broach this issue, with Steve or Pixar.

None of this brought me much comfort in terms of what I had been hired to do. If Toy Story missed its deadline, I was certain that Pixar’s chance of success, however minuscule it might be, would all but evaporate. I had no access to the financial information I needed to even create a rudimentary business projection. And the very person whom Pixar feared the most was now making noises about wanting to spend more time there. I felt like I needed something, some opening that I could grab onto, to create a little momentum. I’d been involved with a number of start-ups throughout my career, but this one carried more doubt and uncertainty than I had ever encountered.

Then, one day at the end of the first week of May 1995, a couple of months after I started, something happened that jolted me out of my doldrums in a way that I could never have imagined. I can’t say if it made a difference in any of Pixar’s challenges, but it sure made a difference in me.

“I’m taking the video back to the store,” I casually told Hillary one Sunday afternoon. “I won’t be long, maybe twenty minutes. I’ll pick up another one for tonight.”

Hillary was more than eight months pregnant with our third child. We’d spend the evening at home watching a film while she rested. There was a Blockbuster film rental store about a mile from our house.

I decided it would be fun to skate to Blockbuster. It would take only ten minutes and I’d get some exercise. So I laced up my Rollerblades, inline skates that were all the rage. I often went skating at the local playground with Jason. We liked to play our own version of roller hockey.

It was a pleasant spring day, warm and sunny. I was relaxed and skating down a neighborhood road I’d been on a thousand times before. All of a sudden, without the slightest warning, instead of going straight along the road, I felt myself rearing off to the side, picking up speed. I must have hit a pebble or something. All I knew was that my right leg was off the ground and I was spinning around on my left leg; only it was my body that was turning, not the leg. The amount of torque on my leg at that instant was far more than it could bear. As I headed toward the ground, I heard a nauseatingly loud pop, and then I was lying on the road reeling from the shock of what I knew instantly to be a badly broken bone, just where the skate touched my leg.

My leg was not so much in pain at that moment as feeling horribly weird, and I felt myself shaking. I kept thinking, “How are they going to get my skate off?”

Traffic began to stop and a woman came up to me to ask if I needed help.

“I don’t know how I fell. I’ve broken my leg. I need to let my wife know. We live close by. Thank you.”

“I’ll wait here till someone comes,” she said.

I later learned that someone drove to my house and knocked on the door. Hillary answered to hear the words that no woman who is eight months pregnant wants to hear.

“Your husband’s been in an accident.”

It didn’t take long for Hillary to get to where I was lying in the road. “I’m okay,” I told her. “My leg’s broken. I don’t know how they’re going to get the skate off.”

“I’m sure the paramedics will know how to do it,” Hillary tried to comfort me.

The ambulance arrived and the paramedic took one look at my leg.

“We need to remove your skate,” he said. He was insistent and told me it would be much harder to do it later. Somehow they took it off.

Soon I found myself in the emergency room having x-rays taken of my leg. The diagnosis was a jagged spiral fracture of the tibia, just above my left ankle. The orthopedist on call in the emergency room explained my options: a cast, or surgery to mend the bones. I was thinking a cast wouldn’t be that bad, and it sounded a lot better than the surgery he was describing. But Hillary wanted another opinion. She had connections through her job at Stanford Medical Center, so she called for a recommendation for the best doctors in the area. It was a Sunday, and I couldn’t see anyone that day, but she did find a surgeon we could see the next day. We headed home and I sprawled on the couch with a broken leg and a heavy dose of painkillers until the next day.

“A cast is out of the question,” the surgeon said. “If we cast it, there’s a real risk you’ll have a permanent limp. The break is too jagged, and too close to your ankle. One leg will be longer than the other. Even surgery is a risk, but if it goes well your walk will be normal.”

The surgery he was talking about involved screwing an eight-inch titanium rod into my bones to hold them together. If it went well, I could have the rod removed in a couple of years.

“I can do it tomorrow,” the doctor said. “You won’t be able to drive for three months, the recovery will be painful, and you’ll need physical therapy to rehabilitate that leg. But try not to worry. We’ll take care of it.”

“Try not to worry!” I thought to myself. This was a disaster. We were having a baby in three weeks. I was less than three months into a new job, with a demanding boss and a company looking at me to figure out a strategy for success. How was I going to be able to do it all? I’d fail before I even started. But what options did I have?

The next day I was wheeled into the operating room at Stanford Medical Center in Palo Alto. I came out of it with a titanium rod knitting my bones together, and a morphine drip for the pain. The following few days were a fog. The pain from screwing the rod into the bone was searing, and the morphine was making me delirious.

The day after surgery, Steve was in my room. He just showed up at the hospital.

“How much pain are you in?” he wanted to know.

“It’s not too bad.” I tried to brave it. “These drugs are helping.”

I felt embarrassed. Here I was just a few weeks into a new job and I was out of commission.

“I’m sorry about this,” I said.

“Don’t be!” Steve exclaimed. “Just get better. If there’s anything you need, anything at all, let me know.”

My room filled with flowers and cards, from family and friends, and also from the Jobs family, and from Ed and the Pixar team. When I got home, Steve brought his family over to visit several times. I’d known him less than six months at this point, and he was acting like an old friend.

The surgery had been a success. The rod had gone in just as the doctor planned, and it was doing its job of holding my bones in place so they could heal.

A week after the surgery, as I emerged from the fog of morphine and was practicing hobbling around on crutches with a big black boot on my left leg, I was ready to get back to Pixar. Only for the first time, something in my attitude had changed. For almost three months I had wandered around Pixar, feeling increasingly dejected about its prospects, questioning if I should even be there. Now I’d been away for ten days and I missed it.

Nothing had happened to change any of my conclusions. I still didn’t have the toehold I needed. But I was feeling something else. Maybe it was the shock of the injury. Maybe it was the care and concern I had experienced from Steve and others at Pixar. Maybe it was my growing appreciation for the magnitude of what Pixar was attempting to do. But there was no question I was experiencing the first glimmer of pride about being on this ship. Pixar was becoming more than a job. What its people had been through, and what they were attempting to do now, was over-the-top extraordinary. It was crazy. I was itching to get back. I wished I had more answers than I did, but if I had a shot at figuring out what to do, I wanted to take it.

The first thing to fix was arranging an office for Steve. Steve was unaware how his frustrations with Pixar over the years, the failure to give employees stock options, not to mention his personal style, had instilled a real fear that he would ruin Pixar’s familial culture. I didn’t want to bring this up with him directly. There was no reason to be inflammatory, or even risk making relations worse, but I needed to address this issue somehow. I called him on the phone one night.

“Steve, I’ll return to Pixar in a couple of days. It’s also a good time to talk about getting you situated at Pixar.”

“That sounds great,” Steve said. “I’m glad to have you back. I only need an office. I plan to come up every week, or every two weeks, probably on Fridays.”

“That’s no problem,” I said, “but we’ll have to make it clear just exactly what your role and purpose is.”

“Why do we have to do that?” Steve asked. I could feel him getting testy.

“As the owner of the company,” I went on, “everyone will want to know why you’re coming up more and what it means. It’s a change for the company—a good change, but a change nevertheless. You’re the CEO, so you hold a lot of power. People might think you want to change things, or start to do things differently.”

“I don’t want to change anything,” Steve protested. “I want to hang around Pixar more. Be part of it. I also want to be closer to discussions around marketing our films. Disney does the marketing, but Pixar should have a strong say in it.”

“I think it would be great to frame it just that way,” I replied. “You’re there not to change how Pixar operates but to be part of it, to be closer to it, and to be involved in the marketing aspects of the films.”

I called Ed Catmull and Pam Kerwin to discuss all of this with them. If they bought into it, others would too. Ed told me that in the past he had talked to Steve about not interfering with Pixar’s story process, and that Steve was okay with that. Pam also understood that we had to make this work.

“We know Steve owns the company and can be here anytime he wants,” Pam said. “We just have to control the situation, get people used to it.”

“I understand,” I said. “He’s on board with how we’re going to position it. That’s all we can ask for.”

Two weeks later I was standing in the front hallway of my home one Friday morning, looking through the window at the road in front of my house. I was waiting for Steve to pull up. He’d be in his silver Mercedes, and he was picking me up to drive to Pixar where he had a new office. I had my crutches and a big boot on my left leg.

It felt more than a little odd waiting for my boss, Steve Jobs, to drive me to work. But that is how it was. For three months, until I could drive again, every time Steve went to Pixar, he drove me there, and he drove me back. On the other days, Sarah Staff, my newly hired right-hand person who had a similar commute to mine, very graciously picked me up.

Finding a way for Steve to spend more time at Pixar wasn’t quite the toehold I had imagined, but at least it was a resolution to one issue we needed to address.

A week after that first ride with Steve, Hillary went into labor and we had our third child. I spent the event standing on one leg in the labor and delivery room. When we left the hospital, we were both pushed out in wheelchairs, Hillary holding our new baby, me holding my crutches.

At the end of the closing credits on Toy Story is a heading called “Production Babies,” below which is a list of all the babies born to Pixar employees during the production of the film. I could not possibly have been prouder to say that my new daughter, Jenna, was among them.