By Thanksgiving of 1994, Steve Jobs was stuck.
Jobs hadn’t had a hit product in years. He’d blown through 50 million dollars investing in Pixar, a maker of high-end graphics computers struggling to reinvent itself as an animation studio. His relationship with the talent there was frayed.
Then, with a couple of shrewd financial moves over the next two years, he helped create one of the most remarkable success stories in Hollywood. Pixar would go on to make a string of hit films, from Finding Nemo to Cars, spawn a renaissance in animated moviemaking, and turn Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, into the largest shareholder of the Walt Disney Co., after Disney bought the studio for 7.4 billion dollars in 2006.
Before Finding Nemo, Pixar had to escape a bad Hollywood deal
It’s a backstory told for the first time from the perspective of Lawrence Levy, Pixar’s former chief financial officer, in a new book, To Pixar and Beyond. Levy doesn’t take credit for Pixar’s big-screen successes. That goes to executives and filmmakers like John Lasseter, Pixar’s chief creative officer, and Ed Catmull, its president. He argues, though, that companies, like people, need a balance of craft and commerce to succeed.
“Pixar was the classic starving artist, full of talent and creativity but frustrated by a lack of money,” Levy said in an interview.
Levy, then a technology executive in Silicon Valley, was cold-called by Jobs that November, 22 years ago. He signed on as finance chief after seeing a short preview of what was to become Pixar’s first feature, Toy Story.
“For 10 minutes I’d been transported somewhere else,” Levy writes. “A world where toys lived. Had feelings. Had problems. I had no idea who was behind it all, but somewhere in this building there were magicians at work.”
After learning more about the movie business and discussing Pixar’s distribution contract with entertainment industry insiders, Levy realized that Jobs, then 39, had signed a lopsided deal with Disney. The Burbank, California-based entertainment company had agreed to put up all of the money to make Pixar’s movies and stood to collect 90 per cent of the profits, even if the films were huge hits. With that kind of profit-sharing, Pixar would never amount to much more than a contract worker, an animator-for-hire, subservient to the Disney machine, Levy reasoned.
“I don’t think Pixar could have retained or hired the kind of talent it did without building a company financially stable enough to reward them,” he said.