Yo-Yo Ma
There was one classical musician Jobs revered both as a person and as a performer: Yo-Yo Ma, the versatile virtuoso who is as sweet and profound as the tones he creates on his cello. They had met in 1981, when Jobs was at the Aspen Design Conference and Ma was at the Aspen Music Festival. Jobs tended to be deeply moved by artists who displayed purity, and he became a fan. He invited Ma to play at his wedding, but he was out of the country on tour. He came by the Jobs house a few years later, sat in the living room, pulled out his 1733 Stradivarius cello, and played Bach. “This is what I would have played for your wedding,” he told them. Jobs teared up and told him, “You playing is the best argument I’ve ever heard for the existence of God, because I don’t really believe a human alone can do this.” On a subsequent visit Ma allowed Jobs’s daughter Erin to hold the cello while they sat around the kitchen. By that time Jobs had been struck by cancer, and he made Ma promise to play at his funeral.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
PIXAR’S FRIENDS
. . . and Foes
A Bug’s Life
When Apple developed the iMac, Jobs drove with Jony Ive to show it to the folks at Pixar. He felt that the machine had the spunky personality that would appeal to the creators of Buzz Lightyear and Woody, and he loved the fact that Ive and John Lasseter shared the talent to connect art with technology in a playful way.
Pixar was a haven where Jobs could escape the intensity in Cupertino. At Apple, the managers were often excitable and exhausted, Jobs tended to be volatile, and people felt nervous about where they stood with him. At Pixar, the storytellers and illustrators seemed more serene and behaved more gently, both with each other and even with Jobs. In other words, the tone at each place was set at the top, by Jobs at Apple, but by Lasseter at Pixar.
Jobs reveled in the earnest playfulness of moviemaking and got passionate about the algorithms that enabled such magic as allowing computer-generated raindrops to refract sunbeams or blades of grass to wave in the wind. But he was able to restrain himself from trying to control the creative process. It was at Pixar that he learned to let other creative people flourish and take the lead. Largely it was because he loved Lasseter, a gentle artist who, like Ive, brought out the best in Jobs.
Jobs’s main role at Pixar was deal making, in which his natural intensity was an asset. Soon after the release of Toy Story, he clashed with Jeffrey Katzenberg, who had left Disney in the summer of 1994 and joined with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen to start DreamWorks SKG. Jobs believed that his Pixar team had told Katzenberg, while he was still at Disney, about its proposed second movie, A Bug’s Life, and that he had then stolen the idea of an animated insect movie when he decided to produce Antz at DreamWorks. “When Jeffrey was still running Disney animation, we pitched him on A Bug’s Life,” Jobs said. “In sixty years of animation history, nobody had thought of doing an animated movie about insects, until Lasseter. It was one of his brilliant creative sparks. And Jeffrey left and went to DreamWorks and all of a sudden had this idea for an animated movie about—Oh!—insects. And he pretended he’d never heard the pitch. He lied. He lied through his teeth.”
Actually, not. The real story is a bit more interesting. Katzenberg never heard the Bug’s Life pitch while at Disney. But after he left for DreamWorks, he stayed in touch with Lasseter, occasionally pinging him with one of his typical “Hey buddy, how you doing just checking in” quick phone calls. So when Lasseter happened to be at the Technicolor facility on the Universal lot, where DreamWorks was also located, he called Katzenberg and dropped by with a couple of colleagues. When Katzenberg asked what they were doing next, Lasseter told him. “We described to him A Bug’s Life, with an ant as the main character, and told him the whole story of him organizing the other ants and enlisting a group of circus performer insects to fight off the grasshoppers,” Lasseter recalled. “I should have been wary. Jeffrey kept asking questions about when it would be released.”
Lasseter began to get worried when, in early 1996, he heard rumors that DreamWorks might be making its own computer-animated movie about ants. He called Katzenberg and asked him point-blank. Katzenberg hemmed, hawed, and asked where Lasseter had heard that. Lasseter asked again, and Katzenberg admitted it was true. “How could you?” yelled Lasseter, who very rarely raised his voice.
“We had the idea long ago,” said Katzenberg, who explained that it had been pitched to him by a development director at DreamWorks.
“I don’t believe you,” Lasseter replied.
Katzenberg conceded that he had sped up Antz as a way to counter his former colleagues at Disney. DreamWorks’ first major picture was to be Prince of Egypt, which was scheduled to be released for Thanksgiving 1998, and he was appalled when he heard that Disney was planning to release Pixar’s A Bug’s Life that same weekend. So he had rushed Antz into production to force Disney to change the release date of A Bug’s Life.
“Fuck you,” replied Lasseter, who did not normally use such language. He didn’t speak to Katzenberg for another thirteen years.
Jobs was furious, and he was far more practiced than Lasseter at giving vent to his emotions. He called Katzenberg and started yelling. Katzenberg made an offer: He would delay production of Antz if Jobs and Disney would move A Bug’s Life so that it didn’t compete with Prince of Egypt. “It was a blatant extortion attempt, and I didn’t go for it,” Jobs recalled. He told Katzenberg there was nothing he could do to make Disney change the release date.
“Of course you can,” Katzenberg replied. “You can move mountains. You taught me how!” He said that when Pixar was almost bankrupt, he had come to its rescue by giving it the deal to do Toy Story. “I was the one guy there for you back then, and now you’re allowing them to use you to screw me.” He suggested that if Jobs wanted to, he could simply slow down production on A Bug’s Life without telling Disney. If he did, Katzenberg said, he would put Antz on hold. “Don’t even go there,” Jobs replied.
Katzenberg had a valid gripe. It was clear that Eisner and Disney were using the Pixar movie to get back at him for leaving Disney and starting a rival animation studio. “Prince of Egypt was the first thing we were making, and they scheduled something for our announced release date just to be hostile,” he said. “My view was like that of the Lion King, that if you stick your hand in my cage and paw me, watch out.”