No one backed down, and the rival ant movies provoked a press frenzy. Disney tried to keep Jobs quiet, on the theory that playing up the rivalry would serve to help Antz, but he was a man not easily muzzled. “The bad guys rarely win,” he told the Los Angeles Times. In response, DreamWorks’ savvy marketing maven, Terry Press, suggested, “Steve Jobs should take a pill.”
Antz was released at the beginning of October 1998. It was not a bad movie. Woody Allen voiced the part of a neurotic ant living in a conformist society who yearns to express his individualism. “This is the kind of Woody Allen comedy Woody Allen no longer makes,” Time wrote. It grossed a respectable $91 million domestically and $172 million worldwide.
A Bug’s Life came out six weeks later, as planned. It had a more epic plot, which reversed Aesop’s tale of “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” plus a greater technical virtuosity, which allowed such startling details as the view of grass from a bug’s vantage point. Time was much more effusive about it. “Its design work is so stellar—a wide-screen Eden of leaves and labyrinths populated by dozens of ugly, buggy, cuddly cutups—that it makes the DreamWorks film seem, by comparison, like radio,” wrote Richard Corliss. It did twice as well as Antz at the box office, grossing $163 million domestically and $363 million worldwide. (It also beat Prince of Egypt.)
A few years later Katzenberg ran into Jobs and tried to smooth things over. He insisted that he had never heard the pitch for A Bug’s Life while at Disney; if he had, his settlement with Disney would have given him a share of the profits, so it’s not something he would lie about. Jobs laughed, and accepted as much. “I asked you to move your release date, and you wouldn’t, so you can’t be mad at me for protecting my child,” Katzenberg told him. He recalled that Jobs “got really calm and Zen-like” and said he understood. But Jobs later said that he never really forgave Katzenberg:
Our film toasted his at the box office. Did that feel good? No, it still felt awful, because people started saying how everyone in Hollywood was doing insect movies. He took the brilliant originality away from John, and that can never be replaced. That’s unconscionable, so I’ve never trusted him, even after he tried to make amends. He came up to
me after he was successful with
Shrek
and said, “I’m a changed man, I’m finally at peace with myself,” and all this crap. And it was like, give me a break, Jeffrey.
For his part, Katzenberg was much more gracious. He considered Jobs one of the “true geniuses in the world,” and he learned to respect him despite their volatile dealings.
More important than beating Antz was showing that Pixar was not a one-hit wonder. A Bug’s Life grossed as much as Toy Story had, proving that the first success was not a fluke. “There’s a classic thing in business, which is the second-product syndrome,” Jobs later said. It comes from not understanding what made your first product so successful. “I lived through that at Apple. My feeling was, if we got through our second film, we’d make it.”
Steve’s Own Movie
Toy Story 2, which came out in November 1999, was even bigger, with a $485 million gross worldwide. Given that Pixar’s success was now assured, it was time to start building a showcase headquarters. Jobs and the Pixar facilities team found an abandoned Del Monte fruit cannery in Emeryville, an industrial neighborhood between Berkeley and Oakland, just across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco. They tore it down, and Jobs commissioned Peter Bohlin, the architect of the Apple stores, to design a new building for the sixteen-acre plot.
Jobs obsessed over every aspect of the new building, from the overall concept to the tiniest detail regarding materials and construction. “Steve had this firm belief that the right kind of building can do great things for a culture,” said Pixar’s president Ed Catmull. Jobs controlled the creation of the building as if he were a director sweating each scene of a film. “The Pixar building was Steve’s own movie,” Lasseter said.
Lasseter had originally wanted a traditional Hollywood studio, with separate buildings for various projects and bungalows for development teams. But the Disney folks said they didn’t like their new campus because the teams felt isolated, and Jobs agreed. In fact he decided they should go to the other extreme: one huge building around a central atrium designed to encourage random encounters.
Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. “There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat,” he said. “That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.”
So he had the Pixar building designed to promote encounters and unplanned collaborations. “If a building doesn’t encourage that, you’ll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that’s sparked by serendipity,” he said. “So we designed the building to make people get out of their offices and mingle in the central atrium with people they might not otherwise see.” The front doors and main stairs and corridors all led to the atrium, the café and the mailboxes were there, the conference rooms had windows that looked out onto it, and the six-hundred-seat theater and two smaller screening rooms all spilled into it. “Steve’s theory worked from day one,” Lasseter recalled. “I kept running into people I hadn’t seen for months. I’ve never seen a building that promoted collaboration and creativity as well as this one.”
Jobs even went so far as to decree that there be only two huge bathrooms in the building, one for each gender, connected to the atrium. “He felt that very, very strongly,” recalled Pam Kerwin, Pixar’s general manager. “Some of us felt that was going too far. One pregnant woman said she shouldn’t be forced to walk for ten minutes just to go to the bathroom, and that led to a big fight.” It was one of the few times that Lasseter disagreed with Jobs. They reached a compromise: there would be two sets of bathrooms on either side of the atrium on both of the two floors.
Because the building’s steel beams were going to be visible, Jobs pored over samples from manufacturers across the country to see which had the best color and texture. He chose a mill in Arkansas, told it to blast the steel to a pure color, and made sure the truckers used caution not to nick any of it. He also insisted that all the beams be bolted together, not welded. “We sandblasted the steel and clear-coated it, so you can actually see what it’s like,” he recalled. “When the steelworkers were putting up the beams, they would bring their families on the weekend to show them.”