The company also sold a professional software application called RenderMan, which allowed computer graphics artists to apply textures and colors to the surfaces of computer-generated 3-D objects onscreen with a level of sharpness and resolution that could be blended into conventional film images. As with everything Pixar did, it was top-of-the-line software. Steven Spielberg’s techies used RenderMan (on Silicon Graphics workstations) to create the scaly skin and ivory teeth of Jurassic Park’s frightening dinosaurs. RenderMan played a key role in the budding field of 3-D computer graphics imaging, helping to enhance movies like The Abyss, Terminator II, and Alien III, along with Disney’s Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and The Lion King. Pixar even released a version that would run on Macintosh computers. But as cool as the software was, it never came close to making Pixar self-sustainable.

BY 1990, THERE seemed very little reason for Pixar to continue to exist as a business. Steve Jobs was anything but a tycoon. The stock he sold after leaving Apple had been worth $70 million, and he had made some successful investments. But after several years of funding Pixar and NeXT, only a fraction of that fortune remained. Pixar’s revenues were stagnant, and Steve was writing one check after another to keep the thing afloat. The world’s most famous computer entrepreneur was in danger of drifting into the middling obscurity that has enveloped so many other one-hit wonders of the technology world. Shutting down this expensive side project would have made enormous sense. And yet Steve persisted.

He had idiosyncratic reasons for doing so. The easiest to understand is that he desperately did not want to admit to having failed. After his ignominious departure from Apple, and in the absence of a tangible success at NeXT, Steve was basically keeping his reputation alive with announcements of milestones that weren’t really milestones. The first kind were the “just around the corner” proclamations, alerting the world to the imminent arrival of something sure to be insanely great, like NeXT’s first NeXTcube computer. The second were the “seal of approval” kind, announcing the endorsement of a significant backer, the purchase of a computer or some software by a notable company, or, in the case of Pixar, an award for graphics excellence.

But announcements alone couldn’t stave off reality forever, and the Steve Jobs story was starting to shift from his past successes to his present failures. Closing Pixar would have only accelerated that story. At a moment when his business life was in worse shape than ever, Steve simply couldn’t risk making things worse by shuttering Pixar. “Steve once told us he had nothing to prove when he started NeXT,” Catmull recalls. “Now I don’t believe that for a second. We knew he had everything to prove with NeXT. We were the only other gamble he took, and he said we turned out to be such a handful to begin with, that he stopped taking any other gambles beyond those.”

Steve’s main reason for keeping Pixar alive was that he still believed in this little band of geniuses and their leaders. The business seemed to be going nowhere, but Steve still deeply respected Catmull and Lasseter. He had great admiration for Catmull’s business and management expertise. And Lasseter? Well, Lasseter was one of those rare geniuses who can always make life seem grander and full of possibilities.

“Steve dealt mostly with Ed,” Lasseter remembers, “because they did the business stuff, and I was just the animator in another building. My first real interaction with Steve was SIGGRAPH in 1986. It was in Dallas, at the beginning of August, and hotter than can be. The film show at SIGGRAPH was like a rock concert. People started lining up six hours in advance. And you do not cut those lines because people get really mad. But Steve and his girlfriend come up, and he says, ‘Hey, John, do we really have to stand in line?’ So I talk my way through to the guard, and basically made up something about why I had to get Steve Jobs and his girlfriend in before anyone else. The guard let us through, just before the flood of people.

“Before this moment, Steve’s tangible moments of success were things like showing up at a school and seeing a whole lab filled with his computers. This was different. It had the feel of a big rock concert, an arena rock concert.

“The show goes on, and people are going nuts over, like, crystal balls bouncing on the screen. It was all tech stuff. Nothing with a story. And then all of a sudden, our little Luxo Jr. comes up. You know, the little hopping lamp. It’s only a minute and a half long, but even before the thing is over, people are cheering. That moment is remembered as significant in computer graphics history because it was the first time a 3-D computer-animated film entertained audiences with its story and characters, not the mere fact of being made with a computer. It got a standing ovation before it was done. The crowd knew they had seen something brand new.

“And Steve turned to me with these big eyes,” Lasseter continues, his own eyes bulging, “like, ‘This is great! Wow! I like this!’ Getting that immediate response from an audience was something he had never experienced. The bug had bitten him, and he was like, ‘I love this.’ It bonded us. And then, that I had the balls to cut in front of this line of six thousand people who would skin you alive! It changed our relationship from that moment on.”

“Luxo Jr. was the breakthrough,” Steve told me many years later. If Steve ever was starstruck, it was by Lasseter, whose artistry seemed to be irrefutable evidence of what Steve believed to be the most important attribute of computers: that they were tools that could unleash and enhance human creativity. Despite his boyish ways (his office is stuffed with so many toys it could double as a Pixar museum, and his wardrobe consists exclusively of blue jeans and hundreds of loud, Hawaiian-style print shirts), Lasseter was a confident grown-up, and not persnickety in any way. While he never looked to Steve for creative advice on his short features, he calmly listened to his boss’s opinions, before going ahead with his own plans anyway. But he made compromises when needed, too, rather than insisting on perfection: when he couldn’t prepare a polished version of a short called Tin Toy in time for SIGGRAPH, he simply showed what he could and filled in the rest with line drawings.

Lasseter lived in constant fear that Steve would shutter his little animation group. Even as he kept writing checks to fund Pixar, Steve regularly slashed budgets and froze salaries: “I think I made the same salary from ’84 to ’89,” Lasseter remembers. “And I thought for sure that they’d get rid of Animation. At one point they were contemplating a layoff in Hardware, I think, and there were lots of complaints like, ‘What about Animation? They don’t do anything to bring in the money.’ So I asked the head of Software, a guy named Mickey Mantle, like the baseball player, ‘When’s the shoe gonna drop, really? When will they just close Animation?’ And he said, ‘John, they never will.’

“ ‘What do you mean?’ I asked him,” continues Lasseter. “And Mickey said, ‘Computer hardware and software companies, they go through layoffs and it’s business. It’s the ups and downs of the business. But when people think of Pixar, it’s not our computers or our software. They think of those little short films you’ve made. That’s the identity of Pixar to the rest of the world. So if Pixar were to stop making those films and lay everybody off in Animation, that would signal to the entire world that Pixar is done. That,’ he said, ‘is why they’re not gonna close Animation.’ ”