Steve had no input on the development of the Toy Story plot. Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, and Joe Ranft worked together to create the script, eventually with help from other writers, including Joss Whedon, who would go on to create the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series and to direct movies such as The Avengers. The team on Toy Story would turn out to be remarkably productive, and exceedingly close-knit. Stanton would direct Pixar’s second movie, A Bug’s Life, as well as Finding Nemo and Wall-E. Docter would direct Monsters, Inc. and Up, while Ranft would serve as cowriter and story chief on several pictures, until his death in a car crash in 2005. The four men became the core of what Catmull calls the Brain Trust—a collection of Pixar writers, directors, and animators who provide constructive criticism to the director of every Pixar movie. It’s a unique idea—the Brain Trust has no authority whatsoever, and the directors are only asked to listen and deeply consider the advice of its members. It became a powerful tool, helping to reshape movies like The Incredibles and Wall-E. But Steve was never a part of it. Catmull kept him out of those discussions, because he felt that Steve’s big personality would skew the proceedings.
Watching Lasseter, Stanton, Docter, and Ranft develop Toy Story, Steve was witnessing creative thinking at its best—meaning it was chock-full of failures and dead ends. He always remained encouraging. “When we screwed up,” says Catmull, “it wasn’t, ‘Oh, you guys screwed up!’ It was always, ‘What are we going to do to move forward?’ When you’re out there on the edge, some things go right and some things go wrong. If nothing’s going wrong, you’re fooling yourself. Steve believed that.” That was a bright contrast to Katzenberg, whose severe critiques kept pushing the movie in a more sarcastic direction than the team was comfortable with. In fact, things with Disney would get so difficult that after a disastrous screening one Friday late in 1993, Schneider shut down production. For three months, Lasseter and his cowriters recused themselves to draft a new version of the script. During that time Steve and Catmull ensured that the production crew stayed together and got paid. And once Toy Story swung back into production, Jobs fought for more money to accommodate the changes made necessary by the new script. His battles with Katzenberg over the budget were intense, but eventually he and Catmull were able to wheedle a bit more cash out of Disney.
“Watching our collaboration, seeing us make ourselves better by working together, I think that fueled Steve,” says Lasseter. “I think that was one of the key changes when he went back to Apple. He was more open to the talent of others, to be inspired by and challenged by that talent, but also to the idea of inspiring them to do amazing things he knew he couldn’t do himself.”
IN THE YEARS after marrying Laurene and starting a family, Steve developed a few especially close friendships. These weren’t relationships he talked about much, at least not in any way that was personally revealing. Steve drew a hard line with reporters about his private life—those of us who had some access to it agreed not to write about it, unless we got Steve’s permission to relate a certain anecdote. Ed Catmull and John Lasseter became two of Steve’s really close friends, part of a very small group of people he would hold near and dear till the end of his life.
“I liked him from the moment I met him,” Steve told me once about Ed. He found him an intellectual match. “Ed is a quiet guy, and you could mistake that quietness for weakness—but it’s not, it’s strength. Ed’s really thoughtful, and really, really smart. He’s used to hanging around really smart people, and when you’re around really smart people you tend to listen to them.”
Steve listened to Catmull. Though he could often come across as a know-it-all, Steve was constantly trying to learn. Trim and professorial, Ed was ten years older than Steve, making him as much of a mentor as a colleague. Ed showed him how a movie came together, explaining all the pieces and processes in a way that eventually fit together. He could dig into the technology of 3-D animation with Steve. And he could explain his managerial decisions with a sincerity, depth of feeling, and rationality that Steve respected. Ed had made it a point for years to try to hire people who he felt were smarter than he was, and the effort showed. “The collection of people at Pixar is the highest concentration of remarkable people I have ever witnessed,” Steve told me. For all that he gained from knowing Catmull, however, Steve never quite acknowledged to Ed how much he had learned from him. “The closest he got,” says Catmull, “is that he said he valued what I did, and knew it was very different from what he did.”
Theirs was a quiet, sincere friendship, enabled in great part by Catmull’s maturity. “Steve and I never argued,” he says. “We had disagreements; I won several and he won several. But even early on, when he wasn’t particularly skilled at dealing with relationships, I always felt that he was talking about a topic, not about who was right or who was wrong. For a lot of people, their egos are tied up in an idea and it gets in the way of learning. You have to separate yourself from the idea. Steve was like that.”
The two men would eventually know each other and work together for twenty-six years. Catmull says he saw enormous changes over the years, but allows that this, too, was something Steve would never acknowledge. “I look at Steve as someone who was actually always trying to change, but he didn’t express it in the same ways as others, and he didn’t communicate with people about that. He really was trying to change the world. It didn’t come across as him being personally introspective.”
Steve’s relationship with Lasseter was different, more buoyant. Their friendship really picked up once Toy Story got under way, and Lasseter’s animation division went from being an expensive indulgence to the future of the company. He and Steve were contemporaries, with growing families. “We were having babies at the same time,” says Lasseter, “so there was that.”
Early in their friendship, the fact that Steve was the boss and the wealthier of the two made him something of an older brother. One weekend in the spring of 1995, the Lasseters invited the Jobs family up to their house in Sonoma. Steve was exploring a radical idea: taking Pixar public after Toy Story’s premiere, which was scheduled for Thanksgiving. So on the first night, after the kids were asleep and Laurene had headed to bed early, Steve stayed up till four in the morning explaining stock options to John and his wife, Nancy. “I mean, I went to CalArts. I didn’t know anything about that stuff. So he gave us Business 101 about stock, how it works, why companies sell it, what’s beneficial for people, how you are then beholden to stockholders and have to do earnings reports, all that stuff. He talked about IPOs, getting ready for it, stock options. He just laid it all out.”
The next morning, Steve and John were sitting on the porch of the house, taking in the nice view—which was marred only by the sight of John’s 1984 Honda Civic, with 210,000 miles on it. “The paint was just sunburned off,” says Lasseter. “The seats were shot—I put T-shirts over them. Steve had driven up in their Jeep Cherokee. Now he knew the roads I had to drive on every day.”
“Don’t tell me that’s your car,” Steve said.
“Yeah, it is,” John told him.
“You drive to and from Pixar on these roads in that car?” Steve said. Lasseter sheepishly nodded. “Okay. No, no, no, no. No, that just won’t do.”