“We called it Steve’s movie,” says Catmull. “This was a labor of love.” Adds Lasseter: “It took the same budget, and the same amount of time as one of our movies, and he was the director. We love it.”
Steve tried to get up to Pixar once a week. While there he met with Catmull and Lasseter, watched reels of movies in development, and huddled with folks like Lawrence Levy, the CFO, or Jim Morris, the general manager. Steve, of course, was not a movie director, nor did he try to be one. Catmull had preempted that possibility years earlier, when he wangled from Jobs a promise that he would never try to be a member of the Pixar “brain trust,” an advisory council of directors and writers and animators who weigh in on every movie as it develops. But Catmull and Lasseter did use Steve as a critic.
“One of the things we lost when Steve died was an external hammer,” says Catmull. “At some point in every film, the director gets lost in the forest. So once or twice a film, I might call Steve up and say, ‘Steve, I think we’ve got a problem.’ That’s all I would say. You never try to tell Steve what to think. I wouldn’t prep him.” Steve would drive up to Emeryville, settle into one of the small screening rooms, and watch whatever had been assembled of the movie up to that point. Then he’d offer his own critique, usually talking to the director and the whole brain trust. “Steve never said anything that hadn’t already been said by one of the other brain trust members, because they’re all really good at the storytelling,” Catmull continues. “But there is something about his presence, and he was so articulate, that he could take the same thing said by somebody else and just cut right through it. He was very careful about how he went about this. Steve would preface it by saying, ‘I’m not a filmmaker, you can ignore everything I say.’ He literally said that every time. He would then just say what he thought the problem was. Right? Only the fact that it was articulate was the gut punch. He didn’t tell them to do anything, he just told them what he thought.
“Sometimes,” Catmull says, “if it were a big enough of a gut punch he’d go for a walk with the director. Steve was this incredibly intelligent, strong-willed person who made things happen, but at the same time he enabled people. He was always big on going for walks with people. So he would take the director out on a walk, where you talked more slowly, you think through things … just talking, just a friendly back-and-forth talking. His goal was just to help them make a better movie. It always made it easier for the director to move forward. It wasn’t ever like ‘Oh, you screwed up.’ It was ‘What are we gonna do to move forward?’ The past can be a lesson, but the past is gone. He believed that.”
This kind of one-on-one mentoring was something Steve learned over time. “Early on, if somebody didn’t measure up Steve wouldn’t hide it,” says Catmull. “That kind of behavior wasn’t something I ever saw during his last ten years. Instead, he would take you off in private, and turn what could have been an embarrassing thing into something that actually became very productive and bonding. He learned; he had taken the mistakes that he made, internalized and processed them, and made some changes.”
Steve was more relaxed at Pixar than he was at Apple. “He never tried to make us like Apple,” says Catmull, “or to run us the same way.” Andy Dreyfus, a designer at Pixar who had previously worked at Apple and CKS Group, says that whenever he and his boss Tom Suiter wanted to present something to Steve, they tried to meet him at Pixar. “We were always happy when we had a Friday meeting with Steve,” Dreyfus recalls, “because Friday was the day he was at Pixar, and he was always in a good mood there.”
Week after week, year after year, Pixar provided Steve with a series of uncomplicated highs. He attended the Oscars regularly, as Pixar accumulated more and more honors. He loved showing friends preview reels from unfinished movies. “Steve was our biggest fan. Every time we did an internal reel, he would want a copy,” remembers Lasseter. “And I’d find out from people I knew, he’s showing it to every neighbor at his house. Hey, everybody—come see this! He loved it. He was like a kid.”
THERE WAS ONLY one problem with Pixar, as far as Steve was concerned, and his name was Michael Eisner.
The relationship between the two high-powered men had deteriorated since they had signed the 1997 contract in which they agreed that the companies would share billing and profits equally. There had been issues between the two companies: Steve was never satisfied with the kind of attention Pixar films got from Disney’s marketing folks, and he wasn’t impressed with the plans once they finally got developed. But things had gone well. A Bug’s Life, Toy Story II, and Monsters Inc., the first three movies on the contract, had all gotten raves from critics. And it was hard to argue with their box-office results; each had debuted at number one, and each had made well over $500 million.
After delivering Monsters Inc. in 2002, Pixar was free to start negotiations with any studio for a new distribution pact. Catmull and Lasseter wanted to continue with Disney, since the company owned the rights to all the Pixar characters they’d created, and since Pixar’s films had done so well with Disney as distributor. Steve hoped Eisner would call to open negotiations, but Eisner chose to wait him out. He believed he would be able to negotiate a better deal after the release of Finding Nemo. He’d seen two previews at Pixar, and, as he wrote Disney’s board of directors, in a memo that was leaked to the Los Angeles Times, “It’s okay, but nowhere near as good as their previous films.” Eisner, of course, was dead wrong. Finding Nemo became one of Pixar’s most beloved films and grossed $868 million around the world.
Now Steve laid out a set of aggressive terms: in return for distributing Pixar movies, Disney would get 7.5 percent of the box-office gross—and nothing else. It would have no ownership of the new characters. No ownership of the films. No DVD rights. At the same time, Steve went public with his dissatisfaction with Disney, harping on the creative excellence of Pixar versus the forgettable disasters that were being released by Disney Animation: Treasure Planet, Brother Bear, and Home on the Range.
The negotiations caused Catmull and Lasseter no end of distress. “He had stayed at the negotiating table with Disney largely for me,” says Lasseter, “because of how much I cared about the characters we had created.” As the months dragged on, things just seemed to get worse and worse. Steve believed that Eisner leaked his demands to the press in an effort to make him seem greedy. In early January 2004, things seemed to reach an endpoint: Jobs told Lasseter and Catmull that Pixar would no longer negotiate with Disney. He would not work with Eisner. Not now. Not ever. “It was the worst day of my life,” says Lasseter, who, besides facing the loss of all his old characters, was now facing the prospect that Cars, which he was just finishing up, would also belong to Disney, and to a CEO who had visited Pixar just twice since the original deal was signed. Lasseter cried as he, Catmull, and Jobs announced the impasse to the Pixar staff, and he swore that the company would never again make a movie without owning the characters.
As soon as the news went public, other studios began calling. Steve played it cool. Disney would distribute Cars regardless of a new deal, and Pixar had so much cash after all its successes that it was in no rush. While Steve dickered with other studios, Eisner began to lose the support of his own company. In the fall of 2003, Walt’s nephew Roy Disney had resigned after Eisner tried to force him off the board of directors, but only after writing a sharp and public critique of the CEO. Investors who had watched Disney’s stock lag for years were tiring of Eisner’s imperiousness. When 43 percent of shareholders voted against Eisner’s reelection to the board of directors at the company’s 2004 shareholder’s meeting, the board stripped him of his chairmanship. Eisner said he would serve out the rest of his contract, which ran through 2006, but the odds against that suddenly seemed quite high.