When he was twenty-seven, Mayer appeared at the January 2004 Macworld, where Jobs introduced GarageBand, and he became a fixture at the event most years. Jobs punched up Mayer"s. .h.i.t "Gravity." The lyrics are about a guy filled with love who inexplicably dreams of ways to throw it away: "Gravity is working against me, / And gravity wants to bring me down." Jobs shook his head and commented, "I think he"s a really good kid underneath, but he"s just been out of control."
At the end of the listening session, I asked him a well-worn question: the Beatles or the Stones? "I f the vault was on fire and I could grab only one set of master tapes, I would grab the Beatles," he answered. "The hard one would be between the Beatles and Dylan. Somebody else could have replicated the Stones. No one could have been Dylan or the Beatles." As he was ruminating about how fortunate we were to have all of them when we were growing up, his son, then eighteen, came in the room. "Reed doesn"t understand," Jobs lamented. Or perhaps he did. He was wearing a Joan Baez T-shirt, with the words "Forever Young" on it.
Bob Dylan The only time Jobs can ever recall being tongue-tied was in the presence of Bob Dylan. He was playing near Palo Alto in October 2004, and Jobs was recovering from his first cancer surgery. Dylan was not a gregarious man, not a Bono or a Bowie. He was never Jobs"s friend, nor did he care to be. He did, however, invite Jobs to visit him at his hotel before the concert. Jobs recalled: We sat on the patio outside his room and talked for two hours. I was really nervous, because he was one of my heroes. And I was also afraid that he wouldn"t be really smart anymore, that he"d be a caricature of himself, like happens to a lot of people. But I was delighted. He was as sharp as a tack. He was everything I "d hoped. He was really open and honest. He was just telling me about his life and about writing his songs. He said, "They just came through me, it wasn"t like I was having to compose them. That doesn"t happen anymore, I just can"t write them that way anymore." Then he paused and said to me with his raspy voice and little smile, "But I still can sing them."
The next time Dylan played nearby, he invited Jobs to drop by his tricked-up tour bus just before the concert. When Dylan asked what his favorite song was, Jobs said "One T oo Many Mornings." So Dylan sang it that night. After the concert, as Jobs was walking out the back, the tour bus came by and screeched to a stop. The door flipped open. "So, did you hear my song I sang for you?" Dylan rasped. Then he drove off. When Jobs tells the tale, he does a pretty good impression of Dylan"s voice. "He"s one of my all-time heroes," Jobs recalled. "My love for him has grown over the years, it"s ripened. I can"t figure out how he did it when he was so young."
A few months after seeing him in concert, Jobs came up with a grandiose plan. The iTunes Store should offer a digital "boxed set" of every Dylan song every recorded, more than seven hundred in all, for $199. Jobs would be the curator of Dylan for the digital age. But Andy Lack of Sony, which was Dylan"s label, was in no mood to make a deal without some serious concessions regarding iTunes. In addition, Lack felt the price was too low and would cheapen Dylan. "Bob is a national treasure," said Lack, "and Steve wanted him on iTunes at a price that commoditized him." I t got to the heart of the problems that Lack and other record executives were having with Jobs: He was getting to set the price points, not them. So Lack said no.
"Okay, then I will call Dylan directly," Jobs said. But it was not the type of thing that Dylan ever dealt with, so it fell to his agent, Jeff Rosen, to sort things out.
"I t"s a really bad idea," Lack told Rosen, showing him the numbers. "Bob is Steve"s hero. He"ll sweeten the deal." Lack had both a professional and a personal desire to fend Jobs off, even to yank his chain a bit. So he made an offer to Rosen. "I will write you a check for a million dollars tomorrow if you hold off for the time being." As Lack later explained, it was an advance against future royalties, "one of those accounting things record companies do." Rosen called back forty-five minutes later and accepted. "Andy worked things out with us and asked us not to do it, which we didn"t," he recalled. "I think Andy gave us some sort of an advance to hold off doing it."
By 2006, however, Lack had stepped aside as the CEO of what was by then Sony BMG, and Jobs reopened negotiations. He sent Dylan an iPod with all of his songs on it, and he showed Rosen the type of marketing campaign that Apple could mount. In August he announced a grand deal. I t allowed Apple to sell the $199 digital boxed set of all the songs Dylan ever recorded, plus the exclusive right to offer Dylan"s new alb.u.m, Modern Times, for pre-release orders. "Bob Dylan is one of the most respected poets and musicians of our time, and he is a personal hero of mine," Jobs said at the announcement. The 773-track set included forty-two rarities, such as a 1961 tape of "Wade in the Water" made in a Minnesota hotel, a 1962 version of "Handsome Molly" from a live concert at the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village, the truly awesome rendition of "Mr. Tambourine Man" from the 1964 Newport Folk Festival (Jobs"s favorite), and an acoustic version of "Outlaw Blues" from 1965.
As part of the deal, Dylan appeared in a television ad for the iPod, featuring his new alb.u.m, Modern Times. This was one of the most astonishing cases of flipping the script since T om Sawyer persuaded his friends to whitewash the fence. In the past, getting celebrities to do an adrequired paying them a lot of money. But by 2006 the tables were turned. Major artists w anted to appear in iPod ads; the exposure would guarantee success. James Vincent had predicted this a few years earlier, when Jobs said he had contacts with many musicians and could pay them to appear in ads. "No, things are going to soon change," Vincent replied. "Apple is a different kind of brand, and it"s cooler than the brand of most artists. We should talk about the opportunity we offer the bands, not pay them."
Lee Clow recalled that there was actually some resistance among the younger staffers at Apple and the ad agency to using Dylan. "They wondered whether he was still cool enough," Clow said. Jobs would hear none of that. He was thrilled to have Dylan.
Jobs became obsessed by every detail of the Dylan commercial. Rosen flew to Cupertino so that they could go through the alb.u.m and pick the song they wanted to use, which ended up being "Someday Baby." Jobs approved a test video that Clow made using a stand-in for Dylan, which was then shot in Nashville with Dylan himself. But when it came back, Jobs hated it. I t wasn"t distinctive enough. He wanted a new style. So Clow hired another director, and Rosen was able to convince Dylan to retape the entire commercial. This time it was done with a gently backlit cowboy- hatted Dylan sitting on a stool, strumming and singing, while a hip woman in a newsboy cap dances with her iPod. Jobs loved it.
The ad showed the halo effect of the iPod"s marketing: I t helped Dylan win a younger audience, just as the iPod had done for Apple computers.
Because of the ad, Dylan"s alb.u.m was number one on the Billboard chart its first week, topping hot-selling alb.u.ms by Christina Aguilera and Outkast. I t was the first time Dylan had reached the top spot since Desire in 1976, thirty years earlier. Ad Age headlined Apple"s role in propelling Dylan. "The iTunes spot wasn"t just a run-of-the-mill celebrity-endors.e.m.e.nt deal in which a big brand signs a big check to tap into the equity of a big star," it reported. "This one flipped the formula, with the all-powerful Apple brand giving Mr. Dylan access to younger demographics and helping propel his sales to places they hadn"t been since the Ford administration."
The Beatles.
Among Jobs"s prized CDs was a bootleg that contained a dozen or so taped sessions of the Beatles revising "Strawberry Fields Forever." I t became the musical score to his philosophy of how to perfect a product. Andy Hertzfeld had found the CD and made a copy of it for Jobs in 1986, though Jobs sometimes told folks that it had come from Yoko Ono. Sitting in the living room of his Palo Alto home one day, Jobs rummaged around in some gla.s.s-enclosed bookcases to find it, then put it on while describing what it had taught him: I t"s a complex song, and it"s fascinating to watch the creative process as they went back and forth and finally created it over a few months.
Lennon was always my favorite Beatle. [He laughs as Lennon stops during the first take and makes the band go back and revise a chord.] Did you hear that little detour they took? I t didn"t work, so they went back and started from where they were. I t"s so raw in this version. I t actually makes them sound like mere mortals. You could actually imagine other people doing this, up to this version. Maybe not writing and conceiving it, but certainly playing it. Yet they just didn"t stop. They were such perfectionists they kept it going and going. This made a big impression on me when I was in my thirties. You could just tell how much they worked at this.
They did a bundle of work between each of these recordings. They kept sending it back to make it closer to perfect. [As he listens to the third take, he points out how the instrumentation has gotten more complex.] The way we build stuff at Apple is often this way. Even the number of models we"d make of a new notebook or iPod. We would start off with a version and then begin refining and refining, doing detailed models of the design, or the b.u.t.tons, or how a function operates. I t"s a lot of work, but in the end it just gets better, and soon it"s like, "Wow, how did they do that?!? Where are the screws?"
I t was thus understandable that Jobs was driven to distraction by the fact that the Beatles were not on iTunes.
His struggle with Apple Corps, the Beatles" business holding company, stretched more than three decades, causing too many journalists to use the phrase "long and winding road" in stories about the relationship. I t began in 1978, when Apple Computers, soon after its launch, was sued by Apple Corps for trademark infringement, based on the fact that the Beatles" former recording label was called Apple. The suit was settled three years later, when Apple Computers paid Apple Corps $80,000. The settlement had what seemed back then an innocuous stipulation: The Beatles would not produce any computer equipment and Apple would not market any music products.
The Beatles kept their end of the bargain; none of them ever produced any computers. But Apple ended up wandering into the music business. I t got sued again in 1991, when the Mac incorporated the ability to play musical files, then again in 2003, when the iTunes Store was launched. The legal issues were finally resolved in 2007, when Apple made a deal to pay Apple Corps $500 million for all worldwide rights to the name, and then licensed back to the Beatles the right to use Apple Corps for their record and business holdings.
Alas, this did not resolve the issue of getting the Beatles onto iTunes. For that to happen, the Beatles and EMI Music, which held the rights to most of their songs, had to negotiate their own differences over how to handle the digital rights. "The Beatles all want to be on iTunes," Jobs later recalled, "but they and EMI are like an old married couple. They hate each other but can"t get divorced. The fact that my favorite band was the last holdout from iTunes was something I very much hoped I would live to resolve." As it turned out, he would.
Bono.
Bono, the lead singer of U2, deeply appreciated Apple"s marketing muscle. He was confident that his Dublin-based band was still the best in the world, but in 2004 it was trying, after almost thirty years together, to reinvigorate its image. I t had produced an exciting new alb.u.m with a song that the band"s lead guitarist, The Edge, declared to be "the mother of all rock tunes." Bono knew he needed to find a way to get it some traction, so he placed a call to Jobs.
"I wanted something specific from Apple," Bono recalled. "We had a song called "Vertigo" that featured an aggressive guitar riff that I knew would be contagious, but only if people were exposed to it many, many times." He was worried that the era of promoting a song through airplay on the radio was over. So Bono visited Jobs at home in Palo Alto, walked around the garden, and made an unusual pitch. Over the years U2 had spurned offers as high as $23 million to be in commercials. Now he wanted Jobs to use the band in an iPod commercial for free-or at least as part of a mutually beneficial package. "They had never done a commercial before," Jobs later recalled. "But they were getting ripped off by free downloading, they liked what we were doing with iTunes, and they thought we could promote them to a younger audience."
Any other CEO would have jumped into a mosh pit to have U2 in an ad, but Jobs pushed back a bit. Apple didn"t feature recognizable people in the iPod ads, just silhouettes. (The Dylan ad had not yet been made.) "You have silhouettes of fans," Bono replied, "so couldn"t the next phase be silhouettes of artists?" Jobs said it sounded like an idea worth exploring. Bono left a copy of the unreleased alb.u.m, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, for Jobs to hear. "He was the only person outside the band who had it," Bono said.
A round of meetings ensued. Jobs flew down to talk to Jimmy Iovine, whose Interscope records distributed U2, at his house in the Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles. The Edge was there, along with U2"s manager, Paul McGuinness. Another meeting took place in Jobs"s kitchen, withMcGuinness writing down the deal points in the back of his diary. U2 would appear in the commercial, and Apple would vigorously promote the alb.u.m in multiple venues, ranging from billboards to the iTunes homepage. The band would get no direct fee, but it would get royalties from the sale of a special U2 edition of the iPod. Bono believed, like Lack, that the musicians should get a royalty on each iPod sold, and this was his small attempt to a.s.sert the principle in a limited way for his band. "Bono and I asked Steve to make us a black one," Iovine recalled. "We weren"t just doing a commercial sponsorship, we were making a co-branding deal."
"We wanted our own iPod, something distinct from the regular white ones," Bono recalled. "We wanted black, but Steve said, "We"ve tried other colors than white, and they don"t work."" A few days later Jobs relented and accepted the idea, tentatively.
The commercial interspersed high-voltage shots of the band in partial silhouette with the usual silhouette of a dancing woman listening to an iPod. But even as it was being shot in London, the agreement with Apple was unraveling. Jobs began having second thoughts about the idea of a special black iPod, and the royalty rates were not fully pinned down. He called James Vincent, at Apple"s ad agency, and told him to call London and put things on hold. "I don"t think it"s going to happen," Jobs said. "They don"t realize how much value we are giving them, it"s going south. Let"s think of some other ad to do." Vincent, a lifelong U2 fan, knew how big the ad would be, both for the band and Apple, and begged for the chance to call Bono to try to get things on track. Jobs gave him Bono"s mobile number, and he reached the singer in his kitchen in Dublin.
Bono was also having a few second thoughts. "I don"t think this is going to work," he told Vincent. "The band is reluctant." Vincent asked what the problem was. "When we were teenagers in Dublin, we said we would never do naff stuff," Bono replied. Vincent, despite being British and familiar with rock slang, said he didn"t know what that meant. "Doing rubbishy things for money," Bono explained. "We are all about our fans. We feel like we"d be letting them down if we went in an ad. I t doesn"t feel right. I "m sorry we wasted your time."
Vincent asked what more Apple could do to make it work. "We are giving you the most important thing we have to give, and that"s our music,"
said Bono. "And what are you giving us back? Advertising, and our fans will think it"s for you. We need something more." Vincent replied that the offer of the special U2 edition of the iPod and the royalty arrangement was a huge deal. "That"s the most prized thing we have to give," he told Bono.
The singer said he was ready to try to put the deal back together, so Vincent immediately called Jony Ive, another big U2 fan (he had first seen them in concert in Newcastle in 1983), and described the situation. Then he called Jobs and suggested he send Ive to Dublin to show what the black iPod would look like. Jobs agreed. Vincent called Bono back, and asked if he knew Jony Ive, unaware that they had met before and admired each other. "Know Jony Ive?" Bono laughed. "I love that guy. I drink his bathwater."
"That"s a bit strong," Vincent replied, "but how about letting him come visit and show how cool your iPod would be?"
"I "m going to pick him up myself in my Maserati," Bono answered. "He"s going to stay at my house, I "m going to take him out, and I will get him really drunk."
The next day, as Ive headed toward Dublin, Vincent had to fend off Jobs, who was still having second thoughts. "I don"t know if we"re doing the right thing," he said. "We don"t want to do this for anyone else." He was worried about setting the precedent of artists getting a royalty from each iPod sold. Vincent a.s.sured him that the U2 deal would be special.
"Jony arrived in Dublin and I put him up at my guest house, a serene place over a railway track with a view of the sea," Bono recalled. "He shows me this beautiful black iPod with a deep red click wheel, and I say okay, we"ll do it." They went to a local pub, hashed out some of the details, and then called Jobs in Cupertino to see if he would agree. Jobs haggled for a while over each detail of the finances, and over the design, before he finally embraced the deal. That impressed Bono. "I t"s actually amazing that a CEO cares that much about detail," he said. When it was resolved, Ive and Bono settled into some serious drinking. Both are comfortable in pubs. After a few pints, they decided to call Vincent back in California. He was not home, so Bono left a message on his answering machine, which Vincent made sure never to erase. "I "m sitting here in bubbling Dublin with your friend Jony," it said. "We"re both a bit drunk, and we"re happy with this wonderful iPod and I can"t even believe it exists and I "m holding it in my hand. Thank you!"
Jobs rented a theater in San Jose for the unveiling of the TV commercial and special iPod. Bono and The Edge joined him onstage. The alb.u.m sold 840,000 copies in its first week and debuted at number one on the Billboard chart. Bono told the press afterward that he had done the commercial without charge because "U2 will get as much value out of the commercial as Apple will." Jimmy Iovine added that it would allow the band to "reach a younger audience."
What was remarkable was that a.s.sociating with a computer and electronics company was the best way for a rock band to seem hip and appeal to young people. Bono later explained that not all corporate sponsorships were deals with the devil. "Let"s have a look," he told Greg Kot, the Chicago Tribune music critic. "The "devil" here is a bunch of creative minds, more creative than a lot of people in rock bands. The lead singer is Steve Jobs. These men have helped design the most beautiful art object in music culture since the electric guitar. That"s the iPod. The job of art is to chase ugliness away."
Bono got Jobs to do another deal with him in 2006, this one for his Product Red campaign that raised money and awareness to fight AIDS in Africa. Jobs was never much interested in philanthropy, but he agreed to do a special red iPod as part of Bono"s campaign. I t was not a wholehearted commitment. He balked, for example, at using the campaign"s signature treatment of putting the name of the company in parentheses with the word "red" in superscript after it, as in (APPLE) RED. "I don"t want Apple in parentheses," Jobs insisted. Bono replied, "But Steve, that"s how we show unity for our cause." The conversation got heated-to the F-you stage-before they agreed to sleep on it. Finally Jobs compromised, sort of. Bono could do what he wanted in his ads, but Jobs would never put Apple in parentheses on any of his products or in any of his stores. The iPod was labeled (PRODUCT) RED, not (APPLE) RED.
"Steve can be sparky," Bono recalled, "but those moments have made us closer friends, because there are not many people in your life where you can have those robust discussions. He"s very opinionated. After our shows, I talk to him and he"s always got an opinion." Jobs and his family occasionally visited Bono and his wife and four kids at their home near Nice on the French Riviera. On one vacation, in 2008, Jobs chartered a boat and moored it near Bono"s home. They ate meals together, and Bono played tapes of the songs U2 was preparing for what became the No Line on the Horizon alb.u.m. But despite the friendship, Jobs was still a tough negotiator. They tried to make a deal for another ad and special release of the song "Get On Your Boots," but they could not come to terms. When Bono hurt his back in 2010 and had to cancel a tour, Powell sent him a gift basket with a DVD of the comedy duo Flight of the Conchords, the book Mozart"s Brain and the Fighter Pilot, honey from her beehives, and pain cream. Jobs wrote a note and attached it to the last item, saying, "Pain Cream-I love this stuff."
Yo-Yo Ma.
There was one cla.s.sical 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 hewas 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 G.o.d, 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 s.p.u.n.ky personality that would appeal to the creators of Buzz Lightyear and Woody, and he loved the fact that Ive and John La.s.seter 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 ill.u.s.trators 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 La.s.seter at Pixar.
Jobs reveled in the earnest playfulness of moviemaking and got pa.s.sionate about the algorithms that enabled such magic as allowing computer- generated raindrops to refract sunbeams or blades of gra.s.s to wave in the wind. But he was able to restrain himself from trying to control the creative process. I t was at Pixar that he learned to let other creative people flourish and take the lead. Largely it was because he loved La.s.seter, 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 a.s.set. 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, n.o.body had thought of doing an animated movie about insects, until La.s.seter. I t 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 La.s.seter, occasionally pinging him with one of his typical "Hey buddy, how you doing just checking in" quick phone calls. So when La.s.seter happened to be at the T echnicolor 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, La.s.seter 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 gra.s.shoppers," La.s.seter recalled. "I should have been wary. Jeffrey kept asking questions about when it would be released."
La.s.seter 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 La.s.seter had heard that. La.s.seter asked again, and Katzenberg admitted it was true. "How could you?" yelled La.s.seter, 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," La.s.seter 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.
"f.u.c.k you," replied La.s.seter, 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 La.s.seter 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. "I t 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. I f he did, Katzenberg said, he would put Antz on hold. "Don"t even go there," Jobs replied.
Katzenberg had a valid gripe. I t 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."
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. I t 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. I t grossed a respectable $91 million domestically and $172 million worldwide.
A Bug"s Life came out six weeks later, as planned. I t had a more epic plot, which reversed Aesop"s tale of "The Ant and the Gra.s.shopper," plus a greater technical virtuosity, which allowed such startling details as the view of gra.s.s from a bug"s vantage point. Time was much more effusive about it. "I ts 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. I t did twice as well as Antz at the box office, grossing $163 million domestically and $363 million worldwide. (I t 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 c.r.a.p. 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 cla.s.sic thing in business, which is the second-product syndrome," Jobs later said. I t 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 Ow n 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 a.s.sured, 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," La.s.seter said.
La.s.seter 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. "I f 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 cafe 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," La.s.seter 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." I t was one of the few times that La.s.seter 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."
The wackiest piece of serendipity was "The Love Lounge." One of the animators found a small door on the back wall when he moved into his office. I t opened to a low corridor that you could crawl through to a room clad in sheet metal that provided access to the air-conditioning valves. He and his colleagues commandeered the secret room, festooned it with Christmas lights and lava lamps, and furnished it with benches upholstered in animal prints, ta.s.seled pillows, a fold-up c.o.c.ktail table, liquor bottles, bar equipment, and napkins that read "The Love Lounge." A video camera installed in the corridor allowed occupants to monitor who might be approaching.
La.s.seter and Jobs brought important visitors there and had them sign the wall. The signatures include Michael Eisner, Roy Disney, Tim Allen, and Randy Newman. Jobs loved it, but since he wasn"t a drinker he sometimes referred to it as the Meditation Room. I t reminded him, he said, of the one that he and Daniel Kottke had at Reed, but without the acid.
The Divorce.
In testimony before a Senate committee in February 2002, Michael Eisner blasted the ads that Jobs had created for Apple"s iTunes. "There are computer companies that have full-page ads and billboards that say: Rip, mix, burn," he declared. "In other words, they can create a theft and distribute it to all their friends if they buy this particular computer."
This was not a smart comment. I t misunderstood the meaning of "rip" and a.s.sumed it involved ripping someone off, rather than importing files from a CD to a computer. More significantly, it truly p.i.s.sed off Jobs, as Eisner should have known. That too was not smart. Pixar had recently released the fourth movie in its Disney deal, Monsters, Inc., which turned out to be the most successful of them all, with $525 million in worldwide gross. Disney"s Pixar deal was again coming up for renewal, and Eisner had not made it easier by publicly poking a stick at his partner"s eye. Jobs was so incredulous he called a Disney executive to vent: "Do you know what Michael just did to me?"
Eisner and Jobs came from different backgrounds and opposite coasts, but they were similar in being strong-willed and without much inclination to find compromises. They both had a pa.s.sion for making good products, which often meant micromanaging details and not sugarcoating their criticisms. Watching Eisner take repeated rides on the Wildlife Express train through Disney World"s Animal Kingdom and coming up with smart ways to improve the customer experience was like watching Jobs play with the interface of an iPod and find ways it could be simplified. Watchingthem manage people was a less edifying experience.
Both were better at pushing people than being pushed, which led to an unpleasant atmosphere when they started trying to do it to each other. In a disagreement, they tended to a.s.sert that the other party was lying. In addition, neither Eisner nor Jobs seemed to believe that he could learn anything from the other; nor would it have occurred to either even to fake a bit of deference by pretending to have anything to learn. Jobs put the onus on Eisner: The worst thing, to my mind, was that Pixar had successfully reinvented Disney"s business, turning out great films one after the other while Disney turned out flop after flop. You would think the CEO of Disney would be curious how Pixar was doing that. But during the twenty-year relationship, he visited Pixar for a total of about two and a half hours, only to give little congratulatory speeches. He was never curious. I was amazed. Curiosity is very important.