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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.”
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. It 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, tasseled pillows, a fold-up
cocktail 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.
Lasseter 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. It reminded him, he said, of
the one that he and Daniel Kottke had at Reed, but without the acid.
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