How They Started by David Lester Read Free Book Online

who was voicing Woody, noted that he rarely got to play jerks.
    Finally, a year into production, Pixar brought its assembled reels to Disney for a screening. The event became known at Pixar as “the black day.”
    The film was a disaster. It wasn’t funny. It didn’t have the heart that had won renown for John’s short films.
    Disney wanted to halt production, lay off most of the Pixar team, and move a few key Pixar animators to its own Burbank, California, headquarters to rework the film under close supervision. In John’s view, this was to be avoided at all costs. John begged Disney for two weeks in which to write a new storyline and prove they could complete a winning film.
    Energized by the reprieve, Pixar staffers worked around the clock to recapture the fun and joy they originally saw in the Toy Story idea. Woody became a far more likeable character, and the interplay between the toys crackled with jokes again.
    Incredibly, within the scant two weeks granted them, Pixar completely remade the entire first third of the movie. Impressed with the new version, Disney reversed its decision: production was back on.
    As the story continued to be animated, Ed’s technical team faced the daunting task of fully animating 80 minutes of film. Previously, the most computer animation in a film had been 10 minutes of dinosaurs in Jurassic Park . Rapidly, the team constructed programs that would allow networked computers to work together to speed the rendering process.
    In all, Steve would invest a staggering $55 million in Pixar prior to Toy Story ’s release. The company would likely have faced extinction without his commitment, John recalled in a Facebook-page tribute the week of Steve’s death in October 2011: “He saw the potential of what Pixar could be before the rest of us, and beyond what anyone ever imagined,” John wrote. “Steve took a chance on us and believed in our crazy dream of making computer-animated films.”
    As Pixar readied Toy Story for release, there was a huge question hanging over the project: what would audiences used to 2-D animation think? Would they take to Pixar’s computer-generated toys? The first preview Disney held for the movie while it was still in process got the lowest scores in the company’s history. However, a later screening of the nearly completed film received high marks.

    “He saw the potential of what Pixar could be before the rest of us, and beyond what anyone ever imagined,” John wrote. “Steve took a chance on us and believed in our crazy dream of making computer-animated films.”
    The fears proved unfounded. Toy Story opened in November 1995 and was an instant smash. It would go on to gross more than $360 million dollars and spawn two sequels that would each gross even more. The movie won a Special Achievement Oscar® as the first-ever computer-animated film.
    Unfortunately, Pixar didn’t benefit much from Toy Story ’s success. In particular, its agreement with Disney left Pixar with little participation in the lucrative merchandising associated with Toy Story. So the millions of Woody and Buzz toys sold did not enrich Pixar’s coffers. But Steve was thinking ahead about this, and had a plan to prevent Pixar from missing out on this revenue in future.
The IPO
    Confident that Toy Story would be a success, Steve began pushing during late production for the company to do a public offering. John thought the idea crazy, thinking it would be better to wait until Pixar had two successful films under its belt. But Steve’s logic was that to better their deal with Disney, the company would have to put up half the production money for future films.
    To do that would take big money. Steve was at the limit of what he could contribute. Pixar needed to go public to get more capital to finance future pictures.
    In a high-risk gambit, Steve timed the IPO to debut the same week as Toy Story ’s release. But with the film’s success, Pixar’s IPO was the largest of 1995,