Steve Jobs

The two main characters went through many iterations before they ended up as Buzz Lightyear and Woody. Every couple of weeks, Lasseter and his team would put together their latest set of storyboards or footage to show the folks at Disney. In early screen tests, Pixar showed off its amazing technology by, for example, producing a scene of Woody rustling around on top of a dresser while the light rippling in through a Venetian blind cast shadows on his plaid shirt—an effect that would have been almost impossible to render by hand. Impressing Disney with the plot, however, was more difficult. At each presentation by Pixar, Katzenberg would tear much of it up, barking out his detailed comments and notes. And a cadre of clipboard-carrying flunkies was on hand to make sure every suggestion and whim uttered by Katzenberg received follow-up treatment.

Katzenberg’s big push was to add more edginess to the two main characters. It may be an animated movie called Toy Story, he said, but it should not be aimed only at children. “At first there was no drama, no real story, and no conflict,” Katzenberg recalled. He suggested that Lasseter watch some classic buddy movies, such as The Defiant Ones and 48 Hours, in which two characters with different attitudes are thrown together and have to bond. In addition, he kept pushing for what he called “edge,” and that meant making Woody’s character more jealous, mean, and belligerent toward Buzz, the new interloper in the toy box. “It’s a toy-eat-toy world,” Woody says at one point, after pushing Buzz out of a window.

After many rounds of notes from Katzenberg and other Disney execs, Woody had been stripped of almost all charm. In one scene he throws the other toys off the bed and orders Slinky to come help. When Slinky hesitates, Woody barks, “Who said your job was to think, spring-wiener?” Slinky then asks a question that the Pixar team members would soon be asking themselves: “Why is the cowboy so scary?” As Tom Hanks, who had signed up to be Woody’s voice, exclaimed at one point, “This guy’s a real jerk!”

Cut!

Lasseter and his Pixar team had the first half of the movie ready to screen by November 1993, so they brought it down to Burbank to show to Katzenberg and other Disney executives. Peter Schneider, the head of feature animation, had never been enamored of Katzenberg’s idea of having outsiders make animation for Disney, and he declared it a mess and ordered that production be stopped. Katzenberg agreed. “Why is this so terrible?” he asked a colleague, Tom Schumacher. “Because it’s not their movie anymore,” Schumacher bluntly replied. He later explained, “They were following Katzenberg’s notes, and the project had been driven completely off-track.”

Lasseter realized that Schumacher was right. “I sat there and I was pretty much embarrassed with what was on the screen,” he recalled. “It was a story filled with the most unhappy, mean characters that I’ve ever seen.” He asked Disney for the chance to retreat back to Pixar and rework the script. Katzenberg was supportive.

Jobs did not insert himself much into the creative process. Given his proclivity to be in control, especially on matters of taste and design, this self-restraint was a testament to his respect for Lasseter and the other artists at Pixar—as well as for the ability of Lasseter and Catmull to keep him at bay. He did, however, help manage the relationship with Disney, and the Pixar team appreciated that. When Katzenberg and Schneider halted production on Toy Story, Jobs kept the work going with his own personal funding. And he took their side against Katzenberg. “He had Toy Story all messed up,” Jobs later said. “He wanted Woody to be a bad guy, and when he shut us down we kind of kicked him out and said, ‘This isn’t what we want,’ and did it the way we always wanted.”

The Pixar team came back with a new script three months later. The character of Woody morphed from being a tyrannical boss of Andy’s other toys to being their wise leader. His jealousy after the arrival of Buzz Lightyear was portrayed more sympathetically, and it was set to the strains of a Randy Newman song, “Strange Things.” The scene in which Woody pushed Buzz out of the window was rewritten to make Buzz’s fall the result of an accident triggered by a little trick Woody initiated involving a Luxo lamp. Katzenberg & Co. approved the new approach, and by February 1994 the film was back in production.

Katzenberg had been impressed with Jobs’s focus on keeping costs under control. “Even in the early budgeting process, Steve was very eager to do it as efficiently as possible,” he said. But the $17 million production budget was proving inadequate, especially given the major revision that was necessary after Katzenberg had pushed them to make Woody too edgy. So Jobs demanded more in order to complete the film right. “Listen, we made a deal,” Katzenberg told him. “We gave you business control, and you agreed to do it for the amount we offered.” Jobs was furious. He would call Katzenberg by phone or fly down to visit him and be, in Katzenberg’s words, “as wildly relentless as only Steve can be.” Jobs insisted that Disney was liable for the cost overruns because Katzenberg had so badly mangled the original concept that it required extra work to restore things. “Wait a minute!” Katzenberg shot back. “We were helping you. You got the benefit of our creative help, and now you want us to pay you for that.” It was a case of two control freaks arguing about who was doing the other a favor.

Ed Catmull, more diplomatic than Jobs, was able to reach a compromise new budget. “I had a much more positive view of Jeffrey than some of the folks working on the film did,” he said. But the incident did prompt Jobs to start plotting about how to have more leverage with Disney in the future. He did not like being a mere contractor; he liked being in control. That meant Pixar would have to bring its own funding to projects in the future, and it would need a new deal with Disney.

As the film progressed, Jobs became ever more excited about it. He had been talking to various companies, ranging from Hallmark to Microsoft, about selling Pixar, but watching Woody and Buzz come to life made him realize that he might be on the verge of transforming the movie industry. As scenes from the movie were finished, he watched them repeatedly and had friends come by his home to share his new passion. “I can’t tell you the number of versions of Toy Story I saw before it came out,” said Larry Ellison. “It eventually became a form of torture. I’d go over there and see the latest 10% improvement. Steve is obsessed with getting it right—both the story and the technology—and isn’t satisfied with anything less than perfection.”