What I found interesting in the book "Creativity Inc" by their co-founder, Ed Catmull, was that Jobs effectively gave them 70 million and 3-4 years of them trying to make computers before they pivoted to animation. I'd love someone to give me 70 million :P
PS: I read the book when it came out. I don't have it around to check my memory is correct about 3-4 years and 70 million. What I remeber is they were a subdivision of ILM tasked with making computers. ILM tried to sell them to HP IIRC, who was not interested. Jobs bought them to make computers, not animation.
The Pixar story is also a kind of an interesting angle on either Jobs blindness or brilliance—thinking that Pixar was a software company, thinking it was a hardware company, and only belatedly coming around to the idea that it was in fact a film studio…
Turns out Pixar _was_ a software company which also did hardware when it was sold. There was another part of ILM that stayed with Lucas which was an VFX shop where most of creatives were. ILM also got rights to use (full source) PRMan/Renderman from it. With Pixar you also got a creative demo team with Lasseter which produced demo shorts that turned into a studio. Lasseter is mostly the story there, no matter the software Pixar did, imo.
After the MeToo allegations, his contributions have been removed—or at least significantly downplayed—in Disney and Pixar’s accounts of Pixar’s origins.
With guys who are in prestigious/powerful corporate positions, I wonder if there is a fundamental issue where everybody tends to brown nose them, but female brown nosing sometimes gets misinterpreted as flirtation and interest.
And because guys in these sorts of positions actually do get an overpowered amount of real interest from women, they may have a harder time detecting inauthentic interest-alias
than say a random janitor guy who a woman is being artificially nice to for some reason.
And then if the guy mistakenly thinks the woman is interested and makes a move, the woman may then in the moment feel unsure about what to do, because an abrupt rejection that contradicts their earlier outward behavior may make them feel not good, they might feel like they caused it, etc (which I think lines up with accounts I’ve read, except they don’t mention the brown nosing part of the theorized pattern).
This doesn’t excuse anything, necessarily, I just wonder if there are some complex dynamics at play. This setup we have where sexual relations are at will, subject only to consent, is not that old, so it wouldn’t be surprising if the system as-is still produces very bad outcomes at times even if the parties involved are all behaving in a non-psychopathic way.
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What I found interesting in the book "Creativity Inc" by their co-founder, Ed Catmull, was that Jobs effectively gave them 70 million and 3-4 years of them trying to make computers before they pivoted to animation. I'd love someone to give me 70 million :P
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity,_Inc.
PS: I read the book when it came out. I don't have it around to check my memory is correct about 3-4 years and 70 million. What I remeber is they were a subdivision of ILM tasked with making computers. ILM tried to sell them to HP IIRC, who was not interested. Jobs bought them to make computers, not animation.
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He has fairly equal representation as the other founders on their history page
https://www.pixar.com/our-story
He also is directly mentioned in the Disney+ docuseries on ILM, and was part of Catmul’s retrospective on Toy Story as recently as this year
https://youtu.be/q1Uq8b2ooVk?si=zjHSHjGHtymH-kKy
Pixar and Disney haven’t been shying away from his involvement in their history
And because guys in these sorts of positions actually do get an overpowered amount of real interest from women, they may have a harder time detecting inauthentic interest-alias than say a random janitor guy who a woman is being artificially nice to for some reason.
And then if the guy mistakenly thinks the woman is interested and makes a move, the woman may then in the moment feel unsure about what to do, because an abrupt rejection that contradicts their earlier outward behavior may make them feel not good, they might feel like they caused it, etc (which I think lines up with accounts I’ve read, except they don’t mention the brown nosing part of the theorized pattern).
This doesn’t excuse anything, necessarily, I just wonder if there are some complex dynamics at play. This setup we have where sexual relations are at will, subject only to consent, is not that old, so it wouldn’t be surprising if the system as-is still produces very bad outcomes at times even if the parties involved are all behaving in a non-psychopathic way.