To Pixar and Beyond

One day in November 1994, Lawrence Levy got a phone call out of the blue from Steve Jobs, who he had never met, offering him a job running a little-known company called Pixar. Jobs' career was in the doldrums: he had a reputation for being impossible to work with and Pixar had already lost him $50 million. But when Levy went for a tour of Pixar's run-down offices, he was led into a showing room filled with battered couches and shown the first scene of a new computer-animated feature, codenamed Toy Story. He took the job. On his arrival, he was dismayed to find that the situation was far worse than he had realised. Their advertising division just about broke even, their graphics software had few customers and their films offered little hope of making them money. Not only that, but Jobs was pushing to take the company public. Everything was riding on their first film release, and even then, it would have to be one of the most successful animated features of all time...