Steve Jobs

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 aboutit. 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.”
    Jobs’s sense that his investments in Pixar might actually pay off was reinforced when Disney invited him to attend a gala press preview of scenes from
Pocahontas
in January 1995 in a tent in Manhattan’s Central Park. At the event, Disney CEO Michael Eisner announced that
Pocahontas
would have its premiere in front of 100,000 people on eighty-foot-high screens on the Great Lawn of Central Park. Jobs was a master showman who knew how to stage great premieres, but even he was astounded by this plan. Buzz Lightyear’s great exhortation—“To infinity and beyond!”—suddenly seemed worth heeding.
    Jobs decided that the release of
Toy Story
that November would be the occasion to take Pixar public. Even the usually eager investment bankers were dubious and said it couldn’t happen. Pixar had spent five years hemorrhaging money. But Jobs was determined. “I was nervous and argued that we should wait until after our second movie,” Lasseter recalled. “Steve overruled me and said we needed the cash so we could put up half the money for our films and renegotiate the Disney deal.”
    To Infinity!
    There were two premieres of
Toy Story
in November 1995. Disney organized one at El Capitan, a grand old theater in Los Angeles, and built a fun house next door featuring the characters. Pixar was given a handful of passes, but the evening and its celebrity guest list was very much a Disney production; Jobs did not even attend. Instead, the nextnight he rented the Regency, a similar theater in San Francisco, and held his own premiere. Instead of Tom Hanks and Steve Martin, the guests were Silicon Valley celebrities, such as Larry Ellison and Andy Grove. This was clearly Jobs’s show; he, not Lasseter, took the stage to introduce the movie.
    The dueling premieres highlighted a festering issue: Was
Toy Story
a Disney or a Pixar movie? Was Pixar merely an animation contractor helping Disney make movies? Or was Disney merely a distributor and marketer helping Pixar roll out its movies? The answer was somewhere in between. The question would be whether the egos involved, mainly those of Michael Eisner and Steve Jobs, could get to such a partnership.
    The stakes were raised when
Toy Story
opened to blockbuster commercial and critical success. It recouped its cost the first weekend, with a domestic opening of $30 million, and it went on to become the top-grossing film of the year, beating
Batman Forever
and
Apollo 13
, with $192 million in receipts domestically and a total of $362 million