The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 16 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Levy: Pixar had to insulate itself from studio pressures to innovate
“Sometimes creativity in Hollywood isn't all it's cracked up to be. The big studios have so many pressures. Some of our thinking back then is we have to protect Pixar from those, some of those kinds of pressures in order for it to continue to innovate and do or…”
Pixar's 1991 Disney deal tied up studio profits for 12–15 years
“They had committed to that in a 1991 contract that they went into with Disney. That was a little bit of a Hail Mary in a way, because otherwise Pixar was perilously close to going out of business. Disney came along and said that they would basically front the …”
Levy: Pixar's top decision was refusing executive interference with creatives
“So the most important decision that we made at Pixel was basically to trust the creatives and not interfere with what they're doing.”
Jeff Jordan: Fashion and brands face dis-economies at high market saturation
“Once everyone's wearing Nikes, people stop wearing Nikes, so you're kind of I worked at Disney when it was a long time ago, it was very, very hot on the consumer product side, and, you know, we couldn't sell enough, and then five years later, you can't give it…”
Anki operates an in-house animation studio using Pixar talent and Maya
“We do, with folks from Pixar, DreamWorks, and these sorts of backgrounds. And so they literally, they're using Maya, a software suite that you would use to animate digital film and digital video games, but we've rigged up a version of Cosmo and Vector and all …”
Evans: Toy Story render farm had one-third the transistors of an iPhone
“The entire Pixar Rennell farm to make Toy Story, which doesn't look that high res today, but it's still amazing. But it was as it might be a third of one new iPhone.”
Levy: Jobs and Pixar leadership never fought despite frequent disagreement
“It is, because we never fought, but we didn't always agree. There was this healthy... Debate, I would call it. One pushing the other, always pushing the other you know.”
Levy: Animated story mistakes cost Pixar $5M to $10M to fix
“They come to you and say, we made a mistake in the story, right? You can't fix that. Like the next day. That's usually a five or ten million dollar mistake.”
Levy: I fought building Pixar into an independent studio
“So the notion that you could build an independent, standalone animated feature film company was one that I basically fought every step of the way because it seemed impossible.”
Levy: Jobs rushed Pixar to IPO as symbol of his comeback
“I think when Steve began to see that an IPO was possible for Pixar, he couldn't get there fast enough. Because that IPO was really the symbol of his comeback. He was rushing toward that faster than I was.”
Levy: Pixar did not view itself as an entertainment company in 1994
“If you did research at that time, which I did, you would have discovered they were really a graphics company. So Pixar had really set out to change the world of high-end computer graphics, and they made an imaging computer. They'd made some short films that ha…”
Hobson: George Lucas sold Pixar to Steve Jobs as a medical device company
“He sold Pixar to Steve Jobs when it was a medical device company.”
Levy: Rendering a single frame of animation took a day
“At that time, just to render a single frame could take a day.”
Steve Jobs cold-called Lawrence Levy in 1994 after seeing his photo
“Imagine that I'm sitting in my office at the company I was at then, which was Electronics for Imaging, and I was sitting at my desk, and the phone rings, and I pick up the phone, and on the other end of the phone, I hear this voice that says, Hi, this is Steve…”