Movies – Page 6 – artdiamondblog.com

CalArts Was One of Walt Disney’s Last Projects

It is a nice minor coda to Walt Disney’s life that the CalArts school that he founded provided a starting point for many of the next generation of great innovative animators, including John Lasseter.

(p. 47) CalArts was Walt Disney’s brainchild; he had started the planning of the school in the late 1950s and provided generously for it in his will. Walt and his brother Roy formed it in 1961 through a merger of two struggling Los Angeles institutions, the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music and the Chouinard Art Institute. The doors opened at the school’s consolidated campus in Valencia in 1971, five years after Walt’s death.
. . .
(p. 48) The storms of the 1960s had mostly receded by the time Lasseter arrived. At CalArts, he found his own kind of liberation: Here, he no longer needed to conceal his passion for cartoons. His twenty classmates from across the country were animation geeks like him. Others had been corresponding with the Disney studio just as he had, and even making their own short films. Many would go on from CalArts to perform significant work at Disney or elsewhere; among them were future stars John Musker (co-director of Aladdin, Hercules, and The Little Mermaid) and Brad Bird.
First-year classes took place in room A113, a windowless space with white walls, floor, and ceiling, and buzzing fluorescent lights. The teachers made up tor the setting, however: Almost all of them were longtime Disney artists with awe-inspiring animation credits. Kendall O’Connor, an art director on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, taught layout; Elmer Plummer, a character designer on Dumbo, taught life drawing; T. Hee, a sequence director on Pinocchio, taught caricature. The program was rigorous and the hours long; the fact that the campus was in the middle of nowhere made it easier to focus on work. Tim Burton, who entered the program the following year, remembered the experience: . . .

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: ellipsis added; italics in original.)
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

Funding Was Scarce to Develop Computer Graphics

(p. 29) As in Catmull’s graduate school days, however, the Walt Disney Co. was not interested in computer graphics. Walt had died of cancer in 1966, and the company was now run by a caretaker chief executive, Esmond Cardon “Card” Walker. Some of Disney’s technology experts saw great promise in the NYIT group’s work, but that was as far as it ever went.
Who else had pockets deep enough to support a major research effort into computer animation for filmmaking? It might take a decade, or even longer, before computer costs came down enough for (p. 30) a feature film to be anywhere near the realm of possibility. The only option, it seemed, was to keep making progress on the technical issues–on NYIT’s dime–while waiting for Disney to call.

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

Storytelling Trumps Technology in Making Good Movies

(p. 28) The calamity of Tubby the Tuba forced them to confront an unpleasant fact–namely, that they were in the wrong place for making good movies. Money was nor enough, they could now see. Technical genius was not enough (though Tubby had grave technical problems, too). Splendid equipment would not be enough. For them to make worthwhile films someday–not just the R&D exercises (p. 29) they showed at SIGGRAPH meetings–there also had to be people on board who understood film storytelling. Schure, although blessed with great foresight, could not be their Walt Disney.

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: italics in original.)
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

How Pixar Vision Was Made Real

(p. 8) . . . Pixar’s story was anything but preordained. It is a triple helix of artistic, technological, and business struggles, and it is a study in the tremendously uncertain and contingent nature of artistic, technological, and business success. It illustrates how professional prestige and social status flow into each other, and how a small organization can magnify its power by deploying them as an economic force. It shows how small things, done well, can lead to big things. It is the story of a small group of individuals who started with a shared ambition to create a new way of telling stories–within a virtual world of mathematical constructions–and who traveled a long and circuitous road until their vision became a reality.

“What Success Had Brought Him, . . . , Was Freedom”

(p. 5) The success of Pixar’s films had brought him something exceedingly rare in Hollywood: not the house with the obligatory pool in the backyard and the Oscar statuettes on the fireplace mantel, or the country estate, or the vintage Jaguar roadster–although he had all of those things, too. It wasn’t that he could afford to indulge his affinity for model railroads by acquiring a full-size 1901 steam locomotive, with plans to run it on the future site of his twenty-thousand-square-foot mansion in Sonoma Valley wine country. (Even Walt Dìsney’s backyard train had been a mere one-eighth-scale replica.)
None of these was the truly important fruit of Lasseter’s achievements. What success had brought him, most meaningfully, was freedom. Having created a new genre of film with his colleagues at Pixar, he had been able to make the films he wanted to make, and he was coming back to Disney on his own terms.

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: ellipsis in title was added.)
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

Pixar as a Case Study on Innovative Entrepreneurship

Source of book image: http://murraylibrary.org/2011/09/the-pixar-touch-the-making-of-a-company/

Toy Story and Finding Nemo are among my all-time-favorite animated movies. How Pixar developed the technology and the story-telling sense, to make these movies is an enjoyable and edifying read.
Along the way, I learned something about entrepreneurship, creative destruction, and the economics of technology. In the next couple of months I occasionally will quote passages that are memorable examples of broader points or that raise thought-provoking questions about how innovation happens.

Book discussed:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.

American Gangster as Destructive Entrepreneur

Source of image: http://celebritywonder.ugo.com/wp/Denzel_Washington_in_American_Gangster_Wallpaper_12_1280.jpg

William Baumol famously categorized entrepreneurs as productive, unproductive, or destructive. (Somewhat similarly, Burt Folsom distinguished market entrepreneurs from political entrepreneurs.) Baumol’s view is that we cannot much influence the supply of entrepreneurs, but good policies can increase the percent of entrepreneurs who are productive.
Frank Lucas, at least as portrayed in the 2007 film American Gangster, is an apt example of the destructive entrepreneur. As portrayed by Denzel Washington, the character is intense, willing to take risks, and works hards. There is a scene where Lucas argues that the quality of his product (cocaine) must not be adulterated, because his business depends on his customers knowing that his brand is better than that of competitors. He finds ways of making his supply chain shorter, and his distribution system more trustworthy (by hiring brothers and cousins).
One can easily imagine that with different incentives and constraints, the Denzel Washington character might have brought the world a product that made the world better, rather than worse.

The Baumol article mentioned is:
Baumol, William J. “Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive, and Destructive.” The Journal of Political Economy 98, no. 5, Part 1 (Oct. 1990): 893-921.

The Folsom book mentioned is:
Folsom, Burton W. The Myth of the Robber Barons. 4th ed: Young America’s Foundation, 2003 (1st ed. 1987).

“Mystified by an American Disdain for Its Own Business Culture”

“Paul Holland and Molly Davis, producers of a new documentary, “Something Ventured,” that gives an admiring look at innovators and investors from the past.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B3) The film, “Something Ventured,” is a frankly admiring look at those who went out on a limb to back upstarts like Atari, Cisco Systems, Genentech and Apple.
. . .
But the film’s beating heart is captured by Tom Perkins, whose Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers company backed the gene-splicing technology of Genentech, among other things. “It’s great if you can make money and change the world for the better at the same time,” said Mr. Perkins, . . .
Other stars of “Something Ventured” include Nolan Bushnell of Atari; Sandy Lerner of Cisco; Jimmy Treybig of Tandem Computers; and a string of venture capitalists, among them Don Valentine, Dick Kramlich, and Arthur Rock.
Many who appear joined dozens of other business people to finance the picture’s roughly $700,000 cost with contributions of a few thousand dollars each, Mr. Holland said.
In becoming involved, several participants said they wanted to rekindle an entrepreneurial spirit that had either waned or changed since the rough-and-tumble years when, by the film’s telling, Atari was started with $250 but needed capital to push Pong, and Mr. Bushnell passed up a chance to own a third of Apple, started by his employee Steve Jobs, for $50,000.
. . .
Mr. Valentine, . . . , said entrepreneurship had not ended — his company was a force behind Google — but it is less often coming from those born in the United States.
“You don’t understand what you have here” is a constant refrain, he said, from Southeast Asian and Indian innovators who are sometimes mystified by an American disdain for its own business culture.

For the full story, see:
MICHAEL CIEPLY . “A Film About Capitalism, and (Surprise) It’s a Love Story.” The New York Times, Week in Review Section (Sun., March 8, 2011): 8.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated March 7, 2011.)

The Anecdote for Malignant Perfectionism: “I’ll Fix that in My Next Piece”

“Jeanne Moreau and Orson Welles in ‘Chimes at Midnight,’ a 1965 Shakespeare-based film that’s recently been restored.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. D8) Every great artist, . . . , strives for perfection. In fact, that’s part of what makes them great: They’re never entirely satisfied with anything that they do. The classical pianist Artur Schnabel once remarked that he was only interested in performing music that was “better than it can be performed…unless a piece of music presents a problem to me, a never-ending problem, it doesn’t interest me too much.” This sums up the plight of all serious artists: They lead lives of endless frustration, struggling to reach the top of the hill, then seeing another, higher hill just beyond it.
. . .
Alas, that kind of suffering goes with the territory. The trick, as every artist knows, is not to let it interfere with getting things done. The wisest artists are the ones who finish a new work, walk away and move on to the next project. Whenever a colleague pointed out a “mistake” in one of Dmitri Shostakovich’s compositions, he invariably responded, “Oh, I’ll fix that in my next piece.”
The road to malignant perfectionism, by contrast, starts with chronic indecision. Jerome Robbins, whose inability to make up his mind was legendary throughout the world of dance, was known for choreographing multiple versions of a variation, then waiting until the last possible minute to decide which one to use. Beyond a certain point, this kind of perfectionism is all but impossible to distinguish from unprofessionalism, and Mr. Welles reached that point early in his career. . . .
. . .
Mr. Welles’s problem was that he wanted it both ways. He was a perfectionist who expected his collaborators to sit around endlessly waiting for him to make up his mind–and to pay for all the overtime that he ran up along the way. Simon Callow, his biographer, has summed up this failing in one devastating sentence: “Any form of limitation, obligation, responsibility or enforced duty was intolerable to him, rendering him claustrophobic and destructive.” That’s the wrong kind of perfectionism, and it led, as it usually does, to disaster.

For the full commentary, see:
TERRY TEACHOUT. “The Snare of Perfectionism: When Artists Aim Too High.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., July 22, 2011): D8.
(Note: ellipsis in Schnabel quote was in original; other ellipses added.)

“A Passion for the Ambition of Walt”

Jon Favreau. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 11) You’ve announced you won’t be doing the third “Iron Man” movie, in order to make “Magic Kingdom,” which is a Disney movie about a family that gets caught inside Disneyland. A movie produced by Disney about a Disney theme park? It sounds a little cynical.

That’s my Rubik’s Cube that I have to solve on this one. I found a writing partner in the novelist Michael Chabon, who shares a passion for the ambition of Walt.

For the full interview, see:
ANDREW GOLDMAN. “TALK; Jon Favreau, From Swingers to Aliens.” The New York Times Magazine (Sun., July 31, 2011): 11.
(Note: bold in original, indicating comments/questions by interviewer Andrew Goldman.)
(Note: the online version of the interview is dated July 29 (sic), 2011.)