of a place where they did do that, and
I always looked at ARPA at that time
as being a spectacularly successful example of governmental policy moving
things in the right direction. It had
very low bureaucracy and trusted that
if you give funding to smart people,
some interesting things will happen. I
came up out of that environment, and
to this day I believe it’s a great thing to
do. That doesn’t mean you won’t have
some failures or some abuses along the
way, but that model of funding universities was spectacularly successful.
Unfortunately that wasn’t the way it
worked at the rest of the schools I was
applying to, so I originally got a job doing CAD work at Applicon. Then Alex
Schure [founder of the New York Institute of Technology] came along, and
he wanted to invest in animation and
make me head of the computer graphics department.
He didn’t have all of the pieces necessary to do it, but he was the only person willing to invest in it. We had this
remarkable group of software people
coming to New York Tech, and Alex was
essentially supporting them, but the
technical people there knew that an
element was missing: they didn’t have
the artists or the other components of
filmmaking. Alex didn’t understand
that. He thought we were the filmmakers, and that rather than being part of a
larger thing, that we were the solution.
Unfortunately, he never got full credit
for what he did because of that little bit
of a blind spot on his part. He certainly
made a lot happen for which he hasn’t
gotten a lot of credit.
Eventually, I moved on to Lucasfilm,
where a very interesting thing happened, which I don’t think people quite
understand. At the time Lucasfilm was
making the second Star Wars film, and
the people at ILM [Industrial Light and
Magic, Lucasfilm’s special effects divi-sion] were the best guys in the world at
special effects. So George [Lucas] took
me to them and said, “OK, we’re going
to do some computer graphics.” These
guys were very friendly and very open,
but it was extremely clear that what I
was doing was absolutely irrelevant to
what they were doing.
hanRahan: They didn’t get it?
Ca TmuLL: They didn’t think it was relevant. In their minds, we were working
on computer-generated images—and
on ThE EaRLY Da YS:
We believed that
achieving the
appearance of
reality was a great
technical goal—not
because we were
trying to emulate
reality, but because
doing it is so hard
it would help drive
us forward. That
is, in fact, what
happened. We
finally reached the
point where we can
create convincingly
realistic images.
Reality was a great
goal for a while.
for them, what was a computer-generated image? What was an image they
saw on a CRT? It was television.
Even if you made good television, it
looked crappy by their standards. However, from their point of view, it was
George’s decision and he could do with
his money what he wanted. It wasn’t as
though he was taking anything away
from them—it’s just that computer
graphics was not relevant to what they
were doing on that film.
I look back at this and see that
what we had—and this is very important—was protection. When you’re doing something new, it’s actually fairly
fragile. People don’t quite get what it
is. Sometimes even we don’t necessarily get what it is. When people don’t get
it, and they’ve got their immediate concerns, it’s hard for them to see the relevance. In ILM’s case, the immediate
concern was to make a movie, and we
truly weren’t relevant to the job at hand.
Because of that, what we needed was
protection at that early stage. That’s
what we’d had at the University of Utah.
ARPA was essentially coming in and
protecting “the new,” even though we
didn’t know what “the new” was. It’s
kind of a hard concept because when
most people talk about “the new,”
they’re actually talking about it after
the fact. They look back and say how
brilliant you were at seeing all this, and
so forth. Well, it’s all nonsense. When
it is new, you don’t know it. You’re creating something for the future, and
you don’t know exactly what it is. It’s
hard to protect that. What we got from
George was that protection.
The reason I was thinking of that
model was that we had a software project here at Pixar to come up with the
next generation of tools and assigned
that task to a development group. But
we had a different problem. The people
responsible for our films didn’t look at
that development group as this sort of
odd thing that somebody else was paying for; they looked at the group as a
source of smart people that they could
use for the film. We had given the development group a charter to come
up with new software, and a year later
I found out the whole group had been
subverted into providing tools for the
existing production.
hanRahan: I see. So, they didn’t get
quite enough protection?