Drawn together at Pixar
Hollywood Newsroom is now Buzz Newsroom! Visit and bookmark our new site. Buzz is bigger and better, including sports, world news, gadgets and the entertainment news that you're used to. Same staff, just more stuff! Why Fark, Drudge and Huffington when you can Buzz!?With an unbroken string of hits stretching from 1995’s “Toy Story” to this summer’s “Wall-E,” you’d think Pixar had story development down to a science.
Not even close.
In fact, while Hollywood has long sought to turn instinct and experience into a replicable by-the-numbers process, Pixar continues to thrive by flying by the seat of its pants. Its filmmakers have come to believe creative chaos is one of the keys to the company’s success — and that the rest of the industry might just want to take a cue from some of the things they do differently.
At the recent Siggraph computer graphics conference, Richard Hollander, producer of the short “Presto,” which played with “Wall-E,” and Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull separately described a story process so chaotic — and so utterly different from Hollywood’s norm — that many in the corporate studio tiers are probably still scratching their heads.
A scandalous tale in James B. Stewart’s “Disneywar” tellingly recounts Michael Eisner emailing the Disney board to snipe at Pixar’s “Finding Nemo” some nine months before the film preemed.
“This will be a reality check for those guys,” wrote Eisner. “It’s OK, but nowhere near as good as their previous films.”
- from Variety