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Comment by pooriaazimi | Hacker News Reader

He almost did nothing for Pixar, except pouring money into it quarter after quarter and using Toy Story's success to rise again. He was a very big visionary, a great manager and he deserves every bit of praise he gets for what he did at Apple in his second coming, but his role at Pixar was only to negotiate and give them money; not that it's an unimportant thing. Pixar would most certainly not exist today if it wasn't for Jobs, but the creative mind at Pixar was John Lasseter.

Source: I've read two books about Pixar, more than 10 about Jobs/Apple and watched well over 20 documentaries about these subjects.

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Actually what he did right with Pixar was to let the creative people be creative. I realize that sounds like nothing, and yes it is nothing -- but it's everything and here's why:

A bad producer or studio head who isn't a creative will always get his or her paws all over the film projects and tend to ruin them. Or worse yet select projects not on the creative merits but on a perceived notion of how they'll do in the box office -- the result is all of the bad special effects and franchise movies we see today.

Instead Steve had the rare courage to do NOTHING except let the creative people "make a great film". That's something that's very rare in Hollywood and deserves a ton of credit...

Exactly. And that's what I was trying to say. He created (or recreated) bot Apple and Pixar, but his role at two companies was completely different.

Standing up to the stuffed suits at Disney would have been no job for the fainthearted. Jobs may not have done anything at Pixar, but he certainly did a lot for them.

Could you recommend a good book about pixar?

"Pixar Touch"[1] is fantastic. Highly recommended.

Also, the 2007 documentary about Pixar ("The Pixar Story"[2]) is well worth a watch - Extremely well done. There's a shorter, 23 minute mini-documantary about Pixar Shorts ("The Pixar Shorts, A Short History"[3]) that I also enjoyed.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Pixar-Touch-Making-Company/dp/1400... and http://www.pixartouchbook.com/

[2]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1059955/

[3]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1164983/

Thanks, i will have a look at this

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