Imagine: How Creativity Works (22 page)

It’s at this point that Toy Story 2 began running into serious setbacks. Because the studio had been frantically trying to finish A Bug’s Life, its second feature film, Toy Story 2 hadn’t benefited from the usual process of plussing. Instead of interacting with the entire studio, the creative team had been largely isolated in a separate building. (The current campus was still under construction.) “The movie was going off course in a way that we had gone off course on the other movies,” remembers Unkrich. “But the problem was, we were all so busy trying to get A Bug’s Life made that we couldn’t take the time to help them fix the film, to add our critical voices to the mix.”

It wasn’t until the winter of 1998 that the brain trust was finally able to start focusing on the troubled cartoon. The first screening of the story reels went horribly. “Everybody knew that the movie wasn’t working,” says Catmull. “Our process was broken — the story wasn’t getting better.” And so, with less than a year until the release date, the Pixar team decided to do the un-thinkable: they threw the script in the trash and started over. Tom Schumacher, an executive at Disney, was terrified. He remembers the first meeting after the screening:

John and I were sitting at the table with some of my Disney colleagues, who said, “Well, it’s okay.” And I can’t imagine anything being more crushing to John Lasseter than the expression, “Well, it’s okay.” It’s just unacceptable to him, and it’s one of his most endearing, most exasperating qualities, and probably the biggest reason for his success. So nine months before it was supposed to come out, John threw out the vast majority of the movie. Which is unheard of.

How did Pixar fix Toy Story 2? The first change was physical. Lasseter immediately moved everyone into the same space, so the engineers and storytellers and directors were all crammed into a small cluster of cubicles. He realized that the movie was missing that Pixar spark, those minor epiphanies and surprising ideas that occur when people interact in unexpected ways. “We decided that from then on we always wanted everybody in one building,” Lasseter says. “We wanted all the departments, no matter what movie they were working on, to be together.”

Lasseter then scheduled an emergency story summit in Sonoma, a two-day retreat that would give people the freedom to think about the movie in an entirely new way. (The new location turned the team into temporary outsiders.) The brain trust soon realized that the fundamental problem with Toy Story 2 — the reason the reels weren’t working — was that the plot felt too predictable. Although the story revolved around Woody’s capture by a toy collector who plans on selling him to a museum in Japan, this scenario never felt like a real possibility. “This film is coming out of Disney and Pixar,” Catmull says. “So you already know Woody’s going back to his original family in the end. And if you know the end, there’s no suspense.” Once this narrative flaw was identified, the Pixar team began fixing it. Wheezy, the broken squeaky toy, was moved to the beginning of the film; a plot twist involving the two Buzzes was dramatically expanded; “Jessie’s Song,” a sad la-ment about no longer being loved by a child, was inserted into the second act. This intense creative process took its toll, with many team members suffering from stress-related health problems. In To Infinity and Beyond, Pixar’s official history, Steve Jobs remembers the difficult first months of 1999: “We killed ourselves to make it [Toy Story 2]. It took some people a year to recover. It was tough — it was too tough, but we did it.”

Toy Story 2 wasn’t just finished on time; it went on to become one of the most successful animated films ever made. (The reviews were literally all positive. According to Rottentomatoes.com, Toy Story 2 is one of the best-reviewed movies of all time, with 146 positive reviews and 0 negative reviews.) Nevertheless, the agonizing production process remains an essential lesson for everyone at the studio. “I’ll worry about Pixar when we unlearn what we learned from Toy Story 2,” Catmull says. “Meltdowns are always painful, but they’re a sign that we’re still trying to do something difficult, that we’re still taking risks and willing to correct our mistakes. We have to be willing to throw our scripts in the trash.” Because Pixar knows that talent is not enough. Talent fails every day. And that’s why Jobs put the bathrooms in the center of the building and why the production team begins every day with a group critique. It’s why the producers think about where people sit and why the best ideas come when a story is being plussed apart. Everybody at Pixar knows that there will be many failures along the way. The long days will be filled with difficult conversations and disorienting surprises and late-night arguments. But no one ever said making a good movie was easy. “If it feels easy, then you’re doing it wrong,” Unkrich says. “We know that screwups are an essential part of what we do here. That’s why our goal is simple: We just want to screw up as quickly as possible. We want to fail fast. And then we want to fix it. Together.”

4.

Dan Wieden is cofounder of the advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy, one of the most innovative and honored ad agencies in the world. Wieden’s firm has a reputation for designing unconventional campaigns, from the Levi’s commercial featuring the voice of Walt Whitman to those yellow rubber bracelets that support Lance Armstrong’s foundation. The agency created the classic Michael Jordan Nike ads and produced a Miller beer television spot directed by Errol Morris. Its employees conceived of the viral Old Spice ads on YouTube and reinvented SportsCenter with the satir-ical “This is SportsCenter” campaign.

I met Wieden at the W+K headquarters in the Pearl District of Portland, Oregon. The building is a former cold-storage factory that’s been hollowed out. This means that the interior is mostly empty space, a soaring lobby framed by thick concrete walls and weathered pine beams. Wieden gives me a tour of the building as he explains his unorthodox approach to fostering group creativity.

At first glance, the Wieden+Kennedy office can seem like a case study in creativity lite, dense with the kind of “innovation en-hancers” that fill the pages of business magazines. There’s modern art on the walls
(The office feels like a gallery; every surface is covered with art. My favorite installation is a huge white canvas filled with tens of thousands of clear plastic pushpins. It’s only when you take a step back that the mural makes sense. The pushpins spell the following slogan: Fail Harder.) 
and the coffee room is plastered with invitations to team-building exercises, including pie-making competitions and company-sponsored trips to the museum. While Dan believes in the virtue of such events — he’s particularly proud of the bian-nual pub-crawl — he thinks they work only if the right people are present. For Dan, this is what creativity is all about: putting talented people in a room and letting them freely interact. “It really is that simple,” he says. “You need to hire the best folks and then get out of the way.”

How does Wieden find these people? How does he ensure that his office is filled with employees who will inspire one another? Wieden takes the problem of hiring so seriously that, in 2004, he decided to start his own advertising school, which he called WK12. (The name is a misnomer, since the school actually consists of thirteen people who work together for thirteen months.) There are no classes at WK12. Instead, the curriculum consists of real assignments from real clients, with the students working under the direction of seasoned Wieden+Kennedy employees. The advantage of the school, Wieden says, is that it allows him to not worry about experience — “CVs can be so misleading” — and instead focus on those intangible qualities that are essential for creativity. “What I’ve learned to look for is the individual voice,” he says. “It might be an aesthetic, or a sentence style, or a way of holding the camera. But having that unique voice is the one thing I can’t teach. I can teach someone to write copy. I can show someone how to crop a photo. But I can’t teach you how to have a voice. You either have something to say or you don’t.”

Not surprisingly, the applicants to WK12 come from every conceivable field. A recent graduating class included a struggling poet, a grad student in anthropology, a chemist, a chef, a cinema-tographer, and two novelists. (The advertisements for WK12 feature a single question: “Tired of a pointless life?”) For Wieden, the school is an important means of ushering in fresh blood, forcing the agency to incorporate new voices from new disciplines. The inexperienced students ask naive questions and come up with plenty of impractical suggestions. They turn in assignments late and can’t figure out the technical equipment. “You could look at these students, and you could easily conclude that they are wasting everyone’s time,” Wieden says. “They don’t know what the hell they’re doing.”

But that’s the point. Wieden describes the challenge of advertising as finding a way to stay original in a world of clichés, avoid-ing the bikinis in beer ads and the racing coupes in car commercials. And that’s why he’s so insistent on hiring people who don’t know anything about advertising. “You need those weird fucks,” he says. “You need people who won’t make the same boring, predictable mistakes as the rest of us. And then, when those weirdos learn how things work and become a little less weird, then you need a new class of weird fucks. Of course, you also need some people who know what they’re doing. But if you’re in the creative business, then you have to be willing to tolerate a certain level of, you know, weirdness.” Wieden is describing the advertising version of Brian Uzzi’s research on Broadway musicals, as the constant influx of students ensures that his creative teams remain in the sweet spot of Q. And so, every year, a new class of WK12 students walks into the headquarters of Wieden+Kennedy and sets up shop in the lobby. Most of their work will be thrown away. Most of their drafts will be ignored. But their weirdness will be contagious. (David Ogilvy, one of the founding fathers of modern advertising, pursued a similar approach. When Ogilvy tested his ideas for a particular marketing campaign, he always included several pitches that he was sure would not work. “Most were, as expected, dismal failures,” Ogilvy wrote. “But the few that succeeded pointed to innovative approaches in the fickle world of advertising.”) 

One of Wieden’s favorite stories illustrates the importance of incorporating a little weirdness into the creative process. In 1988, Wieden was hard at work on a series of television spots for Nike. The campaign consisted of eight video clips, each of which focused on a different athlete in a different sport. Wieden knew that the campaign needed a tag line, a slogan that could link the disparate commercials together. Unfortunately, he was drawing a blank. “I’d been struggling to find that line for months,” he says. “And it was late at night, and we had to have it ready to go in the morning. And so I’m getting nervous, thinking about how this really wouldn’t work without a slogan. But I couldn’t come up with a slogan! It was killing me.”

But then, just when Wieden was about to give up and go to sleep, he started thinking about a murderer named Gary Gilmore who had been executed in 1977. “He just popped into my mind,” Wieden says. “And so it’s the middle of the night, and I’m sitting at my desk, and I’m thinking about how Gilmore died. This was in Utah, and they dragged Gilmore out in front of the firing squad. Before they put the hood over his head, the chaplain asks Gilmore if he has any last words. And he pauses and he says: ‘Let’s do it.’ And I remember thinking, ‘That is so fucking courageous.’ Here’s this guy calling for his own death. And then, the next thing I know, I’m thinking about my shoe commercials. And so I start playing around with the words, and I realized that I didn’t like the way it was said, actually, so I made it a little different. I wrote ‘Just Do It’ on a piece of paper and as soon as I saw it, I knew. That was my slogan.”

The question, of course, is why Wieden started thinking about Gary Gilmore while working on a slogan for cross-trainers. “I swear, I don’t normally think about murderers at midnight,” he says. “So I asked myself: Where did this thought come from? And the only explanation I could come up with is that someone else in the group” — one of his colleagues working on the Nike campaign — “had mentioned Norman Mailer to me earlier in the day. I don’t know why Mailer came up. I can’t remember. I’m sure we were just bullshitting, doing what people do when you put them in a small room together. But we were talking about Mailer, and I knew that he’d written a book about Gary Gilmore. And that was it. That’s where the slogan came from. Just a little sentence from someone else. That’s all it takes.”

Ch. 7
URBAN FRICTION

By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.
— Jane Jacobs

David Byrne loves bicycles. He’s been relying on bikes to get around since the late 1970s, when he started riding a beat-up three-speed all over Manhattan. At the time, the bicycle was mostly a convenience, an easy way to escape the downtown traffic. “I could run errands in the daytime and efficiently hit a few clubs, art openings, or nightspots in the evening without searching for a cab,” Byrne says. “The bike wasn’t cool, and I almost got killed a few times, but it was better than driving.” In the years since, Byrne has become a self-described bicycle fanatic. He now takes a folding bike wherever he goes; he’s pedaled to rock concerts in Dallas and researched an opera by riding in the streets of the Philippines. He’s gotten lost in the ghetto of Detroit and cycled through the hectic alleys of Istanbul.

While Byrne celebrates the pleasures of biking — “The wind in your face, the exercise, the relaxation” — he bikes mostly for another reason: it lets him listen to the city. He describes cycling as a form of urban eavesdropping, a way to overhear the hum of the streets. “When you’re stuck in a car, it’s like you’re in a bubble,” Byrne says. “You can’t hear anything that’s happening outside. But when you’re on a bike, you can tap into the atmosphere. You can feel people doing their thing. It’s a kind of connection.” When I met Byrne outside his office loft in SoHo, on a cobble-stone street filled with fancy clothing boutiques, he was carrying a muffin and a helmet; his shock of white hair was perfectly vertical. He led me inside, up three fl ights of stairs, and down a grim, industrial hallway. (The building used to be a sweatshop.) It was a warm day, and the windows of his studio were wide open — the sound of the street seeped in. “I like it a little noisy,” Byrne says. “It reminds me where I am.”