MEMOIR

In 1994, Lawrence Levy, chief financial officer for a Silicon Valley graphics company, received a call from Steve Jobs. Jobs had been forced out of Apple years ago and was pinning his hopes on Pixar, a loss-making tech company he wanted Levy to lick into shape. Levy had never heard of Pixar, but agreed to take a look. It was a long drive away, in an unfashionable part of California. The firm was burning through money selling imaging software, making animated commercials and attempting to finish the world’s first featurelength computer-animated film.

Feeling distinctly underwhelmed, Levy was taken into a dingy screening room and shown the first few minutes of the movie. It was a Damascene moment. A few days later, he signed up to run the company.

He made the right decision. That film, Toy Story, became the highest-grossing movie of 1995 and was the first of a string of hits (including The Incredibles, A Bug’s Life and Monsters, Inc) that turned Pixar from a failing business into a creative powerhouse worth billions.

This is Levy’s account of getting to grips with the fiendishly complicated world of movie business finance, and of the extraordinary challenges involved in making Toy Story (each frame took between 45 minutes and 30 hours to draw and there were 114,000 frames).

His chief financial officer’s prose won’t win any prizes, but he tells a highly readable and gripping story.