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Pixar Touch Legend has it that the success of Pixar is all about the genius of Steve Jobs, but The Pixar Touch by David A. Price tells a more complicated story, writes Paul Boutin in the Wall Street Journal. Pixar’s start dates back to the 1960s at the University of Utah, whose computer-science department “attracted some of the era’s brightest minds.” This included Ed Catmull, who “was recruited by the New York Institute of Technology to direct its computer-graphics lab.” There he met another computer-graphics pioneer, Alvy Ray Smith. Then along came George Lucas, in the 1970s, looking for a less expensive way to create all those amazing Star Wars special effects. He hired Ed and Alvy, and that’s where Ed had a “breakthrough insight: Movie audiences believed that models were more realistic than computer animation because the models duplicated filmmaking effects that computer animation removed.” Along the way, Ed hired John Lasseter, who had recently been fired by Disney, and then George Lucas, “looking to streamline his business, spun off the graphics group” and sold it to Steve Jobs, who re-named the company Pixar. An early project called Tin Toy won an Academy Award, leading to a three-film deal with Disney in 1991, and the hit film, Toy Story. When Disney bought Pixar two years ago for $7.4 billion, John Lasseter became chief creative officer of the combined animation studios, effectively putting him in charge of the company from which Disney had fired him back in the early 1980s. Inventing Niagara A parking lot now sits where a museum once stood, a parkway runs through what used to be homes and churches, and Niagara Falls is no longer the city of honeymooners and Marilyn Monroe, observes Bill Kaufman in a Wall Street Journal review of Inventing Niagara by Ginger Strand. The museum was leveled by the New York State Parks Authority. The parkway was built in the 1960s by the New York Power Authority. In the 1970s, the Niagara Falls Urban Renewal Agency saw fit to tear down the “shops and diners that had been the lifeblood of a funky downtown.” Then there are the Falls themselves, now tamed by the Army Corps of Engineers, which “manicured, repaired, landscaped and artificially lit” them, blasting away “dangerous overhangs” and managing the water flow “to suit the tourist schedule.” As Bill Kaufman notes, nearly all of the “improvements” made to Niagara Falls were made by the government, pushing aside the “mom-and-pop entrepreneurs whose tackiness had disgusted” preservationist leaders. The lesson here, according to Bill Kaufman, is this: “If government had never lifted a finger, either to ‘improve’ or ‘preserve,’ the waterfalls and the city would be in far better shape than they are now.” The Fruit Hunters “People who are passionate about fruits — hunters, cultivators, smugglers — are often as eccentric as their quarry,” writes Mary Roach in a New York Times review of The Fruit Hunters, by Adam Leith Gollner. Those eccentrics would certainly include Adam himself, who travels to Borneo and Thailand in search of rare and exotic fruit, such as an “orange that tastes like chicken noodle soup.” The result, writes Adam, “is Stepford Fruits: gorgeous replicants that look perfect, feel like silicon implants and taste like tennis balls, mothballs, or mealy, juiceless cotton wads.” Fortunately, such travesties have not totally eclipsed innovation, for example the possibilities of grafting. Adam writes, for instance, about a farmer in Chile who “recently made headlines with a tree that bears plums, peaches, cherries, apricots, almonds and nectarines.”
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