Ed Catmull

Is Ed Catmull a Latter-day Saint? He grew up as one. He was born in Parkersburg, West Virginia in March 1945, and his family, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, moved to Salt Lake City, where his father, Earl Catmull, taught math and went on to be principal of Granite High School and then Taylorsville High. Ed graduated from Granite in 1963. The Salt Lake Tribune reported in April 2017 that he is no longer a practicing member, and quoted him on the culture he was raised in: "I tremendously value that culture." That is the whole of the public record on the subject, and this site is not going to pad it. The business record is another matter. It is long, well documented, and full of numbers.

He wanted to draw for Disney. Fifty years later he was running Disney's animators.

Catmull loved Pinocchio and Peter Pan as a boy and wanted to be an animator, but there were no animation schools and he also liked math, so he took the scientific route and graduated from the University of Utah in 1969 with a degree in physics and computer science. He had meant to work on programming languages until he met Ivan Sutherland, who had written Sketchpad, and switched to digital imaging. Sutherland's DARPA-funded lab in Salt Lake City was the place to be: the program's students included Jim Clark, John Warnock and Alan Kay. As a graduate student Catmull worked out texture mapping and bicubic patches, wrote algorithms for anti-aliasing and subdivision surfaces, and independently arrived at Z-buffering eight months after Wolfgang Strasser had described it in his own doctoral thesis. In 1972 he and Fred Parke made A Computer Animated Hand, one minute of his own left hand flexing on screen; a Hollywood producer picked it up for the 1976 film Futureworld, and the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in December 2011. He took his doctorate in 1974, worked briefly at Applicon, and by November of that year Alexander Schure had hired him to run the new Computer Graphics Lab at the New York Institute of Technology, where in 1977 he wrote Tween, software that filled in the frames between two drawings. The lab could make pictures but could not tell a story, and Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith spent the late 1970s pitching Hollywood studios without much luck until George Lucas called in 1979. Lucas wanted computer graphics, digital editing and digital sound brought into filmmaking, and he made Catmull a vice president at Lucasfilm to build a computer division. By 1980 Catmull had three projects running: a graphics group under Smith, an audio project under Andy Moorer, and a nonlinear editing project under Ralph Guggenheim. Six years later Lucas sold the division. The buyer was Steve Jobs, and the price, according to Pixar's Wikipedia entry, was $10 million: $5 million for the technology rights and $5 million put into the new company as capital. The company was called Pixar. Its first product was not a film. It was a computer.

Pixar sold the Pixar Image Computer to government, scientific and medical buyers for years before anyone paid for a cartoon. The turn came with a film budgeted at $30 million.

Toy Story's numbers are worth a second look. The Wikipedia article gives three different worldwide totals depending on which re-releases you count, from about $362 million to $401 million; the low figure is the one for the original run and the one to use. Catmull was the person who went to Disney to negotiate when the production blew through its first budget, and the Toy Story article records that he "was able to reach a compromise on a new budget". That is the job he did for thirty years: standing between the people who make the pictures and the people who pay for them.

After the 2006 sale, Disney made Catmull president of both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios and John Lasseter chief creative officer of both. In June 2007 they took on Disneytoon Studios in Glendale as well. Pixar sits in Emeryville, more than 350 miles northwest of Los Angeles, so the two men appointed a general manager at each studio and commuted, spending at least two days a week, usually Tuesdays and Wednesdays, at Disney Animation. In November 2014 the general managers of Pixar and Disney Animation were promoted to president, still reporting to Catmull. One item from that period belongs on the ledger: Catmull was named in the Silicon Valley no-cold-calling antitrust case, defended his conduct in a deposition, and Disney and its subsidiaries, Pixar included, paid $100 million in settlement (Wikipedia, Edwin Catmull).

His management book, Creativity, Inc., written with Amy Wallace and published on April 8, 2014, was shortlisted for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year and picked for Mark Zuckerberg's book club in March 2015. The Financial Times summarised its argument as a system where "candid criticism is delivered sensitively" and individuality is not "strangled by a robotic corporate culture". Catmull put the same idea more bluntly to the Salt Lake Tribune in 2017: "Why is it that companies at the top of their game do stupid things?" The awards, in order:

• Academy Scientific and Technical Awards in 1993 (RenderMan) and 1996 (digital compositing), and an Academy Award of Merit in 2001 for rendering
• National Academy of Engineering, elected 2000; IEEE John von Neumann Medal, 2006
• Gordon E. Sawyer Award at the 81st Academy Awards, presented February 2009
• Computer History Museum Fellow, 2013
• ACM Turing Award for 2019, shared with Pat Hanrahan, for work on computer-generated imagery

He announced his retirement on October 23, 2018 and stayed as an adviser through July 2019. In March 2022 the video game studio Thatgamecompany brought him on as principal adviser on creative culture and strategic growth. The physics student who could not find an animation school ended his career with four awards from the Academy, none of them for drawing.