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Live on tape from my house in Los Angeles. I'm Jesse Thorn and this is the Sound of Young America from MaximumFum.org.

It's the Sound of Young America. I'm Jesse Thorn America's radio sweetheart. My guest on the program is David A. Price. His new book is called The Pixar Touch, The Making of a Company.

It's a history of the Pixar Company from Animation Hardware Company to international media super phenomenon. David, welcome to the Sound of Young America.

So I was surprised to learn. I guess I'm probably on board the Pixar phenomenon relatively early on having watched their short films in touring animation shows as a little kid.

But I was surprised to learn that the whole operation sort of had its roots in Utah. That's right. The computer graphics work really a lot of it started out at the University of Utah on the computer science department there.

Ed Katmull was this guy who growing up in Salt Lake City wanted to be an animator, realized in high school that he just couldn't draw.

But he had a knack for math and he goes into college and studies math and physics gets his PhD working in computer graphics, which at that point is really almost at the lunatic fringe.

You have to remember this is the early 1970s when just getting a still image out of a computer was an amazing accomplishment, let alone thinking in terms of movies, but that's where he was.

I mean, even the idea of like putting something into a computer and the computer having a display rather than it generating a new set of punch cards or whatever. That was completely mind blowing to people then.

When he came to be kind of unemployed and a drift that the company sort of started to have it set down its roots.

He's going around looking for jobs. He takes a job that doesn't have anything to do particularly with computer graphics. Tell me about how he tell me about his first benefactor.

Right. Like you said, he's working in this job that he feels like is a dead end job. He's this newly minted PhD. There's no careers in computer animation, right?

Because he's so far ahead of everybody else that he gets a call from this secretary has no idea why she's calling, but she's trying to set him up to come out to New York for some reason.

And finally, he figures out it's for a job interview and there's this guy named Alex Sure, who's the head of an institution called the New York Institute for Technology who has this vision of doing computer animation.

He's gotten the Hollywood bug and he's hired a bunch of animators. I mean, like a hundred of them working on just a regular old timey 2D cell animated film. That's the only kind of animation there was then.

He's watching these people work and he's thinking that computers could do that, which isn't really true. I mean, you still need animators to do computer animation, but this was his idea and he's this really delightfully eccentric guy who people called his way of talking a word salad.

He would just sort of spew out this eloquent nonsense and sort of every 10% of it would make a little bit of sense. And if you wanted to try to get something across to him, you would talk over him and then eventually he'd be repeating your words back to you.

And that was how you understood. That's how you knew that he got what you were telling him. So anyway, he's the first big patron.

Can I interrupt you and ask where his eccentric millions came from?

No one's 100% sure about that. There's different theories about that, but he's got this money and he's the first guy who comes long and bank rolls the development of computer animation.

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