Driven (feature)

Evan Vetere has written an interesting bit on a couple of people who he considers 'Driven'. He selected James Cameron (uber cool director of T2 and Titanic) as well as Steve Jobs (the ego behind Apple of old, and today). You might not agree with everything Evan says, but it is still worth reading. hit the link below to read the feature.

The following feature was written by Slashdot reader Evan Vetere

Driven

Two men in this world have set themselves completely apart from the teeming masses. They're both moderately famous, but there are other famous men. It isn't this that makes them unique: it's their inability to settle for anything less than what they percieve to be perfect.

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James Cameron

'Jim Cameron is certifiably insane.'

Anyone will tell you this; his outburst at the Academy Awards broadcast merely reinforced an already prevalent opinion of the man. He works his underlings as if movie sets were Soviet labor camps; actors have been known to walk off the job in disgust at the way he treats people. The crew of his film The Abyss (1987) wore parodies of the movie's logo on tshirts, retitled The Abuse. He will do anything to get his way.

A sterling example of Cameron's work ethic can be found in the tale of his latest film, Titanic.

In 1995 he decided he wanted to do a love story; all his films up until that date had been either action or science fiction. Nothing really respectable, you see; nothing serious. So he wrote Titanic, placing two head-over-heels-in-love teenagers on a sinking ship. The conclusion was foregone - everyone knows the Titanic sank, of course - and no one could possibly see how this film (budgeted at a hundred million dollars) could be anything but an enormous flop. But Fox's new chairman put his faith on the table and signed Cameron.

Two years later, Titanic had become by far the most expensive motion picture of all time. Fox had had to call in a second studio (Paramount) to help share the cost, and Cameron voluntarily forfeited his director's fees and stake in the movie in order to add the finishing touches to the scenes of the ship sinking. The bell tolled at 200$ million for production alone, not counting the publicity and promotion fees.

The film was originally scheduled for release in July of 1997. It ended up waiting until December. The number of critics who thought Titanic would do anything more than a quick pit stop at the box office on the way to video and the Blockbuster rental shelf was nearly nil. Some condemned it even before they saw it. After all, they said, Cameron's a nut.

As I write this, in April of 1998, Titanic is the most successful film of all time, having brought in over 1.3$ billion. Fox and Paramount are delighted, and so were moviegoers, who gave Cameron and his film Golden Globe and Academy Awards for Best Director, Picture, Special Effects, and most of the other categories - eleven Oscars in all, the most since Ben Hur in 1959. Cameron went home with a mere six hundred thousand dollars he'd recieved for his original script, virtually nothing for a director of his caliber. But he didn't care. The only important thing, he felt, was that the film was perfect.

Crazy, you're thinking. He gave up what would now amount to around forty million dollars in fees for a few special effects?

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, he did. Not because he's insane, either. There are only two qualities that Cameron has that the rest of the world by and large doesn't: he believes that his way of seeing things is the right way, and he's willing to do anything to make his vision of perfection into a reality.

James Cameron has directed seven films, six of which he's written. All six he penned have done quite admirably at the box office, and he earned a rather large cult following before breaking out into the public eye this year. Titanic isn't the best of his films in my eyes, but what makes it great isn't the stunning special effects or the heartwarming storyline. It's that throughout the entire three and a half hour running length, you never cease to feel Cameron's influence. This is, more than any of the other films, his creation.

I know of only one other man of any fame whatsoever who is consistently called insane, and equally consistently proves the pundits wrong. He is Steven P. Jobs, CEO and Chairman of Apple Computer and Pixar Studios.

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Steve Jobs

Back in 1979 when Jobs sat in a garage somewhere in a Silicon Valley that was just beginning to realize its full potential, no one had ever heard of Windows or Mice or, even more amazingly, games on a computer. Why? Computers were extremely difficult to use; dominated by AT&T's cryptic and at times downright obnoxious UNIX operating system, no one but nerds and scientists bothered to use anything more than a handheld calculator or an IBM Selectric. Steve Jobs changed this. In the years from 1977 to 1983, his miniscule company released a series of easy to use computers dubbed the Apple I, II, and finally the Lisa.

Of course, they all said he was crazy. And like Cameron, his first project wasn't a great success - the Lisa died fast. (Jim Cameron's directorial debut was in 1981 with Piranha II: The Flying Killers. Heard of it? Didn't think so.) But he rebounded, and in 1984 released the famous Macintosh. With a measley 128K of ram, no hard disk, and a 400K floppy disk drive in the front, the Macintosh looked more like the illegitimate spawn of your toaster and your refrigerator than a computing device. But the little thing really -was- easy to use, and by 1985 everyone who was anyone owned one. They were so cute!

Steve Jobs was ousted in 1986 from Apple by the new CEO he'd just hired, a man from Pepsi named John Scully. Jobs moved on - he founded a company called NeXT, and the critics panned that too. NeXT made computers as well, large black cubes that programmers quickly fell in love with for their ease of use. Programmers weren't a very large demographic back in the late 1980s, though, and the news media never bothered to mention the NeXT cube's immense popularity in that field.

Jobs' third venture was his most successful. Pixar Animation Studios was the first entirely computer based animation firm in existence, and the critics didn't believe it would go anywhere. People don't want to see an all-computerized movie, or even much computer animation. Right?

Pixar's initial stock offering, valued at 22$, rose sharply to 45$ in 1995. Jobs contracted with Disney to produce the first-ever entirely computer animated film, Toy Story, in that same year, won eight Annies and was nominated for three Academy Awards.

And the critics still didn't stop giving Jobs flack. When Apple Computer took a turn for the worse in the mid nineteen nineties, the company's head instantly bought NeXT. Steve Jobs came with it. He was appointed CEO six months later, in mid 1997, and another half year later the company that nearly everyone had grown to view with a mix of loathing and pity was profitable once again, experiencing record sales and running commercials that made a laughingstock of Intel.

They still call him crazy today.

In 1986 when John Scully booted Jobs from the company, he learned a lesson. From that time on, Jobs never again delegated control to anyone. He designed the NeXT cube himself, personally edited large amounts of Toy Story's footage, and when he returned to Apple he singlehandedly brought the company back from certain death. The new 'G3' product line, the half-inch-thick flat-screen monitors, the Intel-bashing commercials, all of these were thought up and made real by Steven P. Jobs.

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Notice any similarities?

Whether you like the men themselves is a matter of opinion. What can't be denied is that their work is downright brilliant. They've beaten the odds, thumbed their noses at the critics and gone on to change the world.

It's these men who deserve the respect and admiration of our nation. They aren't geniuses, they aren't savants. They simply have the courage and the drive to believe in themselves and put that self into everything they do.