I'm a SIGGRAPH rando who implemented a clone of RenderMan in 1992 or so on Sun Workstations. (It wasn't that great of an implementation (Pat Hanrahan helped me

I'm a SIGGRAPH rando who implemented a clone of RenderMan in 1992 or so on Sun Workstations. (It wasn't that great of an implementation (Pat Hanrahan helped me with one bit), but because of the Sun's networking capability - it could parallelize as well as anything else at the time). I don't every recall seeing Lasseter doing anything inappropriate. To your point: The company was going through a hard time, and randos would have been the PERFECT feedback to him. The company would have died without their support. But, who could be there to tell him to take it down a notch[0], when he acted like a professional all day long? Net-net: I disagree with what you just said. [0] I generally know who was working on that project at that time, but I don't think it advances this conversation...