Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

  During the days, when he wasn’t working on Cyclia with Barry Clark, Jim was writing regularly with Jerry Juhl, pitching ideas for countless television series and specials almost constantly from 1967 through 1969. “Jim and I would sit and think up anything, from hourlong [specials] down to five minute sketches for The Ed Sullivan Show,” said Juhl. The ideas were becoming wilder and more far out, with Juhl writing down the proposals nearly as fast as Jim could spin them. In April 1967, for example, Jim pitched Moki, a genderbending case of mistaken identity in which a long-haired, androgynous young man is mistaken for a female fashion model. Brillstein shopped the proposal, but the subject matter was too touchy, even to those who recognized the brilliance behind it. “This guy Henson’s obviously got a nutty visual mind,” one potential director told Brillstein, “[but] this story scares the bejesus out of me. It’s not exactly dirty—it just ain’t quite clean … the guy is very talented and it’s a funny idea, but I guess I’m just old fashioned.”

  Another innovative pitch was Inside My Head, which was basically a live-action version of the Limbo sketch in which a conversation between a man and woman is played out inside the man’s brain. Jim envisioned the brain as a set made up of “strange electronic pulses and rhythms … a maze of fibers, membranes, and convoluted openings” and the same kind of quick-cut montages Jim had used for Limbo. The visual representations for how the brain works, Jim explained earnestly, “would be based on all the known facts about the brain which are not only fascinating, but more amazing and wondrous than anything a science fiction writer would invent.” To his disappointment, as with Moki, no television network expressed interest in Inside My Head. And still there were a few Muppet-related proposals—all of which went nowhere—including the surrealistic Adventures of the Snerf-Poof from Planet Snee and the even more bizarre Johnny Carson and the Muppet Machine, which Jim illustrated in a style that could have been ripped from the trippy pages of the fledgling underground comix scene.

  If Jim was having a hard time finding a network willing to take a chance on some of his wilder projects, he soon found a receptive audience at NBC, which had recently launched NBC Experiment in Television, a series that catered to the more avant-garde or experimental filmmakers. Hyping its specials as “Off the Beaten Path,” the hour-long Experiment ran without commercials on Sunday afternoons, spotlighting eclectic pieces like A Coney Island of the Mind, performed by students at the University of Southern California School of the Performing Arts, or Movies in the Now Generation, a collection of short student films hosted by George Plimpton.

  For Experiment, Jim put aside dramatic and comedic pieces like Moki and Inside My Head, and proposed instead a documentary he called A Collage of Today “to communicate the ideas of Youth in the forms they understand,” as Jim explained, “employing film and video media in new and exciting ways to best convey not only the substance, but the mood of the young.” With the okay from NBC on February 15 and a budget of $100,000, Jim sent Barry Clark—who was still enthusiastically but unsuccessfully pitching Cyclia—on a quick sprint to scout out college campuses and clubs in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, Miami, and Omaha.

  Jim burrowed into the project for the next two months, poring through books and magazines with Juhl for quotes and snippets of poetry or dialogue, filming one-on-one interviews in late February, and editing by mid-March. On Sunday, April 21, 1968, Jim’s one-hour documentary—now titled Youth 68: Everything’s Changing … Or Maybe It Isn’t—was broadcast on NBC, only a little less than four months after receiving the initial okay from the network—a remarkable pace. “We worked twenty hours a day for eight weeks,” said Barry Clark.

  Utilizing the same rapid-fire editing Jim had first used in Time Piece, Youth 68 truly was a multimedia collage. Music overlaps with spoken commentary, and many times the screen is split into multiple images, resembling a monitor in a psychedelic film editing room. Jim was determined to aggressively use television technology—particularly chromakey, in which two images are composited together—to flood the viewer with sounds and images. Through chromakey, for example, the darkened silhouettes of dancers could be filled with film images, finally giving Jim the projected-on dancers he had envisioned for Cyclia.

  At its core, Youth 68 features interviews with young men and women around the country—including extended commentary from a charming Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas and Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane who too casually waves around a pistol—as they earnestly discuss music, drugs, education, the draft, religion, and the future. Perhaps reflecting Jim’s own equivocal political viewpoint, Youth 68 doesn’t come down strongly on any position, preferring to allow each side to have its say—with, perhaps, one exception: as an army recruitment brochure was read aloud, Jim showed images of soldiers carrying their wounded, pushing back protesters, and wielding flamethrowers. But while Jim may have been antiwar, he had little interest in using his art to make a political statement. Still, Jim’s apolitical stance was actually a kind of statement in itself, and Jim couldn’t resist ending the program with one long-haired young man declaring that, “Nothing will be changed. The people who watch a broadcast like this aren’t going to learn anything.”

  In fact, Jim’s main motivation for Youth 68 was neither political nor social, but technical. “Back in the sixties … I thought of myself as an experimental filmmaker,” Jim said. “I was interested in the visual image for its own sake—different ways of using it—quick cutting and things of that sort.… I loved what one could do with the montaging of visual images, so I was playing with that in several experimental projects.” Juhl put it more bluntly. “We got into [Youth 68] … because of the look and the technology that [Jim] had available to play with,” Juhl said. “It was so typical of Jim to start from that point of view.”

  Critics responded favorably to Jim’s experimental documentary—and many were even quick to recognize the technical wizardry involved. “Visually the program was a nearly continuous light show with images overlaid on image … so there were sometimes three things to watch,” said the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, while the respected columnist Ralph J. Gleason enthused that “No television program on a commercial network that I have seen utilized the possibilities of the TV camera to the extent this show did.” Variety declared it simply “one of the most inspired programs of this season.” Viewers, however—who were more inclined to focus on content rather than Jim’s technical prowess—were split. Some thought it “excellent,” “brave,” or “courageous,” while others viewed it “with alarm and more than a little disgust,” and demanded that NBC apologize for “some of the great damage you have done to our children and their future generations.”

  By summer, however, even those alarmed by what they saw as “the Hippies and drug addicts” of Youth 68 would agree its outlook seemed benign, even quaint, against the background of the tumultuous summer of 1968. Two weeks before the debut of Youth 68, Martin Luther King had been assassinated in Memphis, sparking riots across the country. Six weeks later, Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down in Los Angeles. In early July, racial violence rocked Glenville, Ohio, leaving seven dead. A month later, police and protesters clashed outside the Democratic convention in Chicago. Jim’s hopeful but naive “communicat[ion] of ideas” blew away with the same wind that dispersed the tear gas at the protests in Chicago.

  That summer in New York, Jim had decided to change both the address and the name of his organization, moving Muppets, Inc. out of its 53rd Street address, and over to 227 East 67th Street, taking over the top two floors above an Italian restaurant. The new offices were accessible from the street entrance by a stairway so long, said one visitor, that it looked like the first steep hill of a roller coaster—and Jim would buzz visitors in from the street, then stand at the very top of the steps just outside his office, gleefully shouting “Keep coming!” as visitors trudged up the long staircase.

  With the new offices came a new name: Henson Associates, or HA! as Jim would winkingly abbreviat
e it. In the spirit of Henson Associates’ playful acronym, Jim would later give the other divisions of his company similarly structured names, creating HO! (Henson Organization), HE! (Henson Enterprises), HIT! (Henson International Television), and HUM! (Henson Universal Music). With the name change, Jim was making a point: his company was about more than Muppets. He wanted to be considered more than just “a novelty act,” said Jerry Nelson. It was his name over the door now, not Muppets—though Jim typically couldn’t resist a bit of self-effacing silliness, as the sign outside the door at 227 greeted visitors with:

  Henson Associates and Muppets Inc. This sign will be

  replaced with a nice expensive one some day—maybe.

  Jim was still mulling over “a few larger projects,” explained Barry Clark—who would leave the company that summer—and hoped to “attempt a feature film before the public’s current infatuation with film declines.” What those “larger projects” might be, however, even Jim didn’t know. Since 1962, he and Jerry Juhl had been drafting an ambitious non-Muppet-related movie script called Tale of Sand, a dark western in which the main character learns he’s the Chosen One. It had “a weird kind of dark ritual look to it,” Juhl said later, like “a bad dream, except that most of it was very funny.” Jim was floating the script around Hollywood—he wanted to play the main character, so he was pushing hard—“but nothing ever happened to it,” said Juhl flatly. “It was not a very Hollywood idea … it was such a bizarre piece of work there wasn’t much hope for it.” Still, Jim and Juhl would tinker with it for years.

  Finally, in late 1968, Jim dusted off an experimental piece he and Juhl had scripted and circulated unsuccessfully two years earlier, a one-hour special called The Cube—an “original, surrealistic comedy,” as Jim described it, that “dramatizes the complex, baffling problems of reality versus illusion.” Baffling was putting it mildly; when Brillstein had shopped the script in 1966, most executives had no idea what to make of it. “I see no hope for it in prime time,” wrote one confused producer, “unless [the networks] turn out to be far more courageous and experimental than I expect them to be.”

  By 1968, that experimental network would turn out to once again be NBC—still looking for projects for its Experiment in Television, and still enthusiastic about Jim’s work following the success of Youth 68. On December 30, 1968, then, the network gave Jim the go-ahead for the project; by February 8, 1969, he was already filming the special in Toronto. For the first time, Jim would be producing a serious full-length feature, using professional actors—and no puppets—and he was determined to ensure it looked exactly as he envisioned. “After Time Piece, Jim often got frustrated when directors couldn’t give him what he wanted,” said Oz, who had seen Jim patiently, but firmly, try to articulate his vision to other directors and filmmakers.

  For The Cube, there would be no intermediaries who needed explanations; Jim would again step behind the camera himself. “[Jim’s] inspiration for The Cube came more from exploring the possibilities of television,” Juhl said. “We were just reaching the point with videotape editing where you could play with it and get novel results.… It was really a matter of shooting film-style on tape, but the possibilities seemed exciting to us, and especially to Jim.” For the five days it would take to shoot The Cube—a whirlwind pace made only slightly easier by the fact that the entire production used only one set, the eponymous cube—Jim would issue directions to his actors in a near whisper, hmmmm quietly as he considered their input, then stand patiently in his black leather jacket, arms folded, as the cameras rolled. The taping went smoothly, and Jim edited the film on February 16 and 17 to have a cut ready to show the network on the 18th. Five days later, The Cube was on the air.

  Deliberately vague and defiantly artsy, The Cube perhaps most closely resembles an avant-garde episode of The Twilight Zone. The main character—played by comedic actor Dick Schaal and identified only as “The Man in the Cube”—is trapped in a white, cube-shaped room, with no idea how he arrived there or who he is. As furniture, props, and characters move in and out through the room—including two Gestapo-type policemen, a rock group, and a critic who informs the Man that he is actually in a television show—it becomes difficult, even for the viewer, to determine what, if anything, is real. Growing increasingly paranoid, the Man finally exits the Cube to the sound of applause, then enters a psychiatrist’s office where he accidentally cuts himself … and bleeds jam. Everything fades, and he’s trapped back in the Cube.

  “Congratulations,” wrote one viewer to NBC, “we’re not just sure what we learned from it but it was quite a relief from the usual TV fare.” Even co-writer Jerry Juhl wasn’t sure what it was about. “We were in an era where … everybody had a paranoid streak,” Juhl explained. In a way, it was Time Piece again, with the main character trying to make sense of the world around him—but even that was probably reading too much into it. More than anything, Jim was playing with the form, spinning a circular tale with a shock ending in an artistic way. “When [Jim] got into the experimental film mode, that was the story he tended to tell,” said Juhl, “one of those ‘repeat stories.’ ”

  Response to The Cube was mixed—and viewers and critics either loved it or hated it, with very little middle ground. “A dramatic highlight of the season,” proclaimed critic Ben Gross in the New York Daily News, while other viewers thought it “excellent,” “provocative,” or “a challenge and a pleasure.” Many disagreed. “The people who wrote it must be weird,” one viewer wrote flatly. Variety groaned that “it must have been intended for what is called egghead ghetto time [meanwhile], the lower strata of TV viewers must still be wondering what it was all about.”

  One viewer—a Mr. Dionne from California, who likely didn’t consider himself part of the “lower strata”—fired off an angry, rambling letter, complaining haughtily that “the most disciplined attention I could give [The Cube] was a belch from the grave of Marcus Aurelius, occasioned, I might add, by the dead weight of its own dust caving in on itself.” Two weeks later came Jim’s one-sentence response:

  Dear Mr. Dionne:

  What the fuck are you talking about?

  Yours truly,

  JIM HENSON

  Reading the letter forty years later, Frank Oz roared with laughter. “That’s actually very Jim!” It was uncharacteristic of Jim to swear—his strongest epithet was usually “Oh, for heaven’s sake!”—but that was the difference, Lisa Henson explained, between “work Jim” and “home Jim.” “That isn’t something in our lives he would say,” agreed Jane, “but he would certainly talk that way to Frank!”

  If The Cube, or even Youth 68, left critics and audiences baffled, Jim didn’t mind a bit; he was pursuing his own interests, regardless of success—and besides, he still had Muppet commercials and appearances on variety shows to pay the bills. “I used to always think in terms of having two careers going, two threads that I was working with at the same time,” Jim said later. “One was accepted by the audience and was successful, and that was the Muppets. The other [experimental films] was something I was very interested in and enjoyed. It didn’t have that commercial success, but that didn’t particularly frustrate me because I enjoyed it.”

  Still, Jim was looking for a major project—something larger than scattered one-hour specials, psychedelic nightclubs, or experimental films. For a brief moment, there was the prospect of a collaboration with the cartoonist Johnny Hart, who had proposed developing a series based on his popular comic strip The Wizard of Id. Jim met with Hart and agreed to prepare a short pilot to “demonstrate the technique and approach of its proposed television special” for a total cost of only $1,500. Don Sahlin masterfully built puppets and sets closely resembling Hart’s original drawings, and the Muppet team performed the sketches with enthusiasm, even working in an explosion at the end. But the project went nowhere, due largely to lack of interest on Hart’s part, who “just decided he didn’t want to do it,” recalled Jerry Nelson. For Jim, there were no hard feelings; i
n fact, he would continue to circulate the pilot among the major networks for another year.

  Even as Jim remained on good terms with Hart, he was struggling in a recent relationship with the Frito-Lay company, which had approached Henson Associates about producing several commercials for Munchos potato crisps. Things got off to a shaky start when the Young & Rubicam ad firm, representing Frito-Lay, sent over a contract adding a clause to take ownership of any characters created for the ads. “This is completely wrong,” Jim scrawled in his looping cursive on a note stapled to the contract. “We always insist on ownership of the characters.” Never sell anything I own, Jim had warned Brillstein six years earlier—and he still meant it, even if it meant scuttling a relationship with a client. The offending clause was removed, and Jim would shoot three commercials for Munchos, memorable mostly for their antagonist: a snack-stealing monster that Jim had originally created for an unaired ad campaign for General Foods back in 1966.

  Frito-Lay was delighted with the spots and requested several more commercials. Jim, however, was no longer interested—at last, he had found his next big project. It wouldn’t be long before the monster from the Munchos commercials would no longer crave and eat potato chips, but would devour cookies instead.

  “Tape Pilot Shows,” Jim wrote in his journal entry for July 9, 1969, then two more words: “Sesame Street.”