Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

  CHAPTER SIX

  SESAME STREET

  1969–1970

  (photo credit 6.1)

  “I THINK THERE WAS A KIND OF COLLECTIVE GENIUS ABOUT THE CORE group that created Sesame Street,” Children’s Television Workshop co-founder Joan Ganz Cooney once remarked, “but there was only one real genius in our midst, and that was Jim.”

  That was high praise, considering the caliber of the team Cooney and her CTW colleague Lloyd Morrisett had put together to develop the show. Besides music maestro Joe Raposo—a swaggering, Harvard-educated virtuoso who could knock off a tune about happiness or itchiness over lunch—Cooney had landed several veterans of the well-regarded children’s show Captain Kangaroo, including a brilliant, Yale-educated writer and producer named Jon Stone. Yet, while the Muppets would come to practically define the overall look and feel of Sesame Street, Jim had been among the last to join CTW’s creative team. It had been Stone, in fact, who had not only recommended Jim to Cooney, but had also strongly suggested that if CTW couldn’t secure Jim’s services, they’d be better off with no puppets on the show at all.

  Jon Stone had first become acquainted with Jim in 1965, when the two of them had been practically thrown together by CBS producer Fred Silverman for a pilot Stone was developing, a Cinderella spoof combining live actors and puppets. The finished pilot had gone nowhere, but Jim and Stone struck up a friendship, founded on their mutual regard for each other’s talents. “We discovered we had a tremendous empathy for each other’s work styles and sense of humor,” Stone said. “I just loved what he was doing.” The two got on so well, in fact, that Jim hired Stone several years later to direct Youth 68, and the two vowed to continue looking for another project to work on together. By July 1968, with only a little nudging from Stone, they had found that next project.

  That summer, both Jim and Stone were deeply involved with the Children’s Television Workshop, a nonprofit organization created in March 1968 by a young television producer named Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett, a progressive-minded vice president of the Carnegie Corporation. Their goal, said Cooney, was simple: “to create a successful television program that would make a difference in the lives of children, in particular, poor inner-city children, and help prepare them for school.”

  They were wading into choppy waters. Previously, educational television had consisted largely of stone-faced educators either staring directly into the camera lecturing, or writing on a blackboard—essentially a filmed classroom lesson, neither of which made for terribly compelling television. On the other hand, educational shows aimed solely at children—like Romper Room or Captain Kangaroo—were fun and well intentioned but were guided by no true pedagogies. Cooney envisioned a show that would take the best of each approach: a fun, fast-paced kids’ show with content steeped in the latest pedagogies and education research. “I want this show to jump and move fast,” Cooney told The New York Times. “[Kids] like commercials and banana peel humor and avant-garde video and audio techniques.… We have to infuse our content into forms children find accessible.”

  If that was the critereon, Jim Henson was clearly her man. For the moment, however, Cooney admitted she had “blanked” on Jim’s name when putting together her creative crew, and was now hunting elsewhere for her team by poaching from the best children’s television staff available: the team at the highly successful Captain Kangaroo, where the Captain himself, Bob Keeshan, knew how to assemble talent. Immediately, Cooney lured away Dave Connell, one of Keeshan’s executive producers, as well as Sam Gibbon, another Kangaroo veteran who was put in charge of curriculum development. Her real catch, however, was the versatile Stone, who had to be persuaded out of a freelancer’s relatively quiet existence to take on the responsibilities of directing and writing for a daily show again. (“I talked to [Joan Cooney] for fifteen minutes,” recalled Stone, “and I was hers for life.”)

  Next came a series of five seminars in Cambridge and New York over the summer of 1968, providing, on the face of it, an opportunity to develop the goals and direction of the still unnamed show, but mostly allowing the academics and the creative talent their first real chance to stare each other down and learn to work together. After the first workshop in June, Stone invited Jim to sit in on the next series of meetings, to be held July 25 and 26 at Harvard. Jim traveled to Cambridge and sat in on the discussions, rarely speaking, but listening intently. Stone and Cooney’s project had his attention; he’d be back for the next meeting in August, this time to be held in New York at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel.

  Several weeks later, Jim entered the conference room at the Waldorf and took a seat near the back—slouching down, as usual, until he was nearly horizontal—and sat so quietly that he finally had to be pointed out to Cooney, who had heard Jim’s praises sung by Stone and others but had yet to meet him in person. Even then, it still took a moment for Cooney to register. “I hadn’t remembered the name at first,” Cooney admitted later, but then “a lightbulb went on” and she remembered seeing a compilation of Jim’s commercials over at the Johnny Victor Theatre in New York earlier in the year. “I was on the floor,” Cooney said. “I couldn’t believe puppets could be so hip and funny.” Once she realized the slouching, bearded figure was the puppeteer Stone had recommended—the same one whose commercials had made her “fall over laughing”—“I was thrilled,” she said. Stone and his creative team were more than just thrilled; they were united in their determination to hire him.

  Getting Jim, and the Muppets, wouldn’t necessarily be easy. Always fascinated by any opportunity to push the boundaries of television, Jim was intrigued by the concept of a new kind of children’s educational program that would use television as a positive force. But he initially resisted Stone’s and Cooney’s entreaties to join the CTW creative team, largely because after spending the last decade expanding into film, animation, documentaries, and experimental television, he didn’t want to be thought of mainly as a puppeteer again. Even worse, if he were to begin performing regularly on a children’s show, he would be slapped with the dreaded label children’s puppeteer. “There was a huge ambivalence there,” said Jerry Juhl, “because one of the things that he would say most often and most strongly about the puppet work … was that this was adult puppetry.”

  Fortunately, the new show offered Jim creative opportunities beyond just puppetry. At the moment, in fact, with the first show still more than a year away, the Muppets weren’t even needed; instead, CTW was interested in putting together short films, no more than one or two minutes long, to teach children letters, numbers, or other concepts like body parts. These short pieces were to be inserted like advertisements—and, in fact, would always be referred to as “inserts”—at regular intervals throughout each show, repeated two, sometimes even three times per hour. This was just the sort of thing Jim could get excited about. With his rat-a-tat editing style that had defined Time Piece and Youth 68, his bold animation techniques, and his knack for quickly and effectively driving home a point—a skill honed from making commercials in which he had only eight seconds to get his message across—Jim was uniquely suited to take on the task of creating CTW’s first “educational commercials.” “Jim got involved right away because he loved making short films so much,” said Jon Stone. But Jim also had one other significant vantage point: as the father of four children under the age of ten, he had spent countless evenings painting, gluing, talking with and listening to his own kids—and had come to appreciate just how perceptive, interesting, and receptive an audience of children could be.

  And so, Jim agreed to join CTW’s creative team—but there was one bit of business to resolve first. While Jim was committed to producing Muppet segments for the new show, he insisted, as usual, on owning his characters. That determination caused some grumbling among CTW lawyers, who pointed out that CTW would ultimately be providing the facilities and doing the filming, editing, and production work. Jim stood firm, but eventually agreed that while he would maintain ownership of the
characters—and could approve the merchandise in which any of his characters were used—Henson Associates and CTW would split the profits from any Muppet-related merchandise associated with the show.

  Before a single frame of film had been shot, Jim and CTW had negotiated—as part of the contract that would acquire Jim’s services—the outline of the agreement relating to merchandising that would ensure, well beyond the wildest dreams of either party, the future financial success of Henson Associates—and, for that matter, for CTW. For Jim, it had been about protecting his work; clearly, neither Jim nor anyone else could have foreseen the merchandising juggernaut they were creating. In fact, after the first CTW meetings in Cambridge in June 1968, Jim wouldn’t even mention CTW in his personal journal until early 1969. However lofty the goals of CTW might be, there were no guarantees the show would last beyond one season. “This was an educational children’s show,” remarked Jerry Juhl, summing up the consensus at the time. “The thought was ‘thirteen weeks, and it’ll be over.’ ”

  Regardless, once Jim was on board, his commitment was complete, and he quickly set to work producing short films for “this future amorphous television show that was still a year-and-a-half away.” One of the first films Jim created was a short piece he called “Body Parts vs. Heavy Machinery,” comparing the movements of the body to similar movements in machines, and featuring several boys—including five-year-old Brian Henson—playing in a sandbox, scooping up fistfuls of sand, intercut with shots of a working steam shovel clawing at mounds of earth.

  While the film and its lessons wouldn’t be seen or appreciated by preschoolers for nearly a year, for Brian Henson, the educational benefits were immediate: at breakfast the morning after completing work on the film, Jim presented Brian with his first paycheck, a compliment, and a gentle lesson in fiscal responsibility. “He said, ‘So Brian, you’ve done a good week’s work and you’ve earned this,’ ” Brian recalled later. “He gave me a check for fifty dollars and … then he said, ‘So here’s what we’re going to do: you earned that money so now we’re going to take that to the bank, and you’re going to open a bank account and you’re going to deposit your fifty dollars and you’re going to get a bank book and then it will earn interest and you can add money.’ … In that moment, he taught me how people earn a living and how the world works. I probably learned more from that experience than anything else in my life.” It was Jim in what Brian would affectionately call “full-blown father mode,” providing gentle guidance and educating in short, easy-to-understand terms—just as he would for millions of other children with his short films.

  The next order of business was to produce a “pitch reel,” to be shown on closed-circuit television to public television stations in the spring, giving them ample opportunity to learn more about the show before episodes became available in the autumn. On January 22, 1969—two weeks before he would sprint to Toronto for the whirlwind taping session for The Cube—Jim taped the Muppet portions of the twenty-five-minute pitch reel, using Kermit and Rowlf, who was still the best-known Muppet, as emcees. Between short films and earnest explanations about the research behind the show, Jim wove a running gag about the difficulty in coming up with a name for the show, with assorted Muppet ad men sitting around a smoky boardroom table, hashing through possible names. “We’ll call it The Itty Bitty Farm and City Witty Ditty Nitty Gritty Dog and Kitty Pretty Little Kiddie Show,” suggests the chairman—only to have a monster angrily devour his chair. Finally, one ad man has an epiphany. “Hey, these kids can’t read or write, can they? Then howzabout we call the show Hey, Stupid!” Exasperated, Rowlf breaks up the meeting and announces he’ll come up with the name himself.

  Actually, Jim’s rambunctious Muppet meeting was bitingly close to reality—for the CTW team hadn’t come up with the show’s name until practically the moment before Jim began rolling tape on the pitch reel. In late 1968, Stone had suggested 123 Avenue B, a title that held until mid-January 1969, when it was decided the name sounded too much like a real address. At that point, Stone turned to his writing team for suggestions, poring over lists with everything from the boring Fun Street to the uninspired The Video Classroom. Nothing really leapt off the page until a writer named Virginia Schone submitted a list containing two alliterative words: Sesame Street.

  “I fought like hell—I thought it was an awful name,” Stone said later. “I thought the E at the end was bad education—it looks like a silent E, so it’d be ‘See-same Street’ if you’re trying to read—and I thought it was too cute.” Producer Dave Connell, however, issued a directive that “if nobody came up with a better idea, as of Monday we [are] going to call the show Sesame Street.” By Monday, the name had stuck—and as Jim began filming on Wednesday, it was Kermit who was shown coming up with the name on-screen, casually explaining that the reference to the phrase open sesame “kinda gives the idea of a street where neat stuff happens.”

  CTW intended to have pilot episodes of Sesame Street ready by June 1969, so Jim began sketching out a few new Muppets for the show early that spring, handing Don Sahlin a felt-tip drawing, little more than a doodle, of two characters. The first had surprised eyes set in a tall, banana-shaped head, topped by a shock of dark hair, while the other—looking rather like Moldy Hay from Sam and Friends—had a head like a football, a large nose, and even larger ears, with shaggy dark hair covering his eyes. Typically, Sahlin captured the spirit of Jim’s drawing—highlighting the features that defined the characters and discarding those that didn’t—and produced two Muppets that manifested the study in opposites, both in design and personality, that Jim always found wonderfully funny. “The design was so simple and pure and wonderful,” said Oz. “You had somebody who is all vertical and somebody who is all horizontal.” In the talented hands of Oz and Jim, those vertical and horizontal characters would quickly become, in the minds of many, one of the funniest comedy duos anywhere, providing teachable moments for millions even as they poked, prodded, teased, and taunted each other: Ernie and Bert.

  It took some trying for Jim and Oz to decide which performer would take which puppet. “We played with who did what using the mirror in the workshop,” recalled Oz, with each taking a turn performing Ernie then Bert. Ultimately, the design of the puppets triggered their personalities. “The design really reflects the character and affects the kind of voice you do,” Oz said. “Ernie is expansiveness, while Bert is this rigid, uptight guy.” With that as the basis, it was easy for Jim to finally assume the more laid-back Ernie, and Oz the serious Bert. Still, it would take a bit more tinkering before everything would fall into place with the characters—it even took Jim awhile to find the right voice for Ernie, at first giving the character a voice similar to Rowlf’s. But with the creation of Ernie and Bert, Jim had made his first iconic contribution to Sesame Street. It would be far from his last. (Contrary to popular rumor, Ernie and Bert were not named for the similarly named cop and taxi driver in the film It’s a Wonderful Life—“it’s a total coincidence,” said Stone—though it should perhaps be noted that Jim did have a great-uncle named Ernie.)

  Another of Jim’s most endearing contributions to Sesame Street were the short films and animations he would supply to be used as inserts, many of which were completed before the first episode aired. Following the completion of the body parts film in January 1969, Jim began working on a series of storyboards for ten short pieces of film and animation that would be used to teach children to count. While Jim would label his March 1969 storyboards Numerosity—and CTW would invoice them under the labels “Henson 2” or whichever number Jim featured in his film—for a generation of viewers, they would always be known simply as “the baker films.”

  Each film began with a colorfully animated counting sequence, followed by a number of short live-action clips in which human actors counted aloud various objects (including, in one segment, Jim as a juggler who counts three balls). At the end, a neatly pressed baker carrying a precariously balanced armful of the appropriate number of
desserts appears at the top of a short flight of stairs, dramatically announces his culinary creation (“Ten … chocolate layer … cakes!”), and immediately falls down the stairs—Jim’s educational television equivalent to ending a sketch with an explosion. “I don’t like it,” said Cooney of what she called “banana peel humor.” “Younger children—two-year-olds—they think he’s hurt.” But it would stay. With the films completed, Jim sent his usual thank-you notes to his actors, then billed CTW an even $40,000, well below the actual costs for producing the films—especially since Jim had estimated his expenses based on producing ten one-minute films, when the completed films actually ran nearly two minutes in length. In the spirit of the project, however, Jim refused to bill CTW for the overages.

  On July 9, 1969, only a little more than a month after the Numerosity work sessions, Jim and Oz—stocked with Ernie and Bert and a handful of generic puppets with interchangeable eyes, noses, and hair that Jim called “Anything Muppets”—spent nine days in Philadelphia taping five pilot shows for Sesame Street. The pilots were to be shown to test audiences in Philadelphia and New York, a group that included the toughest critics of all: the preschoolers who were Sesame Street’s target audience. As it turns out, the responses of this key group would result in an important change in the show’s format.

  In its original pilot format, Sesame Street moved from segment to segment in a deliberate, self-aware manner, with the human cast members introducing many of the short films or animations. The Muppets would then be seen in their own segments, often referencing prior inserts, and serving as the links from one piece to the next. This gave the show the magaziney Laugh-In feel Cooney had originally envisioned, but such a format meant the Muppets were completely isolated from Sesame Street’s human cast. This had been done deliberately, and with the best of intentions. “We had been told by all our advisors that preschoolers have difficulty in differentiating between fantasy and reality,” Stone said. “So the first idea was that you would have the street—a very real-looking set with real people on it—and then you would cut away to puppets, to animation, to all the things that make up the fantasy.