Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

  Earlier in the spring, Jim had brought in Jerry Juhl to polish Jack Burns’s rough movie script, hoping that by stirring the two together, the final mix would capture both Burns’s rat-a-tat joke sensibilities and Juhl’s warmth for the characters. Paul Williams, too, had been pressed back into service, though after his positive experience of working with Jim on Emmet Otter, it didn’t take much persuading for Jim to get Williams on board. “Working with Jim Henson was probably the easiest collaboration of my life,” said Williams later. “[He] had a sweetness about him, and I don’t think he ever got emotionally pulled off course. But I’ve also never worked with anybody who spent less time over my shoulder.” Jim never even insisted on hearing demos of the songs as Williams wrote them, merely shrugging that he would “hear them in the studio” when he showed up to record them. Williams’s only other request, then—and one that Jim willingly granted—was that he be permitted to work with composer Kenny Ascher, allowing Williams to fully devote himself to writing the songs while Ascher undertook the more time-consuming task of scoring them.

  Throughout May and June, Jim jetted back and forth between Los Angeles and New York, sometimes twice a week, to finalize the script, oversee production of the sets in California, and meet with director James Frawley, who had spent several days with Jim in London early in the spring to get a feel for the Muppet sensibilities. Jim had wanted to direct The Muppet Movie himself, but had been grudgingly persuaded by the argument that it was better to have an experienced director at the helm of the Muppets’ first foray into film. “Up until that time they had never shot film. They had only shot tape, and they had never shot outside the studio,” said Frawley. “So [Jim] knew that he needed somebody who was a filmmaker and knew what to do with the camera.” Juhl—who had swallowed his own pride when the more experienced Burns had been installed as head writer of The Muppet Show in its first season—understood Jim’s disappointment at being bumped in favor of Frawley. “[It] was actually a very frustrating experience for him in that he wanted to direct,” said Juhl. “So much. It drove him crazy.”

  Regardless, Frawley—who had headed up several small comedies like The Big Bus and The Christian Licorice Store—was a fine choice. With a visual sensibility similar to Jim’s—he had cut his teeth directing episodes of The Monkees, where he employed the same sort of quick-cut editing style Jim had used on Time Piece—and a low-key sense of humor honed by several years in an improv troupe, Frawley and Jim were a good fit. “He felt pretty good about my sense of humor,” remembered Frawley. “It seemed like a good combination of talents for his Muppets. I had a very childlike approach to my work, and the Muppets fit in well with that.”

  One of the first orders of business was to see how the Muppets would look when they were filmed outside, in the real world, under natural light instead of the more controlled, and forgiving, environment of the television studio. On a gray, drizzly spring day, Jim, Oz, and Frawley piled into Jim’s car and drove north into the English countryside, pulling over to film anything remotely interesting. With Frawley’s camera rolling, Jim and Oz poked Kermit, Fozzie, Piggy, and Animal up into the low branches of trees, peeked them around corners, sat them behind the wheel of the car, and chatted with real cows, who stared at Kermit so intently that Jim broke down in giggles. “We’re taking the characters out of the show and bringing them into the real world,” Jim later explained. “Nobody has ever done anything like this using our technique.” After reviewing the nearly fifteen minutes of footage, they proclaimed themselves “very excited” with the results. It was going to work—just as Jim had known it would.

  During the final week of June 1978, Jim hopscotched across the country one more time, attending Lisa’s high school graduation ceremony in New York—she had already been accepted to Harvard, an accomplishment Jim noted proudly in his journal with the appropriate number of exclamation points—then spent two days in Lubbock, Texas, at a Puppeteers of America convention, before finally arriving at Bernie Brillstein’s beach house in Los Angeles just in time to celebrate the Fourth of July. The next morning—a bright and sunny Wednesday—cameras rolled on The Muppet Movie.

  For eighty-seven days over the summer and fall of 1978, Jim and the Muppet performers sweated in the sun on locations in California and New Mexico, rolling around on their backs on furniture dollies or chairs with the legs cut off and wheels attached—almost anything that would roll and keep them out of the view of Frawley’s cameras. While the big screen allowed the Muppets the space to move about freely in the real world—many times out in the open where even their lower bodies could finally be seen—keeping the Muppet performers hidden from view required them to squeeze into even tighter and more claustrophobic spaces than ever. For some scenes, rectangular pits would be dug in which the puppeteers would stand to perform. Other times, the pits would be covered with a piece of plywood—which would then be covered by sand or dirt—and the puppeteers would stick their arms up through holes in the wood, watching themselves on monitors from their shallow underground crypt. As a first-time director of puppeteers, Frawley was surprisingly in tune with the physical demands placed on the performers. Jim, who had once made a particularly inconsiderate director stand holding his arm over his head for ten minutes to understand the pain involved in performing, found a sympathetic ally in Frawley, who would call out “Muppets relax!” between takes so the puppeteers could rest their aching arms and shoulders. “If you don’t dig sore arms,” said Richard Hunt, “don’t work with puppets.”

  In Frawley’s view, the most difficult sequences were those in which the Muppets drove or rode in cars. “[The Muppets] had never been shot outdoors, or in a car or real locations,” said Frawley, “and we pretty much had to invent it as we went along. Every shot had never been done before, because nobody had taken Fozzie Bear and Miss Piggy and Kermit and put them in a Studebaker.” With four puppeteers and their monitors scrunched together in the front seat just under the dashboard, there was no room for a driver—so Frawley’s solution was to rig the car so it could be driven from the trunk by a stunt driver who watched the road on a monitor.

  But it was Jim—in what Frawley called “the single most difficult sequence to execute”—who ended up in the most cramped spot of all. In one of the film’s most memorable moments, a long swooping camera shot eases out of the clouds over a swamp, floats down through the trees, and eventually closes in on Kermit, sitting on a log in the middle of the swamp, strumming a banjo and singing “Rainbow Connection”—a pitch-perfect tune written by Williams and Ascher, who had been directed by Jim to give Kermit a song similar to “When You Wish Upon a Star” from Disney’s Pinocchio. The take is seamless, slowly closing in on Kermit surrounded by water, in another of those How’d they do that? moments that Jim loved. In a similar scene in Emmet Otter, when Emmet and his mother had sung as they rowed a boat downriver, Jim had used remote-controlled puppets. In this case, however, the puppetry is so flawless—Kermit is clearly not radio-controlled—that it seems the only way it could possibly have been accomplished would be for Jim to have performed Kermit from underwater.

  As it turns out, that’s just what he did.

  In a water tank on a movie studio backlot, Jim had created an enormous and entirely convincing swamp set, with real trees—shipped in from the Georgia bayous—drooping their branches into a massive tank full of muddy-looking water. Jim’s idea was to sink a custom-made diving bell into the tank, lower himself inside, then perform Kermit up on the surface by sticking his arm up through a rubber sleeve in the top of the diving bell. It almost worked perfectly—but not quite. For one thing, the water in the studio tank was only four feet deep, while the diving bell being constructed—which Jim had initially intended to sink into a real swamp, before abandoning the idea—was nearly five feet tall. Rather than reconfigure the entire set with a deeper tank, Jim simply directed the construction crew to remove eighteen inches from the diving bell. It was going to make a tight fit that much tighter, but Jim wasn’t
worried. “Well, if I can fit,” he said with a shrug, “I’ll do it.”

  Once the diving bell was secured in place underwater and Kermit and his log were arranged on top, Jim lowered himself into the cramped space, folding himself inside swami-style, with his legs crossed, his knees up, and a monitor and a copy of the script cradled between his legs. When the top of the tank was closed and sealed, Jim could reach up through the rubber sleeve and slide his right arm inside Kermit while operating Kermit’s banjo-strumming left hand with a wire rod snaked down into the diving bell. Even though oxygen was being pumped in through a hose and Jim was always in contact with the surface through his headset, it was like being buried alive—“no place for someone with claustrophobia,” Jim said. Thirteen-year-old John Henson, visiting the set for the day, thought “it was a bit frightening” watching his dad go into the tank and disappear beneath the surface of the water. At one point during the five days it took to film the sequence, Jim was sealed underwater for over three hours—and when he was finally helped out, it took some time before he could get his legs to straighten out again. But that was Jim’s way, said Goelz. “[He] would never ask us to do anything that he hadn’t done himself or wasn’t willing to do himself.”

  Generally, Jim’s philosophy was “simple is good”—though Jim’s definition of simple could swing wildly. For the scenes in The Muppet Movie in which Kermit rides a bicycle, the simple marionette control system—used reliably on The Muppets Valentine Show five years earlier—was deemed unconvincing, and was scrapped in favor of a combined marionette and radio control mechanism. Perhaps more notably, in a scene in which Animal ingests one of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew’s InstaGrow pills and erupts, larger than life, through the top of a building, Jim had insisted on having a gigantic Animal puppet head built, which Oz could manipulate, rather than using the regular-sized puppet on a miniature set. “We always used to kid Jim that after telling everybody ‘simple is good,’ he would turn around and try to produce the most complicated work in the world,” said Juhl, “and just about wipe out all of us—him most of all—in the process.”

  The performers were genuinely excited by the prospect of working with many of the twenty-four celebrities making cameo appearances in the film, including Orson Welles (playing “Lew Lord,” a nod to Lord Lew Grade), Mel Brooks, Bob Hope, Madeline Kahn, and Richard Pryor. The real thrill for the Muppet crew, however, was working with one—or maybe it was two—of Jim’s boyhood idols, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. At the behest of his daughter, Candice, Bergen had been a guest on The Muppet Show during its second season, where his presence alone had been nothing short of An Event. For puppeteers, Bergen was their Elvis, the one who had made their craft cool and who had inspired many of them in their chosen career. “Everybody was eagerly awaiting him,” said Lazer. “I never saw our puppeteers or Jim or Frank in such awe.” Watching Bergen perform, said Juhl, was like going “right back to our childhoods. It was wonderful.… And then, of course, the relationship between him and Jim was very special.” Jim and Bergen working together, said Juhl, was “like passing on the mantle” from Bergen to Jim and the next generation of puppeteers.

  Bergen wasn’t well during the shooting of The Muppet Movie, but happily made a cameo appearance with Charlie McCarthy as judges at a beauty pageant won by Miss Piggy. It was the last footage that would ever be shot of Bergen, who died on September 30, 1978, at seventy-five. Jim spoke fondly of Bergen at his funeral that fall—“We take up where he left off, and we thank him for leaving this delightful legacy of love and humor and whimsy”—and would dedicate The Muppet Movie to Bergen’s memory. Later, Bergen’s widow, Frances, and daughter, Candice, presented Jim with a framed photograph of Bergen and Charlie engraved, “Dear Jim—Keep the Magic Alive.”

  As if to confirm Bergen’s faith, in mid-September, The Muppet Show—nominated for five Emmy Awards in its second season—took home the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy-Variety or Music Series. “Received EMMY,” Jim wrote in his journal, drawing a bold box around the four capital letters, and he, Lazer, Oz, and Goelz accepted the trophies on behalf of the team, beaming proudly in black tie. If the size of its viewing audience hadn’t made the case already, the Muppets were now officially the best thing on television.

  The Emmy excitement carried over onto the movie set where, as was their habit, the Muppet performers remained in character between takes—and Frawley more than once caught himself issuing directions to Kermit and Miss Piggy, rather than Jim or Oz, as he squinted through the camera eyepiece. Disagreements were minor and, for the most part, usually artistic in nature. At one point, Jim and Oz had gotten into a slight dustup regarding The Muppet Movie’s villain, a smarmy Colonel Sanders–wannabe named Doc Hopper, who aggressively pursues Kermit as the mascot for his chain of fast food frog legs restaurants. Jim was convinced that, deep down, Hopper wasn’t a bad guy and that somewhere along the way, Hopper should be redeemed. “Even the most worldly of our characters is innocent,” Jim had once said. “Our villains are innocent, really—and it’s that innocence, I think, that is our connection to the audience.” While that was likely true in most cases, Oz—who was nearly as cynical as Jim was idealistic—didn’t take long to consider his response. “Bullshit,” he said. Hopper would remain unredeemed.

  That character point, however, was small compared to what was, quite literally, one of the biggest problems in the movie: personnel. For The Muppet Movie’s musical finale, Jim planned to feature more than 250 Muppet characters, representing nearly every puppet available in the New York and London Muppet workshops. When filming large crowds of Muppets on television—such as the theater audience of The Muppet Show—Jim had usually peppered the set with a number of motionless puppet extras, propped up in the background on wire frames or stuffed with wadding, to fill the spaces while the puppeteers performed around them. On the big screen, however, there would be no unmoving extras allowed; Jim wanted every one of his 250 puppets moving and singing, which would require a considerably higher number of hands than the core group of Muppet performers could provide.

  Undeterred, Jim put out a casting call through the Los Angeles Guild of the Puppeteers of America, and managed to wrangle nearly 150 performers to supplement the Muppet team, Henson family, and film crew. Puppeteers reporting to CBS Studio Center’s Stage 15—including director John Landis and a young Disney animator named Tim Burton—were handed one, sometimes two Muppets to perform, and given a number that corresponded to a chalked spot on the floor of an enormous pit, seventeen feet across and six feet deep, that had been constructed on the soundstage. Each performer found his or her appropriate space on the floor of the pit, and when Frawley called out “Muppets up!” up came a sea of colorful Muppets—including King Ploobis from Saturday Night Live, several characters from Sesame Street, and the entire River Bottom Nightmare Band from Emmet Otter—making up the largest puppet cast ever assembled on film.

  By late October, most of the film work for The Muppet Movie was complete. That left Jim just enough time to return to London to tape six more installments of The Muppet Show before Christmas, including an exceptional episode guest-starring singer and activist Harry Belafonte. As a longtime admirer of Belafonte—Jim and Jane had attended one of his performances in Washington, D.C., on one of their early dates—Jim had worked hard to woo the showman, offering him significant creative input, and taking time off during the shooting of The Muppet Movie to meet with him personally. Belafonte, too, wanted his appearance to be exceptional, and proposed to Jim that the show might provide an opportunity “to take a look at the lore and history of other worlds, other places.” In early November, Belafonte and the Muppet team created one of The Muppet Show’s most remarkable and memorable moments, a lively five minutes of song and dance to Belafonte’s “Turn the World Around,” celebrating the oneness of everything. Belafonte later referred to his Muppet Show experience as “sheer joy,” and would remain friendly with Jim for the rest of his life.

  With four episodes stil
l to be completed for The Muppet Show’s third season in late 1978, Jim opted to spend the holidays back in the United States, throwing a Christmas party for the Muppet crew at the posh Player’s Club in Manhattan, performing with Joe Raposo at a White House children’s party, then skiing for several days in Vermont before heading back to London with Jane and Lisa just after the first of the year. During the previous fall, Jim had moved out of the flat in Frognal Gardens and was looking for a more permanent residence in the Hampstead area. In the meantime, at the urging of actor James Coburn, who had made a cameo appearance in The Muppet Movie, Jim moved into a house in Holly Village—a “darling little castle,” Jane called it—owned by Coburn and girlfriend Lynsey de Paul. The Hensons stayed only long enough for Jim to wrap up the four remaining Muppet Show episodes—but before leaving in early February, he and Jane scouted several nearby properties as potential homes, eventually submitting a contract for a Victorian-era place in Church Row. To Jim’s disappointment and slight confusion, he would lose the house to another bidder at the last minute, but vowed to keep looking.