For agent Bernie Brillstein, there was never any doubt that he was seeing Jim’s story on-screen. “Kermit was Jim,” said Brillstein plainly. “Jim believed in the entire world.”
Plot aside, everyone, it seemed, was impressed at how convincingly Jim had integrated the Muppets into the real world. “I’m in particular awe of the techniques by which these hand puppets are made to walk, run, sing and play musical instruments,” wrote Canby. “As do the other actors in the movie, we very quickly come to accept the Muppets as real people.” Jim cheerfully explained that making the Muppets seem real involved “trying to fool the audience into thinking they’re living in a whole world and that there’s a whole reality to the world. And so it’s a kind of game that we play with the audience.” Richard Hunt, however, was less elegant in his explanation. “The reason those characters are appealing is because we’re good actors,” insisted Hunt. But even that, wrote Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert, was more than he wanted to know. “If you can figure out how they were able to show Kermit pedaling across the screen,” wrote Ebert, “then you are less a romantic than I am: I prefer to believe he did it himself.”
With his creations moving with a seeming life of their own on the big screen, comparisons with Walt Disney were again inevitable—and now, perhaps, apt. But Jim was still having none of it. “I’m slightly uncomfortable with all the people who want to say things like that about me, because I like Disney, but I don’t ever particularly want to do what he did,” said Jim. “He built this great, huge empire. I’m not particularly inclined to do that. You get that large a thing going and I’m not sure that the quality of the work can be maintained.” He also continued to dismiss questions about the Muppets’ net worth. “It’s important to me that the audience doesn’t think of us in terms of figures,” he told Time magazine. “I don’t want people looking at the Muppets and thinking ‘How much are they worth?’ It’s just not us. It could be destructive.”
To celebrate the success of The Muppet Movie, Jim threw a costume party at the new house on Downshire Hill, inviting guests to attend in Elizabethan-era attire. Many of the Muppet crew raided the wardrobe department at ATV for their costumes, and showed up at Downshire Hill to find Jim warmly greeting his guests dressed as a king. Fifteen-year-old Brian Henson, taking a quick trip to London during summer break, came straight to the house from the airport and found the party still in full swing well into the evening. Jet-lagged and groggy, he dutifully pulled on a jester costume Jim had put aside for him and joined the party. “We were the best party givers in the world!” crowed Lazer. All that was needed, said Lazer, was “good food and drink,” though it was generally Jim’s presence that ensured the necessary “happy environment.”
Work on the fourth season of The Muppet Show continued through the summer, until August 6, when ATV’s technicians—always touchy to begin with—suddenly went on strike, following the lead of London’s public sector unions, which had successfully leveraged their own strike for higher pay during the previous winter. Jim and the Muppet team had just begun working on an episode with Andy Williams when “the electricians broke for tea,” recalled Bonnie Erickson, “and they never came back.” Grade’s television stations went dark. Anyone tuning in to The Muppet Show that week saw only an on-screen apology, promising to resume programming “as soon as possible.” Until then, production was indefinitely postponed.
Even as others huffed around him, Jim was unfazed; it was out of his hands, a matter to be resolved by the unions and television company executives. With ATV closed down, Jim left for an extended vacation with his family, spending a week in late August in the British Virgin Islands, before heading with them to the English seaside resort of Blackpool, where the Muppets had been given the honor of turning on the Blackpool Illuminations—a gala known as the Big Switch On—for the spectacle’s one hundredth anniversary. The town had gone all out for Jim, integrating the Muppets into the gigantic light display along Blackpool’s central promenade, and Jim and Goelz performed as Kermit and Gonzo at the opening ceremonies, throwing the switch together to light up the town. Jim loved it.
With the strike still unresolved in September, Jim returned to the United States for a week to attend the Emmy Awards—where The Muppet Show lost to Steve and Eydie Celebrate Irving Berlin—and to see fifteen-year-old Brian off to the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he planned to study physics and astronomy for his last three years of high school. Brian was fascinated with knowing how things worked, tinkering with gadgets and electronics, and building elaborate Heathkit stereos and televisions. At thirteen, Brian had even constructed a small mechanical puppet in the Muppet workshop, building a puppet potato with a trigger-activated mouth and eyes. “[My dad] was very intrigued that I was inclined in that direction,” said Brian. “He was enormously appreciative and loved seeing what I was doing.”
Still awaiting the resolution of the London strike, Jim spent much of the early fall traveling with his family, spending several days in Scotland in late September, a “delightful weekend” marred only by the theft of Jim’s Nikon camera from the trunk of his typically unlocked car. Several more days were spent in Amsterdam, followed by a road trip to visit Oxford Scientific Films, where Jim spent several hours looking at the magnifying cameras the company used to film tiny subjects, like ant hills, at ground level. “It would look so otherworldly because you’re looking at the mosses and the ferns and everything right up close,” said Cheryl. “Neat!” Jim wrote in his journal, hoping to find some use for the technology in The Crystal.
On October 24, the strike ended as quickly as it had begun, though Grade’s channels would find their viewers slow to return after eleven weeks away. Jim immediately returned to Elstree to wrap up work on two unfinished Muppet Show episodes, completing both in only four days. On November 2, he headed back to the States, this time stopping in Maryland to receive a Distinguished Alumnus Award from the University of Maryland and to serve as grand marshal in the school’s homecoming parade. Wearing a flowered shirt and paisley tie under a corduroy suit, Jim waved Kermit from the back of a convertible, trawling along in a sea of floats filled with papier-mâché Muppets. While he was becoming known around the world, Jim still blushed at the attention lavished on him in his former backyard, mumbling only half-audible responses to shouted questions at a press event.
In early November, the Muppet team spent a week in Los Angeles taping a Christmas special with John Denver, to coincide with the release of a Christmas album Denver and the Muppets had recorded in London during the heat of the summer. Denver had guest-starred on The Muppet Show in May, where his easygoing, no-drama attitude—his strongest epithet was usually golly!—meshed easily with Jim’s own way of performing. Shortly after finishing Denver’s Muppet Show episode, Jim called Denver in Aspen to discuss working on a Christmas album together, the two of them tossing ideas back and forth for hours over the phone and deciding which songs to record. After settling on thirteen tunes—ranging from traditional songs like “The Twelve Days of Christmas” to the Beach Boys’ “Little Saint Nick”—Denver recorded the basic tracks at a studio in Los Angeles, then met Jim and the Muppet team in London in late June to record their vocals together. The resulting album, John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together, went gold before Christmas 1979, and platinum by early 1980. “I can honestly say that collaborating with Jim Henson and the entire Muppet Gang in putting this recording together was one of the most enjoyable experiences of my career,” said Denver.
The television special, taped over a relatively leisurely eight days, featured the Muppets at their sentimental best, softening the trademark Muppet madness in favor of the quieter, more deferential tones suitable for a Christmas special. It was the right choice—the show’s finale, with Denver and the Muppets singing “Silent Night” with the children in the studio audience, is genuinely sweet without being saccharine—but to some critics, the Muppets seemed out of character. “It’s discouraging to see the M
uppets succumb with increasing frequency to sentimental impulses overly exercised in The Muppet Movie,” wrote Tom Shales in The Washington Post, lamenting that the Muppets had gone for “sanctimoniousness, rather than their playful anarchic streak.” Still, Shales had to admit it was “lavish, warm and insanely entertaining,” which was probably good enough for Jim. “He was easily proud, actually,” said Brian Henson. “He didn’t look at things that he’d finished and grimace. He enjoyed what he made.… I mean, he knew he was good.”
In mid-December—after spending Thanksgiving shooting inserts for Sesame Street, riding in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and presiding over the annual Christmas party—Jim returned to London to spend the holidays with the entire Henson family in the house on Downshire Hill. After the long and somewhat frantic year, Jim was pleasantly relaxed, chatting casually on the phone with Brillstein—who delivered the welcome news that he had placed Emmet Otter with ABC for Christmas 1980—and strolling Hampstead Heath, where he would sometimes sprawl out on Don Sahlin’s bench, looking out over Parliament Hill in the brisk cold. For the members of the Muppet team spending their Christmas in London, Jim hosted a formal dinner party at the White Elephant on the River, pulling up at the curb in his Lotus, grinning broadly as he entered the club.
Christmas Day in London was sparklingly clear and cold—“lovely,” wrote Jim in his journal in typical understatement—and as 1979 came to a close, Jim jotted down several notes in his journal, as if to remind himself of just what a successful year it had been. “The Muppet Movie has grossed around 75 million—I think,” he wrote, slightly hedging his bets (the real number was closer to $65 million). “The Muppet Movie album with Atlantic went gold just before Christmas. John Denver and the Muppets album has sold over a million—according to John. The Miss Piggy Calendar is out this year. The Muppet Show Music Album just came out in England this December. The Muppet Movie book is out.”
Meanwhile, he still had The Crystal in its early stages, and had even started talking with Lord Grade about a sequel to The Muppet Movie. It truly had been—as he at last wrote in his journal without a whiff of understatement—“a very major big year.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE WORLD IN HIS HEAD
1979–1982
Kira, one of the heroes of 1928’s The Dark Crystal, with a villainous Skeksis. (photo credit 11.1)
WITH THE WORLDWIDE POPULARITY OF BOTH THE MUPPET SHOW and now The Muppet Movie, Jim had, it seemed, conclusively put to rest the puppetry prejudice that had plagued him since Sesame Street. If there were still critics clinging to the stifling misperception that puppets were purely kids’ entertainment, Jim had a universally acclaimed major motion picture, an Emmy, and 235 million weekly television viewers who would likely help him argue otherwise. But the international success of the Muppets on television and the movie screen had created a different kind of perception problem for Jim. True, he was no longer considered a children’s performer; instead, to the entire world, he was now “the Muppet Guy.”
It was a label Jim had struggled with before. In the late 1960s, as Jim was branching out into various non-Muppet-related projects—television specials, commercials, documentaries, computer graphics—he had deliberately sought to downplay the prominence of the Muppets in the company, even changing the name over the door from Muppets, Inc. to Henson Associates. “Back in the sixties—when I was working on movies like Time Piece—I thought of myself as an experimental filmmaker,” Jim said—and to some extent, that was still true. While the Muppets were certainly the most well known, and most profitable, of Jim’s projects, Jim never had, and never would, consider himself to be solely about the Muppets.
“When you try to get people in the industry to accept a big idea, it usually takes a long time—months or years,” said Jim, who had devoted more than a decade to the task of bringing the Muppets to television and film. “And when they finally say, ‘yes—let’s go with it,’ part of my creative mind is already somewhere else, doing something quite different. I think that’s the normal pattern. By the time I’m actually producing something, part of me is wanting to do something else. I don’t particularly want to make my life go crazy doing several things at the same time, but it always seems to happen that way.”
That “something else” was The Crystal, still in its preliminary stages at the Muppet workshop in New York in 1980—but even before deciding on The Crystal as his next project, Jim had wanted to make a non-Muppet fantasy film for a long time. In the early 1970s, in fact, he had briefly flirted with the idea of doing an adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series, but eventually passed on the project after deciding Tolkien’s sweeping epic was “too big to handle” in a single film.
In 1975, while paging through a copy of The Pig-Tale—an illustrated version of the poem by Lewis Carroll, with lavish drawings by Leonard Lubin—Jim had been struck by one of Lubin’s illustrations of a crocodile in sumptuous Victorian attire. “It was the juxtaposition of this reptilian thing in this fine atmosphere that intrigued me,” Jim said later—and with that spark of an idea, he began writing a treatment for a fantasy film called Mithra, a dry run of the various plot elements that would eventually coalesce as The Dark Crystal. Even in this early treatment, Jim was already certain he wanted the two warring factions—the villainous Reptus and the wizardlike Bada—to have split from a single species, through the influence of a mystical source of power, “perhaps a lodestone,” Jim wrote tenuously.
After meeting artist Brian Froud in August 1977, however, Jim had shelved the Mithra treatment in favor of working with Froud on their “Great Film” together, building a new fantasy world from the ground up, and concentrating more on the overall look and feel of the film than on the story. “I’m trying to create this film in a different way,” Jim wrote in his diary, “hoping to get all the creative elements going on it for a while before tying things down with a script.” In early 1978, as Froud sketched in the New York workshop and handed drawings off to Muppet builders to begin crafting puppets, Jim—while stranded with Cheryl at Howard Johnson’s hotel during the snowstorm—had scrawled out a rough outline of a plot, lifting a few key elements from the abandoned Mithra and finally deciding that the mystical source of power in the land he and Froud were building would be a crystal. Working off his handwritten notes, he quickly put together a sixteen-page treatment of The Crystal, and “set some of the [Muppet] builders working on ideas of ways to create characters unlike anything we’ve ever done before,” he wrote in his diary. “It’s such a wonderful challenge to try to design an entire world … like no one has ever seen before.”
For most of 1978, however, Jim’s focus was on filming The Muppet Movie, though the New York workshop continued diligently sculpting, building, and tinkering with puppets for The Crystal. Wizard heads and various potato-like peasants and slaves slumped on benches around the workshop, while handyman Faz Fazakas was building elaborate—and increasingly smaller—remote-control mechanisms to widen eyes, crinkle foam noses, and wrinkle latex foreheads. In October, Jim took a few of the completed figures out in the backyard of his house in Bedford to film them among rocks and trees, subjecting the puppets to the same sort of outdoor screen test he had put Kermit and Fozzie through earlier in the year in preparation for The Muppet Movie. He was pleased with the results of the screen test, yet he knew his preoccupation with the look of the film meant he was approaching the project in an unconventional, almost backward way. “Normally you write the script first and design around the story,” he explained later. “I wanted to change that and come up with a visual world first, although knowing vaguely the type of story I wanted.”
Six months later, there was still no real script to speak of—but in the summer of 1979, Jim flew to New York to pitch The Crystal to executives at Paramount anyway, perhaps hoping the success of the recently premiered Muppet Movie would convince the studio to invest the $15 million Jim was asking for his next film. He brought with him a beautifully produce
d formal proposal, printed on milled paper and brimming with Froud’s lavish pencil drawings—but typical of Jim’s approach to the project, the pitch book for The Crystal devoted most of its space to the characters and the world itself. That left just half a page to outline the story, only vaguely described as a “struggle through terrible dangers and hardships” which built to a nonspecific “startling climax.” Paramount executives passed.
With Paramount’s demurral, Jim decided to once again approach Lord Grade, his reliable patron for both The Muppet Show and The Muppet Movie. During their initial negotiations for The Muppet Movie, Grade had been encouraging, though noncommittal, about financing a non-Muppet feature—but Jim was certain that, with The Muppet Movie turning a healthy profit, Grade would be more than willing to back such an ambitious project. Lazer, however, wasn’t so sure, and pulled Jim aside for a frank conversation. The success of The Muppet Movie, Lazer explained, had ramped up enthusiasm and demand for a sequel. “I felt that if we gave too much time in between Muppet movies, we couldn’t keep that audience,” said Lazer, “and I knew Lew [Grade] was ready … to go for that second Muppet movie immediately.”
Jim was deflated. “He was always interested in the idea of going beyond the Muppets,” said Cheryl Henson, “[there was a sense of] wanting to find something, wanting to work on something that had more depth to it.” “Jim wanted to do The Crystal,” said Lazer. “His mind was off Muppets. He wanted to get The Crystal done.” And Lazer, who understood perhaps better than anyone just how important The Crystal was to Jim, instead “gave him every reason we should do another Muppet movie.” However, Lazer offered to take up the negotiations with Grade personally, promising Jim that if he would agree to make the sequel to The Muppet Movie first, Lazer would ensure that any funding Grade put up for the second Muppet film would be contingent on financing The Crystal next. Jim agreed, and Lazer was as good as his word, convincing Grade to lay down not only a hefty $14 million for the next Muppet feature—nearly double what he had invested in The Muppet Movie—but also $13 million for The Crystal. Grade also agreed that Jim could shoot the movies back to back, beginning work on The Crystal immediately after wrapping the Muppet sequel.
Jim Henson: The Biography Page 36
