To many, The Dark Crystal had become Henson’s Folly—a project that was not only taking up too much of Jim’s time and money, but was also squandering the global success of the Muppets on a project that no one but Jim seemed to fully understand or appreciate. “It was the focus, it was the obsession,” said Cheryl, who spent months at a time in the London workshop between semesters at Yale. “He worked so hard to try to make other people happy … to keep people feeling like they were a part of it. But that was hard to do, because there were a lot of people in New York who did not understand Dark Crystal, did not care about Dark Crystal.… And it was so essential to him to complete it and get it released.” Producer David Lazer understood Jim’s obsession with his vision. “He had it in his head, and no one else saw it,” said Lazer. “It was that strong.”
The triumph that winter, however, was Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas, which—after three years of wheeling, dealing, and cajoling by Brillstein—finally aired on ABC the week before Christmas 1980. Jim had been confident that, given a chance, the special would become a holiday staple, and Variety readily agreed that it deserved to be “a prospect for perennial usage during the holiday season.” Critic John J. O’Connor, writing in The New York Times, thought the “charming” special worthy of Jim and the Muppets. Jim’s faith in the special had been vindicated, and Emmet would be on its way to becoming an annual Christmas favorite.
The first week in February 1981, Jim left blustery, overcast London for the clearer skies of Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he would film the opening sequence for The Great Muppet Caper—a scene in which Kermit, Fozzie, and Gonzo float lazily in a hot air balloon as they comment on the opening credits. Jim spent much of the week with Oz and Goelz in a helicopter hovering alongside a radio-controlled hot air balloon a thousand feet in the air, performing their characters by remote control as a cameraman dangled from the bottom of a second helicopter, camera rolling. Other times, Jim would race across the desert with a chase team to steady the balloon as it came skidding in for a landing. After one particularly rough landing, the basket tipped over, spilling out the Muppets and badly scorching Fozzie in the balloon’s propane burners. Luckily, Muppet builder Amy van Gilder was on hand to make the necessary repairs, earning a winking credit in Caper as the official “Muppet ‘Doctor’ ” for her handiwork. After each day’s filming, Jim spent time with his dad and Bob at their home near the foot of the glowing Sandia Mountains, and finally wrapped shooting on The Great Muppet Caper for good on February 6.
With Caper complete, Jim spent the next month ping-ponging between New York and London, attending meetings on The Dark Crystal—now scheduled to go before the cameras in mid-April—and skiing on slushy, muddy slopes in Stratton, Vermont. Then, at the end of March, came three days of pivotal meetings in London’s Hyde Park Hotel, where Jim gathered a small group—including Jerry Juhl, creative director Michael Frith, and writer Jocelyn Stevenson—to discuss the international children’s show that Peter Orton had suggested to Jim at the christening for Stevenson’s son nearly a year earlier.
Since that evening’s conversation, Jim had been thinking, brewing, and ruminating over the possibilities. In October 1980, he had discussed the mechanics of the idea with Lazer and a young producer named Duncan Kenworthy, who had overseen the marketing of the Arabic version of Sesame Street—then, a few weeks later, had raised the topic with Jane, Brillstein, Oz, and Frith. Those discussions, while useful, had been largely about the business and marketing strategies for breaking into the international market.
Now, in March 1981, Jim wanted to start developing the series itself—an International Children’s Show, he was calling it—bringing Frith, Stevenson, Juhl and several others to the Hyde Park Hotel for a three-day brainstorming session. Jim’s pitch to the creative team was simple: create a series that might make a difference—hopefully, with a new global reach—in the world at large. (“I want to do a children’s television show that will stop war,” Jim said cheekily.) With that noble directive on the table, said Frith, “we talked about doing a show … demonstrating how, through misconception, we can create problems that not only shouldn’t be there, but can be self-destructive—and how, through harmony, we can achieve strength.”
From the very beginning, Jim was intrigued with the idea of having three very different kinds of Muppet “species” linked together in some way that set up an unintentional but very necessary balance between them. “Something that [Jim] had been observing a lot in life is that we all live within our world, but there are other worlds going on at the same time,” said Jane Henson. “We really don’t know how the ants feel … but we know our world and we kind of think that that’s it.… So he felt that he would like to do a show where there were three worlds and the struggle was to know how to keep each world strong, but also cooperate within the worlds.… He liked that, using the different worlds.”
For three days, Jim and the creative team talked through various ideas, with Juhl and Stevenson scribbling down notes and Frith offering suggestions and drawing rough sketches of smiling, wide-eyed creatures crouched beneath underground water pipes and inside the foundations of houses. When it was over, Jim left with an armful of notes, stroking his beard thoughtfully. “[Jim’s] genius,” said Stevenson later, “is that he can sit through days of meetings getting completely different views from people—because he brought people in there to have different views, right?—and then at the end, he’d synthesize the whole thing.” A week later, Jim did just that, synthesizing as he sat on board a Concorde flight from London to New York, compressing their three days of conversation into a treatment for a show they had decided to call Woozle World.
The set up for Woozle World was reminiscent of Jim’s 1964 pilot The Land of Tinkerdee, with a live-action “old codger” and his Muppet dog living in a cluttered room containing a hidden door that led to the Woozles’ underground world. But at the heart of Jim’s proposal was the complex relationship between three different Muppet species—which, at the moment, Jim and the creative team were calling Wizzles, Woozles, and Giant Wozles—and how the three species might live in harmony, even if they didn’t always mean to. “What the show is really about is people getting along with other people,” wrote Jim, “and understanding the delicate balances of the natural world.… We will make the point that everything affects everything else, and that there is a beauty and harmony of life to be appreciated.”
Several weeks later, Jim installed Juhl, Frith, and Stevenson in his house on Downshire Hill where they could begin the demanding task of fleshing out the Woozle world and its inhabitants. “Jim asked Jerry and Jocelyn and me to develop it and gave us his house to work in,” said Frith. “And so we just went off there for a couple of weeks … and met every day and it was a silly, wonderful, wonderful time.… We loved it.” One of the very first orders of business, however, was the show’s name, since, as Stevenson pointed out, A. A. Milne had already used the word woozles in his Winnie-the-Pooh stories. Jim was open to suggestions—he had noted in his handwritten draft that the name would “likely be changed” anyway—and for a while, the group landed on the name Googlies for their main characters. But Jim, who thought carefully about the way words sounded and how they tumbled around in the mouth, wasn’t happy with that—and after some consideration came back to the name he and Juhl had given their monsters in The Great Santa Claus Switch in 1970: the abrasive sounding Frackles, which was then softened to the warmer and fuzzier-sounding Fraggles.
For the rest of the summer, the Fraggle team built an entire universe with nearly the same fervor with which Jim had constructed the world of The Dark Crystal, putting together a comprehensive guide—a sort of Fraggle bible—to the Fraggles and their realm. In an enormous ringed binder labeled Things We Know About the Fraggles, the team polished and expanded on the parameters Jim had laid down in the Woozle World treatment, transforming the “old codger” and his cluttered room into the kindly tinker Doc (modeled, Juhl admitted, on Muppet technowizard
Faz Fazakas) and his workshop, adding a sentient trash heap, and renaming and refining the other species with whom the Fraggles interacted, from the gigantic and dim-witted Gorgs to the tiny, hardworking Doozers. “We sat around and talked about the fact that we wanted to try to create a childhood fantasy world that had the sense of richness that we all felt in the [L. Frank Baum] Oz stories from our own childhoods,” said Juhl. “Worlds like that are incredibly rich.”
Frith, who illustrated and wrote out much of the Fraggle compendium in his beautiful cursive longhand, also tapped into another favorite childhood tale for inspiration: the real-life story of two boys in his native Bermuda who, in 1905, crawled down a hole to retrieve a lost cricket ball and discovered the breathtakingly beautiful Crystal Cave. With that in mind, Frith conceived of moving the Fraggles beyond just the confines of the foundation of Doc’s house and deeper into an endless maze of underground tunnels and caves. That concept, too, made it easy to change the name they’d agreed on for the series from the British-tinged Fraggle Hill to the spunkier, edgier Fraggle Rock.
Jim was delighted with the work. With the comprehensive Things We Know About the Fraggles compendium—thoroughly illustrated with Frith’s lively drawings—Jim felt certain he could land a network and put the show into production quickly. It was his worldview and philosophy that had driven the project—“Fraggle Rock was a true depiction of Jim’s feelings of peace and harmony,” said Lazer—but for the first time, Jim had been content to encourage, inspire, and motivate … then get out of the way and let his creative team take over. “I have wound up doing things in my career that I … could never have done on my own, because of Jim,” said Juhl. “Jim was very good at doing that to people. I don’t have the driving ambitions that he had.… [I was very good at] being able to use his ambition to do the creative work that I really wanted to do.… I’d always wanted to do something really big and bold in a children’s show.… He could make that show [Fraggle Rock] happen. I couldn’t have.”
Frith often remarked that Jim had given them a “blank check” to develop the show, but it was really more of a blank canvas—one Jim had woven and sewn, then stretched and nailed over a picture frame that was precisely the size and shape he wanted. Then he had simply stepped back to let the other artists paint—and still, said Stevenson, “he’d make each one of you feel like you’ve made a major contribution to this. [He had] a really interesting ability to do that.” Perhaps even more important, he had given them the luxury of time—the one thing he never seemed to have—to thoroughly think the project through. “Nobody’s ever developed a television series better than we developed Fraggle Rock,” said Juhl. “It was a long, very careful process. Jim had very high aspirations for that show and wanted to make sure it was just right.”
Even as work was progressing on Fraggle Rock at Jim’s home in Downshire Hill, Jim was ramping up The Dark Crystal at the workshop across the street. Over the last year, Jim had assembled a talented team to work alongside him on the film, giving The Dark Crystal the kind of collaborative atmosphere in which Jim thrived. “Creatively, I find I work best if I can work with someone—talking things over as ideas come up,” said Jim. “And I do this best with people I’m very comfortable with—there has to be an absolutely pressure-free situation for this to work well.”
Froud was one of those with whom Jim was very comfortable. Each thought visually and had a strong sense of design, and the two could communicate with each other in short bursts of only half-formed sentences, each seeming to intuitively know what the other wanted. Froud was the better artist, but just as with Fraggle Rock, it was Jim’s overarching vision of the project that drove Dark Crystal. Still, said Muppet builder Sherry Amott, “there was some difficulty blending together Brian’s and Jim’s visions, because they often see things differently. Some of the time, it was difficult to know whom to please or how to please both. You wouldn’t want to choose one idea over another but merge both into something else. That, I think, was the most challenging aspect of the project.”
Besides Froud and the team in the workshop, Jim had brought in Gary Kurtz, fresh off The Empire Strikes Back, to serve as a producer, and Dick Smith—the renowned special effects wizard whose makeup had convincingly aged Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man—as a makeup consultant. For the music—to Jim, one of the least appreciated but most important elements of a film—he had personally selected Trevor Jones, an unconventional young composer who had recently scored Excalibur, and who was anxious to experiment with new electronic sounds. Jim had also made the unorthodox decision to collaborate on the directing duties as well, asking Frank Oz to serve as his co-director. Oz was stunned; he had never directed before, and asked Jim why he wanted his help. “I think it would be better,” said Jim plainly—a response Oz never forgot. “To Jim, that was the most important thing. The quality would be better … all he wanted was to work. He just wanted good stuff, that’s all.”
As the team prepared for the April filming date, Jim loved dropping into the workshop to see what fantastic creature might be in production on any given day. The creatures were large and complex—from the heavy, lumbering, carapace-shelled Garthim to the loping, long-limbed Landstriders—and Jim would regularly remind designers to keep in mind that it was the puppeteer, and not the puppet, that made a performance lifelike. No matter how beautifully constructed or realistic-looking a puppet might be—no matter how full of complicated mechanisms that blinked its eyes or pulled back its face into a smile—if the gadgetry got in the way of the puppeteer, the performance would suffer. “You have all of these techniques, but at the heart of all the mechanics is an actor performing a role, trying to get the subtlety of the movement,” Jim explained. “That’s the key thing, and all the technology can merely help and expand and give you more dimension.” For the creatures of The Dark Crystal, then, Jim wanted to ensure that materials were lightweight and flexible, that any cables driving complex eye-blink or face-flexing mechanisms weren’t in the performer’s way, and—in the case of particularly large figures—that there was room underneath or inside the puppet for the performer to mount or wear a monitor.
Jim’s ideal process was to focus the build around the puppeteer. “When we’re doing major characters that we know have to be used through the entire film … we build a very rough prototype, put it on a person, videotape it, take a look at it, and then do a critique of it,” said Jim. “Then we rip the whole thing apart, re-sculpt it, rebuild all the parts, and build it again.” At times, it took three or four tries before Jim was happy with it. Heavy costumes had to be mounted on harnesses so the weight was carried on the puppeteer’s hips, rather than on the back or shoulders. Jim also wanted to ensure that any large puppet, no matter how elaborate, could be put on easily and taken off quickly. “My father had a unique way of working,” said Brian Henson. “He would visualize what you could do with a puppet or a person in costume before working on it. The whole film is a series of experiments in hiding people in costume, and creating movements that no one has ever seen before.”
Sometimes, creating those movements required more than just puppetry skills. “We knew when we went into this film that there would be a lot of very difficult and uncomfortable characters to perform,” said Jim. “So we looked for dancer/acrobat/mime performers—people who had the physical stamina to hold up and work in hot, uncomfortable positions.” The first ads announcing auditions for performers for The Dark Crystal, in fact, didn’t ask for puppeteers at all, but rather for “Mimes, Dancers and Actors.” After selecting his new performers, Jim brought in the European mime artist Jean-Pierre Amiel to lead them through eight grueling months of training to determine how different kinds of creatures might move and to get them into the physical shape necessary to handle what Jim knew would be a demanding shoot. Jim—who never asked of performers anything he wouldn’t do himself—thought those performing the quiet, stooped Mystics actually had the toughest job. “Performers were on their haunches all the way down on their rear
end, walking along very bent over,” said Jim, “a position I could barely hold.”
For Jim, part of the fun of creating a fantasy world wasn’t just building the creatures, but creating everything else in the world as well, from plants and trees to swords and spoons. If a chair was needed in the background, for instance, the crew couldn’t just grab a chair from the prop department; they had to build a chair that looked as if it belonged in Jim’s fantasy world and had been made from materials found there. “I think the idea of conceiving of and building the Dark Crystal world from scratch was really appealing,” said Jim. Working alongside the puppet designers in Downshire Hill, then, were jewelers, furniture and pottery makers, wood carvers and armor builders—an enormous team of craftsmen that ballooned the workshop staff from its initial seven to more than sixty. “We could never have tried something like The Dark Crystal even a few years earlier because, until recently, we didn’t have the performers, the puppet builders or the technicians who could handle the problems involved,” said Jim. “I think the idea for The Dark Crystal came along at about the time we were ready to handle it—which is basically the way things have happened all my life.”
At last, on April 15, 1981, Jim began shooting on The Dark Crystal—a film he had been aching to make since 1978, and had pushed aside twice in favor of Muppet movies. “He was trying to reach out to do some things that he hadn’t been able to do by doing Muppets,” said Jane. “He loved the idea of trying for a different reality.” So immersed was Jim in this world he was creating, in fact, that he had asked screenwriter David Odell not to write any dialogue for the Skeksis or Mystics. Instead, he wanted his creatures to speak a language all their own. While the film’s main characters, the Gelflings Jen and Kira, would speak English, the villainous Skeksis and the wizened Mystics would communicate with a combination of squawks, grunts, groans, moans, and snippets of ancient Greek or Egyptian, making the film even sound otherworldly. It was a gamble, but as he stepped onto the soundstage at Elstree to begin shooting, Jim was confident the film’s visuals were strong enough to clearly convey the plot and carry the story. “I guess I’ve always been most intrigued by what can be done with the visual image,” he said later. “I feel that is what is strongest about the work I do, even today—just working with the image, the visual image.”
Jim Henson: The Biography Page 39
