Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

  Odell had made the best of Jim’s story outline, writing a script steeped in fantasy tradition, in which a young hero—decreed by a prophecy to be the savior of his world—sets out on a quest to “heal” a shattered crystal that will magically merge the evil Skeksis and sage Mystics back into a single, magical species, the glowing, godlike UrSkeks. “It has a lot of elements of fairy tales and the standard fantasy elements,” Jim said proudly—but Frith, who never flinched from giving Jim his opinion, thought the plot was “awful.” Dark Crystal was “a story about genocide,” Frith exclaimed, shaking his head even thirty years later. “And what you’re saying is that you can extirpate an entire race of people and then, because the stars come together right, suddenly you’ve become some godlike figure and everything’s okay.” Jim would hear none of it, however; that was thinking about it too much. “We are working with primary images that appear in many stories of folk-lore and mythology,” he explained patiently, again stressing the visuals of the film. “I like fairy tales very much. I like what they are and what they do.” (Oz was more typically blunt in his response: “Well, we can’t all be perfect,” he told Frith dryly.)

  As they co-directed their lavish fairy tale, Jim and Oz were a study in opposites, and some on the set likened them to Ernie and Bert: Jim in his bright, comfortable colors, grinning as he unconsciously combed at his beard with his enormous fingers; Oz in a fedora, arms folded, eyes narrowed with intensity. Despite their differences in style, he and Oz “had pretty much come to a common feeling about what we wanted,” said Jim. “Besides that, we’ve worked together for over twenty years, so we know each other rather well.” Still, having two directors on the set, Jim admitted, could be “a little tricky.… Movie units are not used to two people directing them … the units had to get used to the idea of running everything by both of us.”

  Not everyone got used to that idea. One assistant director pulled Jim and Oz aside to inform them that the crew was confused and wanted Jim to direct the film alone. Jim said no—but looking back, Oz agreed that his involvement probably was making things difficult for nearly everyone. “Things were not smooth, but it was because of me,” said Oz. “Things would have been smoother had I been more mature, but I was completely inexperienced. Jim should really have fired me several times because I was just this young guy who felt slighted because the crew saw Jim as the key guy. I felt I was ignored. People listened to Jim—as it should be. So, I should have been fired—but Jim, God bless him, just supported me. He was always patient. I’m sure I drove him crazy during that time, too, but we loved each other.”

  The Dark Crystal team, from the performers through the technical crew, quickly came to respect the power Jim could convey simply through his presence and respectful silence. “Jim didn’t tell you what to do,” said Oz. “He just was. And by him being what he was, he led and he taught. But by not answering, sometimes you answered your own question, and you could do more than you thought you could.” Jim spent most of his time overseeing the technical side of things, directing elaborate special effects or large, noisy, crowd scenes—he especially relished working on the slobbering, gnashing Skeksis dinner banquet sequence, which had been in his story outline since the very first draft—while Oz worked more closely with the performers. Already notorious for calling for retake after retake on The Muppet Show, Oz continued to make similar demands on the set of The Dark Crystal. Jim, too, appreciated that several takes might be necessary, particularly when so many performers were trying to stay out of sight. But while Oz wanted takes to be perfect, Jim wanted takes to be right—a subtle, but important difference. “Jim had the head of a producer,” said Lazer, “which meant he understood you can only do two or three takes and move on … and Frank, if he didn’t feel it was right, wanted to continue … and sometimes wanted to over-rehearse when Jim didn’t.”

  It was also obvious to Oz that while he and Jim might generally agree on the “common feeling” of the film, the true visionary on the set, from day one, was always Jim. “He saw the movie in his head,” said Oz. “I didn’t.” For Oz, that distinction was never more apparent than during the several days spent filming the movie’s climactic scene in which the stone walls of the Skeksis castle collapse to reveal their crystalline inner structure. “He had that all in his head,” said Oz. “And he’d be doing a storyboard, and thinking about doing it in sections—and I’m thinking, ‘I’m directing here, and I have no fucking idea what Jim’s thinking or talking about.’ It was his vision totally.”

  Jim was not only directing, he was performing one of the lead roles as well, taking on Jen, the Gelfling hero who ultimately brings order to the universe when he makes whole the Crystal of Power by merging it with the shard in his possession. Unlike most of the fantastic creatures populating The Dark Crystal, Jen bore a vague resemblance to a human child—a particular challenge for both the designers and the performers. “Everyone knows how a human moves and what we look like, so you set certain expectations,” said Froud, “and if they are not fulfilled, people are disappointed.” For Jim, that meant special care in figuring out how to move the puppet in a convincing or realistic manner. “I’ve never done any performing that difficult in my life,” said Jim. “And the things that were the hardest were really ordinary things.… The Muppets can just go bouncing across the room … but when you have some characters that you have to believe in as living creatures, the movements are much more complex and subtle. Like, do you cut your eyes before you turn your head or after? Little things like that, things you normally wouldn’t think about.”

  While Wendy Midener and the puppet builders had done their best to keep Jen light and flexible—she had even constructed the puppet around a mold of Jim’s right hand—the figure was still heavier and clunkier than Jim would have liked. Kathy Mullen—only the third full-time female puppeteer in the Henson Associates stable—had rehearsed with her Kira puppet all summer, and had gone back to Midener several times for modifications that had significantly reduced the puppet’s weight and increased its flexibility. Jim, however, “was just too damn busy to give it that much thought,” said Mullen. “I had all kinds of time.… But he never did go in and work on it. He just struggled with what he had. And he made it work because he always did—but he made it hard on himself.” Eventually, Faz Fazakas modified the Jen and Kira puppets so the delicate facial mechanisms could be operated by radio control rather than with thick cables connected to black control boxes. “I really do believe it saved our lives,” recalled Mullen. Freed from the restrictions of the heavy cables, Jim and Mullen could concentrate solely on their performances, and not on the need to work around the technology.

  And so it would go for nearly six months, with Jim and Oz—along with cinematographer Ossie Morris and producer Gary Kurtz, who served as the lead director for the second unit—working their way slowly and deliberately through each scene, creeping their cameras carefully through the massive sets sprawled across nine of Elstree’s soundstages and out onto the backlot. While there were the usual challenges of filmed puppetry to overcome—even the most expensive, ornate sets were still platformed up, with removable floor panels—the complexity of the puppets, and the sheer number of people required to operate many of the characters, could slow things down considerably. “You see this character walking in the woods and the audience has no idea that there are television monitors, and cables, and radio control boxes, and all these performers swarming around just out of sight,” said Jim. “You have to be concerned about keeping the cable crews out of shot … it’s a slow process.” Oz called it “an exercise in logistics”—and after five months of such meticulous filming, even Ossie Morris—who had shot his share of gigantic, sweeping epics—could be heard muttering, “This just never ends, does it?” “It was massive,” agreed Oz.

  Through it all, Jim continued to meet his obligations for Sesame Street—“You went off and built this great career,” Joan Ganz Cooney told Jim warmly, “but you remained faithful, and I really appre
ciate it”—and huddled regularly with the Fraggle Rock team as they continued their work on Downshire Hill. In May there was a quick sprint through Spain with John and Cheryl, and then a weekend shooting several commercials for Polaroid. Jim wasn’t thrilled with the thought of getting back into doing commercials again, but after several weeks of “grueling work” on Dark Crystal, he and the Muppet performers “had a wonderful time” performing their familiar Muppet characters for the Polaroid ads. “It was just so great to get back to those same old guys again,” said Jim, “so we could play.”

  In June 1981, the movie featuring “those same old guys,” The Great Muppet Caper, opened in the United States, though Jim was still at work at Elstree and could only discuss the film with American reporters via satellite feed. Caper marked Jim’s first effort as a director, and as he waited for the reviews to come in, it didn’t take long before it was clear the film was a rousing success. Variety lauded him for his “sure hand in guiding his appealing stars through their paces” and concluded that “no doubt remains that Miss Piggy and Kermit are now film stars in their own right.” That assessment of the Muppet stars was shared by Vincent Canby at The New York Times—always one of Jim’s most devoted admirers—who likened Kermit and Piggy to an old Hollywood power couple. For critic Rex Reed, the film was gloriously sentimental, full of “humanity, tenderness and intelligence” and “a musical in the best tradition”—exactly as Jim had intended.

  One of the film’s biggest fans was Joe Raposo, Jim’s songwriter of choice for the film, whose love song “The First Time It Happens,” would be nominated for an Academy Award. In the opening minutes of The Great Muppet Caper, Jim had chosen to give Raposo a prominent on-screen credit, with “Music and Lyrics by Joe Raposo” appearing by itself immediately following the film’s title card—and Raposo, who knew nothing of the credit until watching the movie in a theater—was nearly moved to tears by the gesture.

  Jim completed primary filming on The Dark Crystal in early September 1981, marking the occasion with a party for the movie’s first unit at Stringfellow’s nightclub in London. For the rest of the autumn he would continue to oversee filming by Kurtz and the second unit on various locations around England before hunkering down for the winter with film editor Ralph Kemplen to assemble the final film. With Crystal winding down and heading into postproduction, Jim was ready to turn his attention to other projects—mainly Fraggle Rock—but he wasn’t the only one who was preparing for a change.

  After six years at Jim’s side, David Lazer informed Jim that he had decided to take an extended leave of absence. Lazer had battled with various aches and pains since childhood—the symptoms resembled Lyme disease—and now, at age forty-three, he was suffering from nearly debilitating arthritis, which had worsened over the last six years of almost nonstop work. Now he wanted to retire to Long Island to recover his health and oversee the construction of a house—and while he would retain his title as executive vice president and promised to continue to assist Jim as a producer for future films, he was removing himself from both the day-to-day operations of the company and television production. Jim took Lazer to a small dinner in London with Brian and Wendy Froud, then put him on a flight for New York the week before wrapping Dark Crystal, allowing Lazer to depart quietly, with little fuss or fanfare, just as he had asked—or so Lazer thought. Three months later, on the day after Christmas, Jim and Brian pulled up in front of Lazer’s house in a brand-new $35,000 limited edition black Mercedes coupé. Jim and Brian stepped out of the car, which they’d driven shoeless so as not to scuff or muddy up the car’s floor mats, and handed Lazer the keys. “[Jim] was just like a little kid, beaming,” said Lazer.

  As Lazer’s replacement, Jim brought back Diana Birkenfield, his producer from the late 1960s and early 1970s who had often rattled him with her frank appraisals of projects. Despite Birkenfield departing under a cloud in 1974, there were no doubts that the renewed professional relationship would work. “Yeah, she was absolutely no bullshit,” said Oz, “but she was also very good at her job. For Jim, that was really all that mattered.” With Birkenfield in place, Jim could now focus on Fraggle Rock, a project that was falling into place with a cheerful efficiency entirely in tune with Fraggle’s colorful optimism.

  Jim had Brillstein making the rounds among television networks with the comprehensive Fraggle Rock proposal, and was so confident the series would sell that he had put the show into preproduction in Toronto without a firm deal in place. Part of the preproduction process involved finding the right performers for each of Fraggle’s five main characters, which had been built according to Frith’s designs and now sat on workshop tables in New York. In early November, Jim called in all the major Muppet puppeteers and asked them to perform with each Fraggle—and with each other—to see if they could come up with characters. Such freewheeling play had helped define and hone the characters on The Muppet Show, and Jim wanted to see how his performers ad-libbed and bounced off of each other. Partly, it had to do with finding the right chemistry between the five main characters, consisting of four distinctive character types—the athlete, the artist, the worrywart, and the indecisive one—revolving around a steady central character. It was the Pogo formula all over again, an approach that Jim’s fellow Pogo fans Frith and Juhl said was intentional. “We said, ‘All right, we’re going to have five characters … each of whom is a different wedge of the pie,’ ” said Frith. “But when you put them all together, you get the whole pie.”

  More important, for the first time Jim would not be performing any of the show’s central characters; with Jim out of the eye of the Muppet hurricane, then, getting the chemistry right was critical. Frith, an admirer of Jerry Nelson and in awe of his singing voice, had always intended for Nelson to serve as the show’s anchor in the lead role of Gobo—the role to which he was eventually assigned—but Jim still wanted each performer trying out different characters in case sparks flew among an unexpected combination of puppeteers. Karen Prell, for example, who came into the casting call hoping to land the role of the introspective poet Mokey, found herself assigned instead to the outgoing athlete Red. “But I really have to thank Jim for wanting to try me as Red,” said Prell, “because it was obviously the perfect thing to bring out a lot of crazy Red stuff in myself that I guess he could see.” Dave Goelz, who was given the role of the fretful Boober, was convinced that Jim and the Fraggle writers had known all along which performer would play what role, and merely wanted to confirm their instincts through the auditions. “I think we went through the motions of playing around with the puppets in New York before we went to Toronto to shoot,” related Goelz. However, Steve Whitmire, who was handed the amiable but indecisive Wembley, wasn’t so sure. “I really pushed to do that character [Wembley], but we did ad-lib sort of improvisations.… I’m not sure how that ended up happening the way it did. I think it happened the best way that it could have happened.”

  In the middle of casting, Brillstein informed Jim that he had found a home for Fraggle Rock—but not with one of the major networks. Instead, Brillstein had placed the series with the subscriber cable channel HBO, which opted to co-produce the show along with Henson Associates, the British television company Television South, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. With only nine million subscribers, HBO’s viewership was still small—Jim didn’t even have cable, much less HBO, at his home in Bedford—but HBO was aggressively working to expand its subscriber base and promised creative freedom and a high profile for the Fraggles, intending for Fraggle Rock to be its first original weekly series—the colorful ancestor to later original series like The Larry Sanders Show and The Sopranos.

  HBO was also hoping to have the series ready for broadcast in early 1983. Since each season would contain twenty-four episodes—and Jim intended for the team to keep to the one-episode-per-week pace they had maintained for The Muppet Show—that meant Jim had to begin shooting as quickly as possible. In preparation, the Fraggle Rock performers were sent to Toronto to
spend several weeks rehearsing and improvising their characters, “just kind of finding out who they were,” said Kathy Mullen, who was assigned the role of Mokey.

  Jim, meanwhile, returned to a cold and snowy London to oversee work on The Dark Crystal, spending several days in January 1982 at Abbey Road Studios with composer Trevor Jones as the London Symphony Orchestra recorded the film’s music. Like the puppets in Dark Crystal, the music, too, was a fusion of the traditional and the technological, and Jones had brought several unconventional instruments into the session that seemed to embody this approach, carting in a synthesizer and a ninteenth-century double flageolet, a woodwind instrument that produced a droning, otherworldly sound. “I like to think [that what] my music did is bridge the gap between the world that wasn’t real and the audience, giving a sense of a real world to something that is totally unreal,” said Jones later. “In that process the hardest thing to do was trying to enter the mind of Jim and think of the things he wanted for his film.” As so many others had come to understand, Jones could see that Jim saw—and heard—the entire movie in his head. “He knew how great the score would be,” said Jones, “he just wanted me to discover it for myself.”