Shooting on location also required the Muppet workshop to set up camp close by where they could quickly make any needed repairs, dividing duties between a puppet and costume shop to address puppet-related mishaps, and a mechanical shop to fix technical problems. Working in the mechanical shop that summer was nineteen-year-old Brian Henson, who had recently left his classes at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he had been studying astrophysics and art. Brian had entered the university intending to make a career in film, with a focus on special effects, a craft he had learned to love from Don Sahlin and Faz Fazakas. “I thought, ‘Well, getting a degree in physics actually lends itself to that,’ ” said Brian. But he found his time taken up more and more by his film work—“I just kept getting movies,” he recalled—that he eventually abandoned school altogether in favor of working in the Muppet workshop, reporting directly to Fazakas. He wouldn’t stay there long; the following year, he would take on his first non-Muppet role when he was tapped by the Walt Disney Company to perform one of the lead puppet characters in Return to Oz.
While Frank Oz was, for the first time, sitting alone in the director’s chair, he knew “it was under an umbrella of safety, because I had Jim and David Lazer’s full support.… But it wasn’t a pure handoff,” said Oz. “I made all the decisions, but it was still Jim and Dave protecting me, and coming to me to say, ‘Frank, we can’t afford this.’ So it wasn’t me doing everything on my own out in the world.” The Muppet performers, however, braced themselves. Now that Jim was no longer regularly at Oz’s side to temper Oz’s notorious tendency for multiple takes, Oz would often nitpick a scene to the point where the performers could no longer tell the difference between takes.
Even Jim could get irritated by Oz’s admittedly “dictatorial” manner, growing angrier and angrier one evening as Oz kept the performers around for a seemingly endless round of retakes. “I fucked up,” said Oz. “I was like, ‘I’m the boss and I can keep everyone around,’ and I made Jim stay on the set when he really didn’t need to be there.” Typically, Jim never got visibly angry, merely setting his mouth in a tight line beneath his beard. But “Jim was steaming,” remembered Oz. “He was incredibly angry, and he got so powerfully silent. I don’t even remember what he said to me, I just remember that blistering silence. I apologized, and Jim was very forgiving.” Jim shrugged it all off. “We sort of go up and down as all relationships do, but we have a great deal of respect for each other.”
The Muppets Take Manhattan featured yet more innovative puppetry—including a complicated sequence choreographed by Jim in which several rats take over a kitchen—but some of the most notable moments came from Oz’s script. Jim was particularly pleased with Oz’s treatment of Kermit, who was given “an opportunity to stretch,” said Jim cheerily, “to become a little bit more interesting instead of just … the more limited personality that he is most of the time.” In fact, it didn’t take much squinting at Kermit in The Muppets Take Manhattan to see where Oz had poked a bit of gentle fun at elements of Jim’s own personality. Not only did Kermit get to play several different kinds of characters, from a big-shot Hollywood producer to an advertising man—two roles Jim had played in real life—but there was even a moment when he finally got to lose his temper with the entire Muppet cast. “Tell us what we should do!” Fozzie implores of Kermit at one point. “I don’t know!” Kermit explodes. “How should I know? Why are you always asking me anyway? Can’t you take care of yourselves?? I don’t know what to do next!”
Steve Whitmire thought that was probably a moment of pure catharsis for Jim, who rarely, if ever, lost his patience with the Muppet performers. “He’d say, ‘I can’t be expected to watch everything,’ ” said Whitmire, “which is very much the same moment when Kermit turns and really screams at everybody and says, ‘Why do you expect me to have all the answers?’ ” But that was about as irritated as Jim would ever get. “You’ve got Jim … and all of us crazies around him at different levels of ability, different levels of knowledge, different capability as performers, and him trying to hold it all together,” explained Whitmire, “but by and large … I never saw him lose his temper.… He had a real knack for getting to the problem without scratching open the scab.”
The moment in the film that created a buzz, however—especially after word of it leaked to the press before the film’s release—was its final scene, in which Kermit and Miss Piggy are married in a lavish wedding ceremony that may or may not have been merely part of a Broadway musical. To keep the sequence a secret—at least for a while—the wedding had been filmed on a closed and sweltering hot soundstage at Empire Stages in Long Island City, where 175 puppeteers crammed themselves under a chapel set to perform the three hundred puppets attending the Kermit-Piggy nuptials. When word of the wedding scene—and its ambiguous nature—leaked out, reporters began frantically lobbing the same question at Jim and Oz over and over again: Are they married or not? But neither Jim nor Oz would provide any clear answers, engaging instead in an elaborate bit of performance art to keep the press guessing. “I’m just an actor,” Jim would have Kermit entreat to reporters, “and when two actors marry onstage, they’re only acting!” Not so fast, Oz as Piggy would respond, and point out that the actor presiding over the on-screen ceremony was a real minister—which was true—and thus the two of them had been officially married. Reporters left more confused than ever, and Jim loved every moment of it. “The argument will continue on, hopefully into … I don’t know what.” He grinned. “We’ll wait and see.”
Still, while the Maybe it was real wedding scene got people talking, it was a dream sequence that would truly have audiences roaring with enthusiasm. Even Jim knew the sequence was something special, as the only production note he wrote in his private journal during Manhattan’s entire fifteen-week shoot came with three weeks left in filming, when he jotted down “SHOOTING MUPPET BABIES IN MOVIE.”
The three-minute musical number, featuring baby versions of the entire Muppet cast—including a sailor-suited Kermit, a diaper-clad Rowlf, and Miss Piggy in an enormous bow—was one of the toughest sequences to film, requiring a combination of marionettes, radio-controlled figures, and specially designed baby Muppets with “short, stubby arms and legs,” which made them “very difficult” to operate. Keeping the performers out of sight often required careful positioning of the camera and a few well-placed props to hide the holes that were cut into the set, just wide enough for the Muppet performers to stick their arms through. “It becomes quite a game, working out all of these things,” said Jim. “To me, one of the more enjoyable things is to try to figure out how to stage sequences like this.” What had inspired the Muppet Babies, Oz wasn’t certain—“Things spring up in your head, and you never know where they come from, you know?”—but the sequence would end up as one of the most memorable of all Muppet moments, and would soon take on a life of its own in a form that surprised even Jim.
While he had only grudgingly ceded the directing duties on The Muppet Movie to James Frawley five years earlier, Jim found that for The Muppets Take Manhattan he was delighted not “to worry about it.… I was able to relax and kid around, and in between takes, I could talk to people and make phone calls and enjoy a cup of tea.” Filming in New York had its advantages, too. “Being able to go home in between takes or at the end of the day … was a lot of fun.” In the evenings, then, Jim would retreat to his apartment in the Sherry-Netherland, which was being gutted and put back together and redecorated by an expensive architectural firm. It would take more than a year before Jim would pronounce the work finished. With its pastel-tinted walls, expensive sculpture, custom-made etched glass, and hand-carved furniture, everything in Jim’s apartment was richly detailed and interesting to look at—an architectural embodiment of Jim’s unique design aesthetic: art noveau, with a dash of whimsy. The dining room furniture, carved by artist Judy Kensley McKie, featured wide-eyed rabbits peeking playfully around the backs of the chairs, while in the bedroom, alongside sculptures an
d carved furniture, lounged a puppet built by Rufus Rose, the puppeteer who had performed Howdy Doody. Like the house on Downshire Hill, Jim’s homes were always his oasis in the middle of a bustling city—and the Sherry-Netherland apartment in particular would always be his glowing, cozy sanctuary in the sky.
Other days, when he wasn’t needed on-set at Empire Stages, Jim had begun working on a project that was small but close to his heart: a series of one-hour specials he was calling Jim Henson Presents, showcasing puppeteers he admired from around the world. With his continued involvement in both the Puppeteers of America and UNIMA, Jim took puppetry even more seriously than many of the Muppet performers, and he intended for Jim Henson Presents to be a kind of international puppetry primer, spotlighting both performers and their performances. In late July, Jim spent two days interviewing and filming Bruce Schwartz, who performed in a style influenced by the Japanese Bunraku, at the Dance Theater Workshop in New York. In the coming months and years, he would tape five more specials, including programs featuring Australian shadow puppeteer Richard Bradshaw, Dutch puppeteer Henk Boerwinkel—who chatted earnestly with Jim about using puppets to create “magical realism”—and eighty-three-year old Russian performer Sergei Obraztsov, who, perhaps more than any other puppeteer, had inspired Jim in the art and craft of puppetry.
For Jim, the more he learned about different styles of puppetry, the more excited he got—and the more he wanted to incorporate those kinds of puppetry into his work. “Puppetry is a very wide field,” he explained. “It encompasses a lot of different ways of operating hand puppets and marionettes and rod-control figures and people in black. There are many, many different techniques and … I feel that we can use them all. We try to use a lot of them. I believe in using any technique that will work.… I’m not a purist in terms of what puppetry is, or what it should or shouldn’t be.”
For someone who once considered puppetry merely a “means to an end,” Jim had become one of the leading authorities on—and chief promoters of—one of the world’s most ancient arts. Recently, in fact, he had established the Jim Henson Foundation to promote and develop the art of puppetry in the United States—to this day, still the only grant-making institution with such a mission. “Jim started the Foundation … so that an artist would have a bit of money and breathing space to develop his own vision,” said fellow UNIMA member Allelu Kurten, “without having to give up or copy some one else’s.”
It was the copying, in fact, that bothered Jim the most. “We see frequently puppets which have the overall ‘Muppet look,’ but which do not look like our individual Muppet characters,” he wrote in Puppetry Journal. “We feel that the people creating these puppets should create, as we did, their own concepts and not use ours.” If puppetry was going to grow and expand as an art form, it needed to move beyond the Muppets—which, given their popularity, was easier said than done. Jim was fine with performers using the look of the Muppets for inspiration—just as he had been inspired by the design and working styles of Burr Tillstrom and Obraztsov—but encouraged puppeteers to “find their own unique style of puppetry.… It seems to me that each of us expressing our own originality is the essence of our art and professionalism.” The foundation, then, was Jim’s effort to encourage such originality—and in the first year alone, the foundation awarded $25,000 in grants to performers and organizations, including $7,500 to a young puppeteer named Julie Taymor, who would later win a Tony Award for her groundbreaking puppetized version of the musical The Lion King on Broadway.
On other days, Jim was in Toronto, meeting with his writers on Fraggle Rock, or in London, where he had decided to begin building the various creatures and props that would be needed for The Labyrinth—or, at least, the building would start once the script was finished. In the meantime, there was more than enough work to be done hammering the old workshop at 1B Downshire Hill into shape. In early July, Jim moved Muppet builder Connie Peterson—who had been part of Caroly Wilcox’s ambitious Piggy Research and Development Department—from the New York shop over to London, where she was put in charge of turning the trash-filled former postal sorting facility into a fully functional, state-of-the-art workshop.
“Getting started was really difficult—it was hard to know where to grab hold of the project,” said Peterson. “The situation was made harder due to an architectural modification of our building … before our arrival. The main work space was filled with an impenetrable pile of stuff from the front of the building to the back … ranging from heavy machinery to feathers and sequins all jumbled together and coated with construction dust.” The job also required some politicking with the neighbors and local council, since the workshop was the only industrial building in a residential area, and tended to vent slightly noxious fumes from time to time. Faz Fazakas, too, was dispatched to Downshire Hill to help establish the electromechanical side of the workshop, and spent weeks measuring floor thicknesses to determine the best locations for all the heavy equipment needed for metalwork. Under the watchful eye of Duncan Kenworthy—who often joked that part of his job was to “be Jim when Jim wasn’t there”—Peterson and Fazakas would spend the rest of the year banging the London workshop into shape.
Jim spent his forty-seventh birthday at the wrap party for The Muppets Take Manhattan, earnestly toasting Oz for completing his first film as director—and now that Jim had opened that door for Oz, he was going to find it impossible to close. Two years later, Oz would be asked to direct the musical comedy Little Shop of Horrors for Warner Brothers, on his way to a successful career as a film director, racking up a run of well-received, eclectic hits like Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and What About Bob? “I was always chomping at the bit to go beyond the Muppets,” said Oz, “but Jim was amazing, because he never said, ‘Hey, you can’t leave me! I gave you all this stuff and you learned so much from me.’ Instead, he said, ‘Of course you’ve got to go do that.’ He was always amazing that way.”
Jim was earnestly watching another blooming career that autumn as well. In June, twenty-three-year-old Lisa graduated from Harvard with two distinctions: not only was she graduating summa cum laude, but she had also served as the first female president of Harvard Lampoon. Now she was spending her summer preparing to attend film school, and after a series of strenuous interviews—during which she discussed at length the interactive movie concept she and Jim had pitched several years earlier—she had been accepted to a school in London. As she prepared to attend classes in the fall, however, she was offered a position at Warner Brothers by executive vice president (and Harvard alumnus) Lucy Fisher—and off Lisa went to Warner Brothers, never to look back. Over the next ten years, she would serve as a production executive and later a vice president for the studio, overseeing blockbusters like Lethal Weapon and Batman.
Jim devoted much of the fall to tinkering with various television projects, including a music education program and a children’s television series he and Lisa had kicked around called Starboppers, notable more for the technology he was proposing to use than for its underlying concept. In its early draft, Starboppers—a terrible name, but Jim could never come up with a title he liked better—followed the adventures of several star-hopping aliens, with personalities based on the Freudian ideas of id, ego, and superego. More exciting, however, Jim was planning to film his characters against a green screen, then insert them into entirely computer-generated environments. He had even approached Digital Productions, a Los Angeles–based computer animation company, about using their powerful Cray X-MP supercomputers to create the virtual backgrounds. Unfortunately, Jim could never get the idea to catch fire with a network, but he loved the technology—he had been playing with computer animation since even before Sesame Street—and was determined to find a use for it.
While he awaited Dennis Lee’s first draft of Labyrinth, as he was now calling it, Jim was excitedly looking for a screenwriter with whom he could collaborate on the script. Very briefly he had considered enlisting the help of Melissa Mathison, who had w
ritten E.T. for Steven Spielberg, but then abandoned the idea, deciding that if he was hoping to give Labyrinth the more lighthearted, comedic edge that had been missing from The Dark Crystal, he was better off collaborating with a comedian. An early fan of Monty Python’s Flying Circus—he would regularly note on his desk calendar the dates and times when the show was airing on PBS—Jim was particularly impressed with Terry Jones, one of the group’s most versatile members, who seemed to share his penchant for fantasy and folklore. Jones had co-directed and co-written the Arthurian spoof Monty Python and the Holy Grail, had written a serious, literary analysis of the knight in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and had recently published a children’s book called The Saga of Erik the Viking, which Jim greatly admired. In late fall, he approached Jones about collaborating on Labyrinth—“a really marvelous idea,” fellow Python member and former Muppet Show guest John Cleese told Jim approvingly—and was delighted when Jones said yes. “Your contributions to Labyrinth will surely make the script jump to life,” Jim wrote Jones.
At the end of December, after nine long months of waiting, Jim finally received a treatment of Labyrinth from Lee, who had transformed Jim’s rough story outline and his own meticulous notes into a ninety-page novella. In early 1984, Jim handed Lee’s novella and an enormous pile of Froud’s drawings (“I filled sketchbook upon sketchbook,” admitted Froud) over to Jones to begin the task of writing the screenplay. While Lee’s novella provided a guiding track of a plot, Jones didn’t find it of much use, calling it a “poetic novella [that I] didn’t really get on with.” Instead, he was much more inspired by Froud’s drawings of monsters and goblins. “I sat at my desk with Brian Froud’s drawings stacked on one side of the desk and writing away sort of to see what would happen,” said Jones. “And every time I came to a new scene … I looked through Brian’s drawings and found a character who was kind of speaking to me already and suddenly there was a scene.” Jones would complete his draft by early spring, at which point Jim would pass it off to another writer for revisions—and then another—cooking up an increasingly murky screenwriter stew that would send the Labyrinth screenplay veering through nearly twenty-five revisions and rewrites over the next two years.
Jim Henson: The Biography Page 43
