Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

  Ever since Robert Holmes à Court’s acquisition of ACC in early 1982, Jim had been wary of the mogul and the way he did business, and was determined to shake himself free of ACC’s grasp. Jim had managed to buy The Dark Crystal out from under Holmes à Court in late 1982, but that still left ACC owning the first two Muppet movies (The Muppets Take Manhattan had been financed independently, and thus remained free of ACC’s grip), several Muppet-related television specials, and, most gallingly, all 120 episodes of The Muppet Show. While Holmes à Court had washed his hands of The Dark Crystal—and indeed, was likely glad to be rid of it—the Muppet properties were of a different caliber altogether. Not only was The Muppet Show already in syndication, earning a steady flow of revenue, but—even more irksome to Jim—ACC received 10 percent of the net income generated by Muppet-related merchandising.

  Being handcuffed to Holmes à Court was beyond frustrating. For the better part of the year, then, Jim and Holmes à Court had tangled on the phone—and, from time to time, in person—with Jim trying to convince Holmes à Court to release The Muppet Show from his clutches, and Holmes à Court either complacently demanding an exorbitant price for the show or ignoring Jim’s pleas altogether. “The terms that I mentioned were not designed to commence negotiation,” Holmes à Court had written Jim curtly in March, cutting off any further discussion—a patronizing response that likely set Jim’s teeth on edge. While Duncan Kenworthy ran the numbers to determine a fair price for buying back just The Muppet Show’s distribution rights—about $1.5 million, Kenworthy thought—Jim was upping the ante, putting together an offer that would not only rescue all of the Muppet properties in ACC’s claws, but also close down ACC’s share in merchandising.

  Never sell anything I own, Jim had insisted to Bernie Brillstein two decades earlier, and he intended to take his own advice. On August 17, 1984, after weeks of heavy negotiation, Jim acquired all of his Muppet properties from Holmes à Court for $6.5 million, agreeing to pay ACC $5 million up front, then $750,000 for the next two years. It wasn’t an extraordinarily large amount—and according to Kenworthy, there was plenty of money on hand from merchandising—but just as he had done with The Dark Crystal, Jim had seen the value in securing his own creative and artistic freedom—and, as it turns out, his future. “We would have no company today if he hadn’t done that,” said Lisa Henson twenty years later, “and he wouldn’t have had that much of a company, either. How many people take that gamble? [How many] invest in their own interests?” For Holmes à Court, the Muppets had been little more than a stock option; for Jim they were the foundation on which he could continue to build a company and a legacy. “He knew it had long-term value,” said Lisa admiringly. Al Gottesman, who had helped close the deal, called the effort “simply heroic.”

  Relieved, and feeling slightly victorious, Jim headed for Europe with Cheryl, first to Dresden to attend the UNIMA Puppet Festival, then on to Edinburgh, where he spent several days rewriting the script for Labyrinth. Only seven months in, the screenplay already had multiple fingerprints on it—Jim had given Jones’s first draft to Fraggle Rock writer Laura Phillips—and now Jim was tinkering with the script as well. At its core, the plot of Labyrinth was simple: Sarah, the fourteen-year-old heroine of the story, wishes her baby brother would be whisked away by goblins—and when the Goblin King makes her wish come true, Sarah has thirteen hours to rescue her brother from the Goblin’s labyrinth. But Jones and Phillips had approached that basic plot differently.

  Jones had written an episodic, Alice in Wonderland–type story that was funny and contained some of the story elements Jim had already envisioned—the Escher room, the talking door knockers, comic relief sidekicks—but only lightly touched on the personality and motivations of Sarah, the heroine of the story. “[It was] about the world,” said Jones, “and about people who are more interested in manipulating the world than actually baring themselves at all.” Laura Phillips, on the other hand, excelled at writing relationship-oriented stories, and had written a character-centered treatment that more fully fleshed out Sarah, but downplayed the humor and relied less on the kind of strong visual sequences Jim preferred. But Jim liked parts of both scripts, and was hoping he could split the difference and compress the strengths of both Jones’s and Phillips’s scripts into a single screenplay. Everyone agreed to keep working.

  With both scripts in a constant state of flux—and neither quite getting a firm grip on the heroine—it was clear that casting the role of teenage Sarah was going to be critical. Jones, in fact, had argued that a good actress was vital, as she could express through her performance much of what he had intentionally left unwritten on the page. “We’ve got a live actress playing the part,” he told Jim, “and she can convey a lot of this in her manner and by the way she talks and walks.” Finding the right young actress, however, would take nearly ten months. Jim had started monthly auditions in London beginning in April 1984, and by July his first choice was the “dark and cynical” seventeen-year-old British actress Helena Bonham Carter. As more actresses read for the part, however—Sarah Jessica Parker, Laura Dern, Mia Sara, Mary Stuart Masterson—Jim was convinced that the role should go to an American. By late December 1984, he had narrowed the list down to five actresses he considered his leading candidates—including Ally Sheedy and Jane Krakowski—but after looking at their screen tests, decided to open auditions again.

  On January 29, 1985, fifteen-year-old New Yorker Jennifer Connelly—a former child model who had appeared in films by Italian directors Sergio Leone and Dario Argento—auditioned for Jim at One Seventeen, and was pronounced “just right for the role” almost the moment she walked in. Jim signed her for the part within a week, and immediately moved her and her mother to London, where she would stay for the duration of her work on Labyrinth. David Bowie, too, who had continued to follow the various iterations of the script, formally signed his deal two weeks later. In the meantime, the Creature Shop was now working full-time on the assortment of monsters and other creatures needed for the movie, and had filmed several of the main characters together to establish the relative sizes for the gigantic, full-body puppet Ludo, the dwarf Hoggle, and the foxlike, dog-riding knight Sir Didymus.

  With production ramping up quickly—though the script still remained a problem—Jim excitedly presided over a massive Labyrinth-inspired masked ball in mid-February. Starting with the Elizabethan costume party he had hosted at Downshire Hill in 1979—the precursor for the masked balls he would begin hosting regularly in 1983—Jim’s costume parties had gotten increasingly larger and louder over the last three years, and now sprawled through the gigantic, four-story-high Starlight Room on the fiftieth floor of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. Jim loved dressing in costume, strolling the ballroom in a feathered mask, dark cape, and goblin armor borrowed from the Creature Shop, shaking hands with Andy Warhol and other celebrity guests. “Puppets are a lot like masks,” Jim once noted. “Children—and adults—can perform without inhibitions and without being seen. That sort of helps to foster true expression.” The Muppet staff, already expressive and uninhibited enough, took great joy in putting together elaborate costumes, hoping to disguise themselves to the point where Jim couldn’t figure out who they were.

  With a glass of white wine in his hand, Jim moved among his staff proudly, asking about children and grandchildren, and wrapping his long arms around them as they posed for pictures. “I have a good group of people that work with me,” Jim said. “I don’t do everything myself.” The masked balls were a conscious effort to thank the group for their work. While Jim had gotten better about openly appreciating the efforts of the staff, he was still less effusive in his praise of his employees than David Lazer—who was constantly encouraging Jim to “hand out the ‘attaboys’ ”—would have liked. In Jim’s mind, the fact he had chosen to hire a particular person was already proof of how much he valued them, and their work was the validation of that decision. “He didn’t wonder if his own work was good, so he didn’t have to be ext
racting and pulling approval and praise out of people,” said Lisa, “but that meant when other people needed his praise and tried to pull it out of him, he didn’t always respond well to that.” But he was trying—and the masked balls, he hoped, were one way of showing how much he appreciated and valued them.

  That didn’t mean staff were making it any easier for him. While Jim had hoped that the formal creation of the Creature Shop would put an end to the turf wars that seemed to continually erupt between the New York and London workshops, there was still muted grumbling among the New York staff that Jim preferred the Creature Shop to the Muppet workshop—especially as his time became more and more wrapped up in projects requiring the Creature Shop’s work. And it didn’t help when Dreamchild, on its release in 1985, provided a prominent on-screen credit for JIM HENSON’S CREATURE SHOP.

  So powerful was the pull of Jim’s personality that even those Jim worked with outside the company craved his time and approval—and sulked when Jim moved on to projects that no longer required their services. At one point, when Jim decided to start working with a new music producer for a new series of Sesame Street records, his former producer wrote Jim a long, agonizing letter of protest. Jim was genuinely baffled that his decision had been taken so personally. “If you like one person, does that mean that you dislike someone else?” Jim asked. “I work with a great many people all the time, and as one goes through life, you work with one person for a while and then you work with someone else. This feels healthy and correct to me. As we do this, we try to treat people fairly and with respect for what they’ve done.” Jerry Juhl, though, thought he understood the former producer’s plight. “When you first encounter the kind of energy that Jim brought, and the kind of desire he had for you to give things to a project, you became so caught up in it that you were really at a loss when he moved on.”

  In late February, only a month and a half away from the April 15 date when he planned to begin filming Labyrinth, Jim brought in screenwriter and comedian Elaine May, who had done some touch-up work on the screenplay for Tootsie, to make a pass at the Labyrinth screenplay as well. Jim left her with Jones’s and Phillips’s scripts, along with his own treatment and a pile of notes from Labyrinth’s executive producer, George Lucas, in the hopes that somewhere in the mess May would be able to find and define the characters of Sarah and Jareth.

  As May went to work, Jim headed for Toronto for a “Future of Fraggles” meeting with the creative team of Fraggle Rock, now in its third season and still a solid hit for HBO. As he had with The Muppet Show, Jim was determined not to let his TV series wear out its welcome—and Fraggle’s creative team was already putting the same kind of thought into ending the show as they had put into its development, brainstorming ways to bring the series to a close while also leaving room for a possible Fraggle Rock spinoff. While writers Jerry Juhl and Jocelyn Stevenson wanted a final episode that would “dramatize the fact that the hole in Doc’s workshop is not the only entrance to the magic”—that the Fraggle world is actually accessible anywhere—Jim wasn’t so certain he wanted a solid sense of closure for the series. From a purely practical standpoint, that made the series less tenable in syndication, as a final episode implied a particular order in which shows had to be broadcast—an unattractive option for local syndicates, which wanted to show the episodes in any order they chose.

  He was more excited, however, by the idea of doing a Fraggle Rock spinoff series. In a memo to the creative staff, Jim described a show built around Uncle Matt and two new Fraggle characters, who “travel around the world in a nutty hot air balloon,” wrote Jim enthusiastically, “landing in new places each week … possibly on a quest to gather music.” Jim had even planned out the technical tricks he wanted to put to work each week. “We could radio-control Uncle Matt and the female Fraggle on a bicycle with a sidecar … and the Doozers might follow along in their radio-controlled vehicles.” Jim left the meeting with no real decisions made, only writing down that “everyone wants 120 [episodes]”—which would leave the show on for another two years.

  Jim headed for London at the end of March to begin rehearsals for Labyrinth out at Elstree movie studios. Bowie wasn’t available yet, and wouldn’t be until June, but the puppeteers welcomed the rehearsal time. “It takes a lot of rehearsing … and getting to know each other’s timing,” explained Jim. “Even if you have the characters together, the puppeteers start working with them and they find out problems.… So there’s a great deal of sort of last minute adjusting, figuring out what it’s all going to be before you start to shoot.”

  While wireless radio control had replaced the clunky and heavy cable-controlled mechanisms—thanks largely to the efforts of the Creature Shop’s new gadget guru, Tad Krzanowski, who replaced the retiring Faz Fazakas—many of the characters still required a small fleet of puppeteers to operate, with different performers controlling eyes, chins, cheeks, and eyebrows. Brian Henson, who was performing the dwarf Hoggle, led a team of five puppeteers—including little person Shari Weiser, who performed the full-body Hoggle costume—and spent months trying to get the smallest movements just right. “Everyone has to work closely and smoothly with one another when Hoggle is being operated,” said Brian. “We all have to think the same way, even though we’re doing very different jobs.”

  Jim was still tinkering with the script right up until nearly the last minute, huddling with Elaine May at Downshire Hill only five days before shooting was to begin. Jim was delighted with May’s contributions—he felt she had done a good job “humanizing” the characters—and would leave her changes intact. That made the final screenplay an amalgam of contributions from May, Laura Phillips, Jim, Dennis Lee, Terry Jones, and even executive producer George Lucas—talented chefs all, but a far too crowded kitchen. While the final film would credit the script to Terry Jones, based on a story by Jim and Dennis Lee, Jones “didn’t feel that it was very much mine. I always felt it fell between two stories, Jim wanted it to be one thing and I wanted it to be about something else.”

  There was another writer, however, who would also feel he deserved a writing credit—and without it, was determined to stop the film altogether. When he learned the plot of Labyrinth in late 1985, writer Maurice Sendak—a friend of the Hensons for over a decade—had his attorneys fire a warning shot across Jim’s bow, cautioning him that the plot of Labyrinth sounded a bit too much like his 1981 book Outside Over There, in which a young girl named Ida must rescue her younger sister after she is kidnapped by goblins. Further, Sendak had learned that Jim was calling some of his characters “wild things,” which Sendak thought was a bit too close to Where the Wild Things Are. Sendak’s lawyers advised Jim to cease production on the film, and warned that a longer list of grievances would follow.

  Cheryl remembered her father being “stunned” by Sendak’s accusation. While Jim was likely familiar with the book—Cheryl owned a copy, and Jim had seen Sendak’s original drawings for the book during a visit to the author’s Connecticut home—the idea of poaching Sendak’s work was a ridiculous affront to Jim’s own work ethic; anyone who knew Jim understood that he simply wasn’t wired that way. “Jim was hurt,” said Lazer. “If things had been reversed, he would say, ‘Oh, go use it.’ … But he didn’t consciously steal anything.” However, there may have been other issues surrounding Sendak’s charges than the prickly writer let on; while Sendak was friendly with Jim, he was closer with Jane—and there were some who thought Sendak’s charges might have been an expression of righteous indignation over Jim’s decision to separate from Jane. Whatever the cause, Jim responded by renaming his wild things as Fireys in the final film, and would give Sendak a special acknowledgment in the credits. Sendak withdrew his objection, though he would grumble about it for years.

  Filming for Labyrinth finally began on April 15, 1985—a massive, $25 million project that sprawled across Elstree’s nine soundstages. “It’s a big one,” Jim told the American Film Institute. “I think it would be very difficult to do any o
f those major fantasy, in-studio productions for under 20 million.” Executive producer George Lucas was also on hand the first day, and surprised the entire crew by arranging for Darth Vader to stroll onto the set and present Jim with a good luck card.

  For the first time, Jim would not be performing a major character in one of his films, allowing him to devote his full attention to directing. Early on, he found that Jennifer Connelly needed some coaxing to interact naturally with puppets. “In the beginning it was hard because … it’s just strange thinking about the fact that you really are talking to a puppet,” said Connelly. Eventually, the illusion became real to her—just as Jim knew it would. “The puppeteers make them so lifelike,” said Connelly, “and you can really learn to relate to each one of them.” Jim was delighted with her attitude both on and off camera; he got along with her well, in no small part because she didn’t crave the constant reassurance so many around Jim seemed to need. “I found I could talk very straight to her,” Jim said. “I didn’t have to tiptoe around her feelings or anything like that.”

  Bowie, who reported to the set in early June, also had to learn how to act with Labyrinth’s elaborate puppets. He found himself especially troubled by scenes with Hoggle, whose mouth opened and closed in front of him, but whose voice came from Brian Henson, sitting just offstage, speaking into a microphone and performing Hoggle’s mouth remotely with a waldo. “Once I’d overcome the disorientation,” laughed Bowie, “we all got along great!” “[Bowie] has been wonderful to work with,” Jim wrote privately, “and has added a truly magical spark as Jareth.” Jim also respected Bowie’s songwriting, giving Bowie—as he had Paul Williams—“a completely free hand” with the songs.