Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

  While Bowie winkingly described Jareth as “a spoiled child, vain and temperamental, kind of like a rock ’n’ roll star,” Jim found Bowie himself to be anything but spoiled or temperamental. “[He’s] a very normal well-grounded straightforward person,” said Jim. John Henson, who visited the set with a friend, was starstruck by Bowie, who greeted the twenty-year-old while still dressed as Jareth. When Bowie, finally out of makeup, sought John out at the end of the day, prowling the Elstree lobby in a bright red jacket, John was so awed by the sight of the musician that he and his friend ducked out of the studio without being seen. “Supposedly, David Bowie went around looking for us for about an hour after,” said John sheepishly. “But we were gone!”

  For his part, Bowie was impressed by Jim, who seemed constantly in motion, yet oddly unaffected by his own crazy schedule. “Jim is undoubtedly the most unflappable guy I’ve ever encountered in any profession,” said Bowie admiringly. “I just can’t believe his capacity for work. For instance, he would finish shooting for the week on Labyrinth in London, catch an airplane to New York, work … over the weekend, then catch a plane back to London Sunday night and be at the studios early on Monday morning.… He’s desperately work-conscious but he seems to love it all. His calm spirit made the whole film a pleasure to work on, not just for me, but for the entire cast and crew.”

  Live actors aside, Jim was, as always, interested in doing new or unexpected things with puppetry. While the animatronic creatures were impressive in themselves, Jim had two more memorable sequences in mind, one that would involve the largest and heaviest mechanical puppet he’d ever created, and another that relied on nothing more complicated than the gloved hands of his performers.

  “Late in the story, what we wanted was for our hero to come up against some huge obstacle,” Jim explained. The result was a creature Jim called Humongous, a fifteen-foot-tall, armored warrior that stepped from the ornate carvings on a door. Labyrinth’s special effects team—led by George Gibbs, who had done mechanical effects for George Lucas—constructed an enormous puppet with a mechanical skeleton that used hydraulics to slowly walk and raise its arms. The gigantic figure could be operated remotely by a single performer wearing a robotic sleeve that controlled the skeleton’s arms, and using levers and switches to pivot and bow the figure at the waist. Despite its lumbering appearance, “this was the most complicated thing we’d ever built,” Jim enthused, requiring computers to translate the motions of the operator for the hydraulics raising and lowering the mechanical arms of the skeleton. “To just stand there and have this large thing walk towards you is one of the most awesome sights in the world,” said Jim.

  Equally as impressive, though far simpler, was a sequence Terry Jones had written in which Sarah falls down a Shaft of Hands—a narrow chute lined with gnarled hands that grab at her as she falls past. “I suddenly had this idea of oooh! all these hands … and they all grab her … [and it] sounds pretty spooky,” said Jones. “And then I thought it would be very nice if the hands started talking to her.” Jones thought this might involve performing the hands in a Señor Wences–like manner, with each hand making a mouth by curving the thumb against the closed fingers. But Jim had something better, and creepier, in mind.

  As Jim saw it, multiple puppeteers could use their hands to form faces, with one performer making eyes, another making a fist for a nose, while another formed a mouth with one or both hands. Standing on-set, Jim ran a group of performers through possible hand motions, relying largely on Brian Henson and Kevin Clash, a dynamic young puppeteer borrowed from Sesame Street, to help make the faces and choreograph the performance. The result was both spooky and funny. “It’s certainly one of the most bizarre and unusual sequences I’ve ever used in a movie,” said Jim. Jones, too, was delighted. “When you’ve had an idea which you thought was a pretty good idea, and then you see it done and it is so much better than you ever imagined.… It was one of those magic moments, I think, when I actually saw it.”

  Brian Henson, who shared his father’s love of technology and ambitious puppetry, loved every moment of it, whether he was making mouths of his hands in the Shaft of Hands, puppeteering one of the countless background goblins at Jareth’s castle (“real crazy!” laughed Brian), or leading his team through a performance on Hoggle. But it was also hard work, the hours were long, and Brian was coming to more fully appreciate the work ethic that made his father … well, Jim Henson.

  For one thing, it was never about money. After several long and grueling days of filming, Brian—who was now working as a paid performer—raised the issue of overtime. “I never leave the studio before around 10:30 P.M.,” Brian pointed out to his father, “[and] I never put in for overtime.” Jim considered for a moment, then smiled wryly. “When you’re in your twenties, don’t ever put in for overtime and don’t ever ask for a raise,” he told Brian warmly. “Just do the best work you can do. Impress the heck out of people.” Brian understood immediately. “He wanted to see me develop my experience and become really excellent and not get greedy,” said Brian. “That way, I’d know that I’d earned whatever I had.”

  Jim wrapped shooting on Labyrinth on September 6, marking the moment with a small party at Downshire Hill (the final wrap party, which he had hosted on-set a week earlier, had drawn over a thousand attendees). Across the street at 1B, Connie Peterson was preparing to close down the Creature Shop—but Jim was determined not to let the workshop lie fallow between projects again. “Rather than laying everyone off, Jim wanted to start a permanent workshop, where research and development could be continued,” said Duncan Kenworthy. At Jim’s direction, Kenworthy rounded up Labyrinth’s core group of designers, builders, and craftsmen—a close-knit group of about ten—and installed them as the Creature Shop’s first permanent staff. This wasn’t Jim being sentimental, but practical. “By keeping a group of people together, we are staying closer to what we’ve always done with the Muppets, where we had our own builders,” Jim explained. “That way, you can make it better every time and build on your past work.”

  As for finding the right person to run the Creature Shop, Jim’s decision-making process epitomized his management style. “He had tried to approach the problem from an engineering and creative perspective, although without much success,” remembered Brian Henson. Then Kenworthy suggested John Stephenson, who had been a designer for Labyrinth—but Stephenson was also a good friend of Kenworthy’s, and Kenworthy worried “it would have almost been nepotism to have offered him the job.” Jim stroked his beard thoughtfully. “We should all be so lucky as we go through life working only with friends,” he said. Stephenson was hired immediately.

  When it came to working with friends, Jim, too, considered himself lucky. In early October, he rented a yacht to spend a week cruising the waters just off the south of France with a group of colleagues, including Bernie Brillstein, who was loudly and joyously celebrating twenty-five years of working with Jim. “He was the first one to take me on a yacht,” said Brillstein. “That was Jim! He was something.” A yacht trip, in fact, was typical of the kind of vacation Jim loved. “He was a modest guy in some ways,” said Heather Henson. “In other ways, he was completely over the top.”

  “He was very conservative, but there was this whole other side of him,” agreed Brillstein. “He just loved to laugh. He got the joke. He always got the joke.” Lately, in fact, Jim had become a much more engaged practical joker, actively taking up the mantle since the death of Don Sahlin, and showing a knack for somewhat prurient pranks. “My dad was naughty,” laughed Brian Henson. “He had a wicked sense of humor and he loved to do naughty things … and he certainly had that glint in his eyes.”

  A favorite target was Duncan Kenworthy, whose very proper British chain Jim delighted in yanking. One Saturday morning, Jim asked Kenworthy to join him for a meeting with a Swedish filmmaker who hoped to hire the Creature Shop to construct realistic-looking animals for a foreign film called Animal Farm—though as the pitch unfolded, and the di
rector described a story of a nubile young girl who spent her summer tending to animals on a farm in the country, it was clear the filmmaker was not planning to film the George Orwell novel. Kenworthy was ready to dismiss the project outright, but noticed Jim listening with real interest. “Why not just use real animals?” Jim asked earnestly. The foreign filmmaker shrugged. “The sex scenes will be more difficult to do with real animals,” he explained. A horrified Kenworthy nearly erupted in outrage at the idea of building creatures for an X-rated film, but Jim merely kept nodding and hmmming. “It sounds like an art film,” said Jim to Kenworthy, “and I think it could be interesting. Besides, don’t we need the money for the Creature Shop?” Kenworthy blanched. “It all sounds tawdry to me,” he finally spluttered—and Jim exploded into his high-pitched giggle, unable to contain himself any longer. Laughter erupted from just outside the room, where Muppet performers had been hidden just out of sight, witness to—and videotaping—the entire elaborate prank.

  Jim continued editing Labyrinth into the winter—often working alongside an editor with the serendipitous name of John Grover—and regularly reviewed rough cuts of the film with George Lucas. In early January 1986, Jim put Digital Productions—the computer animation firm with whom he had discussed the Starboppers project—to work on the film’s opening credits, a two-and-a-half-minute sequence featuring a computer-generated white owl soaring over a labyrinth and across the credits. While computer-generated images (CGI) had been used in films before—most notably in 1984’s The Last Starfighter, which featured CGI spaceships (also produced by Digital Productions)—Labyrinth’s opening sequence marked the first time a realistic, real-world animal had been created and animated in the computer. The result, said Jim later, “was really quite beautiful.”

  As he put the finishing touches on Labyrinth, Jim checked himself into the Colombe d’Or hotel in France to spend a weekend banging out a proposal for IBM Europe, whose CEO had dangled a tantalizing offer for Jim to come up with a television project he might do if “money were no object.” Jim’s response, for a show called Muppet Voyager, was typically high-minded. “Television is one of the greatest connectors around,” he wrote. “The world is an immense network of human relationships, and peace and the resolution of conflict can only come through greater awareness of our connections. I think it’s possible to change the world by reinforcing our inter-connectiveness, the spirit of one family of man, to the children of the world.” Building on the objectives of Fraggle Rock, Jim envisioned a series centered around an intergalactic documentary film crew, reporting back to their home planet about life on Earth—much as Traveling Matt had reported back to the Fraggle residents on his adventures in “outer space”—while making the point that all life on the planet is connected. The project never got beyond an illustrated proposal, but Jim was serious about ensuring he had a meaningful presence on television—especially since Fraggle Rock was coming to an end.

  Due to some difficulties with HBO—Jim would never let on exactly what had happened, but there were murmurings that Fraggle had been collateral damage in another battle over exclusive content for the network—it had been decided that Fraggle Rock would end after ninety-six episodes. While that was four shy of the one hundred usually needed for syndication, cable television was making it increasingly easier to syndicate shows with fewer episodes. However, Jim still wanted Fraggle to run for five seasons, which meant stretching the final twenty-six episodes out over two years. So while Jim and the Fraggle Rock team would be filming the final episode in Toronto in May 1986, the episode itself wouldn’t air until March 1987—nearly a year later.

  In the year since their “Future of Fraggles” meeting, Jerry Juhl and Jocelyn Stevenson had overseen the writing of a final arc of stories that brought some closure to the story of the Fraggles and their relationship with the Gorgs, the Doozers, and even Doc, who, in one of Fraggle Rock’s most memorable moments would finally discover the Fraggles. While Jim had initially resisted a final episode, he agreed with producer Larry Mirkin’s assessment of the final story arc: “Those last four shows are just beautiful.” “We who were totally involved in the creation of the world through the years, came to feel so strongly that we wanted a sense of … not ending, but a sense of roundness and finality to the series,” said Juhl. “We tied up the threads.”

  And so, Jim had returned to play the minstrel Cantus in the second-to-last episode, dispensing his usual nuggets of cryptic wisdom in a typically calm manner as he helps the Fraggles find their way. While Jim wasn’t directly involved in the final episode, Jerry Juhl’s script seemed to capture much of Jim’s own view of the universe. “Everyone is magic,” the Trash Heap oracle tells Gobo. “The silly creatures are sometimes just too silly to remember that.… You go to him and you say this … ‘You cannot leave the magic.’ ” In the end, Doc and Sprocket move to a new home far out in the desert, sadly leaving their beloved workshop and the Fraggles behind—only to discover a new Fraggle hole has magically appeared behind a box in their new home. “I think we all cried when we watched it,” said Jerry Nelson. As the Fraggles sang and danced in Doc’s new apartment, a final, loving dedication appeared at the end of the closing credits: “THIS SHOW IS FOR DON SAHLIN.”

  Following the taping of the final episode in May, Jim threw a wrap party for the entire Fraggle team. “This whole project has been a joy from the beginning,” he told the crew earnestly. “It’s fun when you start off trying to do something that makes a positive statement … that brings out the best in a lot of people. [Fraggle Rock] is something that’s going to stay around and something that all of us are going to be proud of for a long time. And that’s really nice.” You cannot leave the magic.

  Despite his intentionally arm’s-length engagement with the show, Fraggle Rock had been something special for Jim—a higher calling for television as well as an embodiment of his own views of what was right about the world. “Jim wanted to make a difference,” said Jerry Juhl later. “He knew that television shows do not bring peace to the world, but he wasn’t so cynical to say we can’t think about it. There was a kind of idealism there that could seem naive and childlike, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t come true.”

  That idealism—that ridiculous optimism—carried over to Labyrinth as well. As Jim made the rounds with the press in the weeks leading up to the film’s June 27, 1986, release, he was brimming with excited anticipation and was clearly proud of the movie. “When I go see a film, when I leave the theater, I like a few things,” he explained. “I like to be happier than I was when I went in. I like a film to leave me with an ‘up’ feeling. And I like a picture to have a sense of substance. I like it to be about life, about things that matter to me. And so I think it’s what we’re trying to do with this film, is trying to do a film that would make a difference to you if you saw it.”

  At first, it seemed the reviews would bear out Jim’s high expectations and enthusiasm. Nina Darnton of The New York Times hailed Labyrinth as “fabulous” and “a remarkable achievement” marred only by what Darnton thought to be a weak performance from Connelly. That, unfortunately, was as good as it was going to get. Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert, always an admirer, tried hard to make lemonade from what he found to be a most bitter lemon. “[It’s] obviously made with infinite care and pains, and it began with real inspiration [with] impressive production that is often good to look at,” said Ebert sympathetically. “Yet, there’s something missing. It never really comes alive.” Nick Roddick, a critic for Cinema Papers, also tried gamely to point out Labyrinth’s merits. “[It] has quite a lot going for it,” wrote Roddick, “but it all somehow fails to gel.… It’s all admirably clever rather than compulsive watching.” Perhaps, the critic gently suggested, Jim’s talents were “not the stuff of adult fantasy.”

  More typical, however, were reviews like the one in Variety, which took a nearly morbid glee in dashing Jim and the film repeatedly against the rocks. “A crashing bore,” the reviewer sneered, unimpressed by
puppets he found “terminally cute with no real charm” and which “become annoying rather than endearing.” Even Connelly was “stiff and childish.” (Despite early criticism of her Labyrinth performance, Connelly would go on to have a very successful acting career; in 2002, she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for A Beautiful Mind.) Meanwhile, over at the Chicago Tribune, critic Gene Siskel was positively cranky. “Jim Henson knows what he’s doing with his Muppet characters on TV and in the movies,” wrote Siskel. “But he’s completely at sea when he tries to create more mature entertainment.” Labyrinth was “quite awful,” its creatures were “visually ugly,” and Jim had stooped to “one of the sleaziest gimmicks a film can employ” by placing a baby in peril as the center of the plot. All in all, thundered Siskel, the film was “an enormous waste of talent and money.”

  While critics were split on what it was about Labyrinth that annoyed them the most—was it trying to be a music video? Was it supposed to be scary?—most agreed that the biggest problem was the story. There had been too many hands at work on the screenplay, and it showed; the resulting patch job had turned the movie into a “series of incidents,” wrote Ebert. “Sarah does this, she does that … until at last nothing much matters.” In the end, “it doesn’t have a story that does justice to the production.” Variety sniffed that the story “loses its way and never comes close to the archetypical myths and fears of great fairy tales.… [It’s a] silly and flat excursion to a land you can’t wait to leave.”

  While that was probably all fair criticism, the real problem—as Jim had feared from the beginning—was with the character of Sarah. Despite the best efforts of Phillips and May, Sarah remained an empty, slightly brusque character, whose motivations were suspect and who didn’t seem to have evolved or grown by the end of the film. Jerry Nelson summed up the problem perhaps most succinctly: “I didn’t give a fuck whether she got her brother back or not. I just didn’t like her at all.… You had to care about her, and you had to care about her getting her brother back. And I just didn’t.” Neither did audiences. After a relatively strong opening weekend, Labyrinth began losing money so rapidly that distributor Tri-Star Pictures pulled the film from theaters after three weeks. In the end, Labyrinth only grossed $12 million on its $25 million budget—a “costly bore,” snarked Variety.