Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

  As Thanksgiving neared, Jim was in discussions with Brandon Tartikoff, the enthusiastic head of programming for NBC, to gauge the network’s interest in The Storyteller. The response was encouraging. “[Tartikoff] loves it,” Jim told Kenworthy. “Or at least loves it enough to broadcast it in January so that he can find out if the audience loves it.” While a favorable reception from an audience might eventually assure the show a spot as a regular prime-time series, Jim wasn’t ready to call it a sure thing, especially with a series as unconventional as The Storyteller. And now that Tartikoff had opened the door, Jim wanted another series ready to pitch to NBC in the event Storyteller failed to take hold.

  Jim was an enormous admirer of comedian Paul Reubens’s frantic Saturday morning Pee-wee’s Playhouse, which, apart from being funny, liberally combined live actors with playful chromakey effects and computer animation. “I thought it was just terrific,” Jim had written to Reubens appreciatively after the show’s premiere in 1986. “We’ve been waiting for someone to come along and put a lot of this stuff together like you did.” Jim thought he could have even more fun with the technology than Reubens—and since early summer he had been kicking around an idea for a fast-paced, sketch-driven comedy called IN-TV that would utilize all the technology Jim had at his disposal—from computer graphics and chromakey to Muppets and animatronics—to poke fun at the medium of television itself.

  At the heart of IN-TV was a clever concept: each week, a live guest star would get sucked into the television set and would have to work his way back out again, usually by moving from one bad television channel to another. It was a fun idea, giving Jim an opportunity to satirize the seemingly endless parade of upstart cable channels and lame public access shows that were common in the early days of cable. Jim had a number of new characters in mind, though not much else, but he was excited about it—and when Jim was excited about a project, no detail was too small for his attention. He designed the IN-TV logo himself, and brought in respected music producer Phil Ramone to collaborate on original songs for a new Muppet band. He was so pleased with how things were proceeding, in fact, that he presented Ramone with a thank-you gift—a $2,900, thirty-five-inch Mitsubishi television—along with a note thanking Ramone for his music and assuring the composer with typical optimism that “we’re going to have great fun doing some wonderful television that should look good on this set.”

  Jim spent the first part of December promoting Labyrinth overseas—like The Dark Crystal before it, Labyrinth would perform strongly in the international market—traveling with Heather and Mary Ann to Germany and London, where the British press swooned adoringly as Jim introduced the lumbering Ludo to Princess Diana at the royal premiere. There were more parties and premieres in Amsterdam, Madrid, Paris, and Copenhagen before they finally returned home just before Christmas. While the pre-holiday skiing in Vermont was “great,” Christmas itself was a somber affair. Jim spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day silently helping Jane pack up the last of their belongings in the Bedford house—and all the boxes, of course, would go to Jane’s new place, not Jim’s. It was a “broken-family Christmas,” said John Henson. “It was really devastating.”

  The first two weeks of 1987 were spent rehearsing and preparing for the IN-TV pilot, which Jim was moving forward with despite some apprehensions about the show’s script, by Mork and Mindy scribe David Misch. While Jim could usually tell intuitively when a script wasn’t working, he didn’t always know why. Creative consultant Larry Mirkin—who Jim relied on to give him a straight read on scripts to help figure such things out—told Jim he thought the script was a disaster, “consistently dark, victimized, and pessimistic,” and flat-out unfunny. Despite Mirkin’s misgivings, Jim and the Muppet performers spent three days taping Misch’s messy script anyway, which Jim eventually edited down into a ten-minute pitch reel and renamed Inner Tube. Bernie Brillstein was assigned the job of selling the show to NBC—or any other network for that matter—but found no takers. Frustrated, Jim would spend the better part of the year trying to figure out what to do with it.

  While Inner Tube sputtered, The Storyteller—which finally made its debut on NBC on the evening of Saturday, January 31, 1987—was a qualified success. While it failed to crack even the top thirty in the ratings for the week, The Storyteller was an immediate critical hit—and, in fact, would go on to win the Emmy as the Outstanding Children’s Program. It would also earn Jim some of his best reviews in years. “It’s time to stop thinking of him simply as the man who created the Muppets,” said an impressed Hollywood Reporter, finally conceding a point Jim had been trying to make for two decades. “When a show arrives under the auspices of Jim Henson, we can be pretty sure we won’t be disappointed,” wrote Walter Goodman in The New York Times. “If it [The Storyteller] were turned into a series, that would be a real happy ending.” USA Today, meanwhile, hailed it as “one of Jim Henson’s finest moments on TV.”

  Jim was justifiably proud of The Storyteller, which he regarded as something of an artistic higher calling. “It is our responsibility to keep telling these tales—to tell them in a way that they teach and entertain and give meaning to our lives,” he said later. “This is not merely an obligation, it’s something we must do because we love doing it.” A delighted NBC offered to pick up The Storyteller as a weekly series, and Jim approached Anthony Minghella about writing new episodes. The inscrutable Minghella, who had initially been skeptical about his ability to write for the series, found himself caught up in Jim’s energy and enthusiasm. With Jim, said Minghella, “it’s very hard to just visit. You tend to lose your return ticket when you go on the journey [with him]. I wrote the pilot and then discovered, of course, that it was a fascinating subject and the possibilities of it were enormous. [Jim] was absolutely right. There was a series there and, in fact, we could go on making it for the rest of our lives.”

  Even with The Storyteller now fully in production—and the problematic Inner Tube on the back burner—Jim continued to develop and pitch one television series after another. One of them—Puppetman, a live-action sitcom about a group of puppeteers working on a daily children’s television show—actually made it as far as the pilot stage, though abysmal ratings doomed it from being picked up as a regular series. Others—like Muppet Voyager, still languishing in outline form in Jim’s desk drawer, or Read My Lips, a comedy series co-written by Muppet performer Richard Hunt about puppets who come to life after they’ve been put away for the night—never made it much beyond the written page. Jim had always kept a breakneck pace—multiple projects were the rule, rather than the exception—but lately some of the projects had a slight whiff of indifference to them, as if Jim were simply launching a handful of darts at a dartboard, hoping for any of them to hit. “I think Jim felt … he was responsible [for us],” said Richard Hunt. “And he would go out of his way to keep creating new work so that these people had something to do.” And if Hunt or any of the Muppet performers or writers questioned the artistic merits of a project, Jim would simply fold his arms and sigh knowingly. “Richard, please,” he would say quietly. “I’m trying.”

  And he was trying. Jim took seriously the management of his company—and his nearly 150 employees—personally writing chatty quarterly reports to the entire staff, organizing company orientations, and even submitting himself and several managers to the Myers-Briggs test to identify their management styles. Jim’s Myers-Briggs results labeled him, to perhaps no one’s surprise, as an idealist. As he made a list of his business objectives, Jim wrote near the top, “work for common good of all mankind” and “use of technology and business for common good.” The “common good,” as he saw it, was “growth and development of children … sharing wealth … respect[ing] work—nature—environment.” But running the company was taking increasingly more and more of his time, draining his energy from the creative projects he considered his real work for the common good. “I’ve never particularly wanted to have a large organization,” Jim confess
ed to one reporter. “The trick is to try to stay small enough to be creative but still be able to do all the projects we want to do—and not to get so big where you just spend your time managing people and trying to keep everybody working.” And trying.

  At times, the pressures were more than he wanted to handle. He was easily frustrated with internal squabbles; Henson Associates’ legal department, in fact, could often be particularly exhausting. “The lawyers would all fight with each other,” remembered Jane Henson, and then would call in Jim to resolve the dispute. Jim—who wouldn’t even argue with his own wife—refused to engage, and simply backed out of the room with his big hands up, palms out. “You resolve it,” he begged them. “I have to go to London.” And then, said Jane, “he’d just get on a plane and go,” whether he actually had business in London or not. “It was fight or flight,” said Jane, “and he’d choose flight.”

  That summer, however, there really was business taking him overseas and away from the worries of the company. In July, Jim spent twenty days in Charleville-Mézières, France, teaching a puppetry workshop to twenty-one students—“many of whom,” Jim wrote playfully, “will not speak English.” With Brian and Cheryl assisting, Jim strolled the classrooms at the Institut International de la Marionnette, teaching puppet building, Muppet-style performing, and going over the basics of lip-synching, singing “Frère Jacques” as a roomful of students waved a sea of Muppets over their heads, staring intently at monitors.

  From France, Jim returned to the familiar grounds of Elstree film studios in Borehamwood, where the Henson Organization—the British arm of Henson Associates—had taken over three soundstages, along with several offices in the studio’s centrally located John Maxwell Building, to film four new episodes of The Storyteller. After the successful premiere episode in January, Jim had been approached by a number of young directors interested in working on the show—“It’s almost like the early days of The Muppet Show, when top stars would beg to be guests,” said producer Duncan Kenworthy—but after handing directing duties over to Steve Barron, Charles Sturridge, and Jon Amiel, Jim was itching to get back in the director’s chair himself. And once he was back within the comforts of Elstree, Jim took the helm of the episode “Soldier and Death,” an adaptation of a Russian folktale in which a soldier uses a magic sack to capture Death. Jim had a ball.

  Financially, however, The Storyteller was barely keeping its head above water—while Jim was now financing the series with money from NBC and the independent British television company TVS, The Storyteller was running a deficit. So troublesome was the series to produce, in fact, that Jim and NBC had agreed that it would be impossible to produce as a weekly series; instead, The Storyteller would air on the network as a series of half-hour specials, shown on a sporadic basis. But that wasn’t really an ideal setup, either—and on August 22, Jim met with Brandon Tartikoff to suggest that installments of The Storyteller might be incorporated into a weekly themed anthology series Jim was proposing, called The Jim Henson Hour. Tartikoff liked the idea well enough that he asked Jim to prepare a proposal and a pitch reel—which NBC would pay for—that Tartikoff could then take back to the network brass.

  As Jim saw it, The Jim Henson Hour would be “in the same grand tradition” as The Wonderful World of Disney, a weekly anthology in which Disney appeared on camera to introduce an assortment of features, from cartoons and nature films to short movies and behind-the-scenes documentaries. “Each week,” Jim explained, “we’ll tell a different story: some with puppets, some with people, and most with a mix of the two.” For The Jim Henson Hour, Jim was proposing four different themed shows, shown in a regular rotation. The first week of each month, then, would be devoted exclusively to The Storyteller, allowing Jim to put the show on a regular monthly schedule as part of his own series. And since he would now have an hour to fill, Jim could produce hour-long installments of The Storyteller—something he was longing to do, as current episodes were only thirty minutes—slowing down and spreading out “to allow ourselves to take advantage of the rich imagery” of folktales.

  For the second week of each month, Jim was hoping to salvage the remains of Inner Tube and reshape them into something called Lead-Free TV. The concept was still relatively the same—a cast of new Muppets and a guest star interacting across television channels—but for Jim, it was still more about playing with the new technology. “In the many years we’ve been on television, the capabilities of TV itself have changed dramatically,” he pointed out enthusiastically. “Using state-of-the-art technology we can create settings that exist only as electronic information.” With new technology at his disposal, Jim envisioned Lead-Free TV as “The Muppet Show of the future!”

  The third week of each month would be devoted to “Picture-book Specials”—spotlighting more homespun fare like Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas or The Tale of the Bunny Picnic—while the fourth episode in the monthly cycle would be “The Next Wave,” shows that would have “unlimited potential,” Jim said, “because we will allow ourselves to do almost anything.” Jim already had plenty of ideas for his “Next Wave” specials, including a celebration of the upcoming twentieth anniversary of Sesame Street, a Miss Piggy special, and a behind-the-scenes documentary on the Muppets. “We’re tremendously excited about these shows,” he enthused.

  On September 25, 1987—the day after his fifty-first birthday, and only a little more than a month after discussing the idea with Tartikoff—Jim stepped before the cameras to tape his host segments for the pitch reel for The Jim Henson Hour. Dressed casually in a black-and-white-patterned jacket over a collared shirt, Jim looked remarkably at ease as he strolled onto a set designed and constructed to resemble an idealized version of the Muppet workshop. It was a perfect setup. “I thought that was a wonderful way of doing The Jim Henson Hour because that’s the way it happens,” said Muppet performer Kevin Clash. “What I love and always have loved about … Jim Henson started in this workshop.… That’s the way that you do it. That says Jim to me.” It was perhaps no wonder that Jim looked so comfortable; this was home, in the workshop—or at least a reasonable facsimile—and Jim played his role as a cheerful and thoughtful host enthusiastically. “Imagination is what this show is all about,” he said warmly, bantering with Gonzo, Animal, Miss Piggy, and Kermit (“you, as usual, have your hand in almost everything here,” joked Kermit) and grinning broadly as he played at the controls of a computer and teased an animatronic gryphon. “We think it’s an hour families will want to spend together watching quality television,” he concluded. “What more can I say?”

  As he sent the pitch reel off for editing, Jim reported that its filming had gone “quite well.” He found it was fun to play with the Muppet gang again—and with Frank Oz back performing Animal and Miss Piggy, even for a moment, it was almost like old times, when Jim could play with the guys and not worry so much about running a company. Juhl, too, after writing almost exclusively for Fraggle Rock for the last four years, discovered he enjoyed writing for the familiar characters again. Feeling nostalgic, Juhl had written what Jim considered a “lovely” Christmas show, in which the casts from the three major Muppet productions—The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, and Fraggle Rock—gathered at Fozzie’s mother’s house for the holidays. The resulting special, A Muppet Family Christmas, would be one of Jim’s favorites.

  Taped quickly in late September and early October at Glen Warren Productions in Ontario, A Muppet Family Christmas was a true homecoming. Not only was Oz back (“He doesn’t do a lot of puppeteering anymore,” said Jim. “So this was very much a reunion.”), but so were Muppet Show alumni Peter Harris and Martin Baker, as well as Caroll Spinney, just starting his twentieth consecutive season on Sesame Street, whom Jim greeted with a warm, “Hello, Muppets West!” With Juhl’s lovingly written script, Harris’s tight direction, and top-notch performances from every Muppet performer, A Muppet Family Christmas stands as one of Jim’s finest, and most underappreciated, productions. As the characters from the va
rious Muppet universes encounter each other, many for the first time, the hour-long episode is full of remarkable moments: Ernie and Bert bantering with Doc; Kermit and Robin entering a Fraggle hole and learning how the Fraggles give presents; Rowlf speaking “dog” with Sprocket (“Woof woof! Yeah! Bark bark!”). Jim even makes a cameo in the closing moments, watching over the Christmas celebration from the kitchen with Sprocket. “Well, they certainly seem to be having a good time out there, Sprocket,” Jim says. “I like it when they have a good time.”

  Viewers and critics had a good time, too. When it aired that December, A Muppet Family Christmas was warmly received by reviewers and easily won its time slot. The Muppets, who hadn’t appeared in an entirely new production since 1984’s The Muppets Take Manhattan, were back in the news again—and as Jim cheerfully made the rounds with the press, he seemed genuinely stunned to find his characters were not just enjoyed, but “cherished”—and moving with a seeming life of their own toward an iconic status. “There’s a nice, naive quality to this family of characters,” Jim explained helpfully, speaking so softly that one reporter’s voice-activated tape recorder kept shutting off. “I think people relate to their childlike quality, because everybody has that in themselves.”

  To the delight of the press, Jim also announced that he was at work on another Muppet movie, which he hoped to start shooting in early 1989. For much of the year, he had been mulling over various proposals and brainstorming with Juhl and other Muppet writers. Some ideas sparked his interest—for a while, he seriously considered “taking them [the Muppets] on an archeological adventure to discover their roots”—while others were dismissed outright, including a suggestion that Miss Piggy might get pregnant. Jim had blanched at that one, calling it a little too “specific and explicit.” But Jerry Juhl had recently handed in a movie treatment that Jim loved—and which had been inspired, in part, by a private conversation in which Oz had groused to Jim and Juhl about the growing costs of projects at Henson Associates. If they were going to make another Muppet film, Oz said testily, they would have to “figure out a way to do a really low-budget kind of thing.” That was all Juhl needed. Hunching over his Macintosh computer in his home office in California, he quickly pounded out a treatment for a film called The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever Made.