Jim Henson: The Biography (19 page)

For the next eight months or so, between appearances on
Jimmy Dean
, trips to D.C. to film commercials, and a puppetry conference in Miami (Jim would step down as president of the Puppeteers of America for 1964, though he would remain on the board), Jim would grab any opportunity to shoot even a few seconds of footage for his film. “
We were all over the place,” remembered Oz. “We were doing [a show in] Vegas and Jim and I went out in the desert and I just [shot a] handheld camera roll. He was running along the mountains in silhouette.” Other days, Jim would have himself filmed strolling down a New York sidewalk in a loincloth, or shoot several minutes of Oz pogo-sticking in a gorilla costume. “
All those
Time Piece
shots were so bizarre,” said Oz.

Whether the rest of the Muppet staff understood what Jim was up to, it was, they knew, clearly “a personal piece.” “It came totally from Jim,” Juhl said. “I don’t think there was ever a project that came more specifically.” Thematically, it was a subject Jim had explored before in “Tick-Tock Sick”: the incessant, relentless, perpetual passage of time. Creatively, it was an opportunity, as Jane said, for Jim to tap “
all [the] different places in his artistic thinking.”

Time Piece
opens simply enough, with Jim—the Everyman—in a hospital bed being examined by a doctor. The sound of Jim’s heartbeat and blinking eyes become the percussive rhythm of drumbeats and machinery clicks, and over the next eight minutes the main character’s everyday routine—going to work, eating dinner, going out to a nightclub with his wife—unfolds rapidly through a series of “
repeated cuts from realistic scenes,” as Jim described it, “to wild dream sequences that seem to comment on the reality they interrupt.” Each shot, Oz recalled, “
was maybe about a second or four seconds long,” but Jim made every second count, even tracking in a notebook precisely how many frames of film each shot would take up. Looking at it today,
Time Piece
plays like an extended alternative music video, cutting quickly from shot to shot—sometimes almost quicker than the eye can register—under a frantic percussion soundtrack.

“
I was … playing with a kind of flow-of-consciousness type of editing,” Jim said later, “where one image took you to another and there was no logic to it, but your mind put it together.” That was true
enough, as even the most casual of viewers can’t help but feel they’ve gotten … well,
something
from it. But the plot is beside the point. The real star is Jim’s strong visual sense, which carries the film forward on one memorable image after another: Jim as a gunslinger shooting the
Mona Lisa
. Jim as a factory worker pulling levers as a conveyor belt carries rusty cans. Jim painting a real elephant pink. “Richard Lester did
A Hard Day’s Night
at about the same time I was doing
Time Piece
,” Jim said later, “and I just loved what one could do with the montaging of visual images.”

Through it all, Jim’s Everyman is in constant motion, strolling down sidewalks, swinging Tarzan-style through the jungle, leaping from a diving board, flapping on makeshift wings, or dodging through a cemetery in top hat and tails. It’s a race against time, and every sound in the film—Jim’s tapping fingers, a cough, a nightclub drummer, a woman’s high heels clacking—vibrates with the regular rhythm of a ticking clock. Perhaps tellingly, Jim’s Everyman speaks only one word of dialogue, repeating it four times in eight minutes: “
Help.
”

“
Time Piece
is about time and a man running, and I understand that about Jim,” Juhl said later. “Jim was always running from time.… There never would’ve been enough time, and I think he knew that really early.” Perhaps it was Jim once again coping with the loss of his brother, Paul, and the feeling that there would never be enough time to do all the things he hoped to do—but then again, maybe it wasn’t. “
A lot of people want to say something,” Jim said. “But I don’t start out to say things. I try to keep it first of all entertaining, and then humorous.” For the most part, Jim would remain coy about whether he was really trying to make any kind of statement with
Time Piece
, remarking that he was simply exploring “
the possibility of filmic stream of consciousness.”

After completing the film in May 1965, Jim hosted a premiere party for his “
rather weird little movie” at the Museum of Modern Art, renting out the fourth-floor screening room and running the film continuously for several hours. Oz, who had initially been unsure exactly what to make of the snippets of film they were shooting, was enthusiastic about the final product: “
It was Jim pushing the form.” Following the premiere, Jim held a reception at the Muppets
headquarters on 53rd Street, drinking champagne with friends and mulling over ways to put the film into a nationwide release, a task he assigned to Bernie Brillstein.

The agent aggressively made the rounds with copies of the film, which baffled several potential distributors. (“
I don’t think there’s anything we can do with it,” wrote a confused representative at United Artists, adding that “the short does show a certain talent, but I think it’s a gimmicky sort of a talent.”) Eventually, Brillstein landed a deal that would distribute the film nationally with French director Claude Lelouch’s acclaimed
A Man and a Woman
. That put
Time Piece
squarely in art house circles, including a highly successful eighteen-month run at the Paris Theatre in New York—an unexpected and distinguished venue for a twenty-eight-year-old whose previous film work had mostly been ten-second commercials with creatures exploding or devouring each other.

While
Time Piece
had been Jim’s pet project for nearly a year, there was still plenty going on at Muppets, Inc. During the summer of 1964, following a performance in Las Vegas with Jimmy Dean, Jim and his team had made a trip out to San Francisco to film another
Tinkerdee-based
pilot, this time at the behest of the Quaker Oats company, which was interested in working with the Muppets on a Saturday morning television series. While Jim would normally have bristled at the idea of straitjacketing himself into a children’s puppet show, with
Time Piece
under way, he perhaps felt he had a project in the works that would help him define himself as more than just “a puppet guy.”

Still, this new pilot,
The Land of Tinkerdee
, was far less ambitious than the earlier
Tales of the Tinkerdee
. Clocking in at less than ten minutes and filmed only in black-and-white, the
Land of Tinkerdee
pilot was limited to one set—a tinker’s workshop—and featured appearances by only two Muppets, King Goshposh and a new live hand sheepdog puppet named Rufus. It’s not subpar work, but it does appear that Jim’s heart was elsewhere at the time—which it was—and in a December meeting with Quaker Oats, the company opted not to pick up the show. What makes
The Land of Tinkerdee
memorable, however, is its setup:
Land
featured a live performer (Darryl Ferreira, a friend of Oz and Juhl’s from Oakland) as a tinker
who interacts with a Muppet dog in a workshop at the gateway to a magical domain—nearly the same setup as
Fraggle Rock
twenty years later.

A
s the Muppets took on more and more projects, Jim was looking at adding several more employees, at least on a part-time basis, to the Muppet offices. The most notable addition was a bearded thirty-one-year-old performer named Jerry Nelson, a gifted puppeteer who, like Jim and Oz, initially had no interest in puppetry. Born in Oklahoma and raised in Washington, D.C., Nelson had served in the army and, after briefly attending college, moved to New York to become an actor, taking walk-on roles in shows like
The Defenders
and
Naked City
. In 1964, while out of a job, he learned that puppeteer Bil Baird was looking for performers to work marionettes for a New England tour. Nelson, who hadn’t touched a marionette in twenty years, nevertheless ad-libbed his audition with Baird, performing a tough-talking, trench-coated mobster, and landed the job. Later that same summer, while performing with Baird’s troupe at the New York World’s Fair, Nelson met Jim’s old friend Bobby Payne, who suggested Nelson give Jim a call. “
He thought our senses of humor would mesh very nicely,” recalled Nelson.

At Jim’s request, Nelson submitted a recording of himself performing some character voices, “mostly just Stan Freberg impressions,” Nelson said later, laughing. At the moment, Jim was the only performer providing voices—and with Oz insisting that he would “never” do a voice (a vow he would stick to only another year), Jim was likely looking at ways to give the Muppets a more diverse sound. If that was indeed the case, Nelson was an ideal find. With his acting background and love of music, Nelson provided not only a wide range of voices, but he could sing—and sing beautifully—as well. Jim listened to the recordings and liked what he heard, then brought Nelson in for a quick audition. The two fell in together immediately; hiring him would be an easy decision.

Jim’s professional family wasn’t the only one that was growing. In April 1965, shortly after returning from a vacation in Puerto Rico, Jane gave birth to their fourth child, a son they named John Paul.
That left Jane—with the help of a young au pair—to manage a house with two young girls, a toddler, a newborn, and a new Great Dane puppy named Troy, which Jim had rather cluelessly presented to the already swamped Jane. (Troy, in fact, would prove to be more than
anyone
could handle and would soon be given away.) With her hands full, and Jim’s schedule changing daily, things could get frantic at the Henson household, once with frightening consequences. One June afternoon, Lisa, nearly five, and Cheryl, just shy of four, were playing in the gravel driveway of their Greenwich home when Jane—turning quickly into the short driveway out of the speeding traffic on Round Hill Road—accidentally ran over them with the station wagon.

When the phone rang at Muppets, Inc., both Juhl and Oz remember watching Jim as he learned what had happened. One of Jim’s strengths as a father, said Cheryl later, was his ability to “
approach things in a calm and kind way,” but Jane’s news shook him deeply. “
He just went ashen,” Oz recalled, then hung up the phone and rushed from the room without saying a word. “
A terrible day,” remembered Juhl with a shudder. Although Lisa had been pinned by the car, she wasn’t badly hurt, but Cheryl’s ankle had been fractured. To Jim’s and Jane’s relief, both Cheryl and Lisa would be running through the woods by autumn as if nothing had happened—though Lisa would be haunted by nightmares for some time—with Jim trailing behind them, movie camera rolling, getting the footage he would use later in a charming short film called
Run, Run
.

Jane could still be found at the downtown offices from time to time, often sitting in front of a mirror with Frank Oz, helping him perfect his lip-synching. “
I sat in front of that mirror for
hours
. Jane was really good at lip-synch,” said Oz appreciatively—but he thought he understood why Jane had gotten out of regular performing, for reasons that went beyond motherhood. “A great puppeteer needs to be aggressive and selfish,” Oz said—qualities, he thought, the artsier Jane lacked. “It’s also important to be uncomfortable. You should be prepared and ready at all times,” Oz continued. “If you’re comfortable, you’re doing it wrong.”

If discomfort was truly the mark of a great performer, then when it came to filming a series of commercials for Southern Bread, Jim
and his team were definitely doing things right. For the Southern Bread campaign, Jim had asked Sahlin to create a live hand puppet resembling the company’s mascot, a white-mustached Southern colonel in a starched white suit and hat. Jim filmed most of the commercials on location, requiring him and Oz or Nelson to squeeze and mash themselves into odd places, lying on railroad tracks, hunching down in cars, or squatting on the pavement outside Yankee Stadium.

More perilous, however, was a Southern Bread spot Jim had dreamed up that required an arrow to fly in from off-screen and puncture an apple on top of the colonel’s head. Jim decided to film the ad in his backyard in Greenwich—this time performing the character with Jerry Nelson—and hired a professional archer, a young woman of about twenty-five, to shoot the arrow through an apple balanced on the puppet’s head. “
The gal started walking away to do this,” Nelson recalled, “and Jim said ‘Oh, you don’t have to go
that
far. You can come up close because the camera won’t see it.’ And she said, ‘No, I have to get a certain distance away, because when the arrow leaves the bow, it waffles.’ ” As the archer moved into position twenty yards away, Jim and Nelson knelt on the ground, Jim with his hand up inside the puppet’s head, and Nelson crouched under Jim’s armpit. “Jim was fearless,” Nelson said, but Nelson was
terrified—
and ducked his head as low as he could as the young woman drew back the bow and took aim.

“She shot it and hit the apple and knocked it off … [and] I said ‘Oh, great!’ ” laughed Nelson. But Jim—just as he had with Oz and the flame-engulfed Wontkins—was determined to get the shot right. “No, that’s not what we want,” Jim insisted; the arrow had to stay
in
the apple. “
When he had a vision in his mind, he would
chase
it,” said Nelson. With cameras rolling, the archer nocked another arrow and fired again and again, finally nailing the apple on the fifth take. As Jane said later, “
That’s one of the times I thought, ‘Oh my God, he’s crazy!’ Jim was so fearless at things like that, and [yet] he was so afraid of spiders in the shower!”

That was life with the Muppets: a kind of fearless craziness that pervaded nearly every aspect of the business. “
Working at the Muppet office was always fun,” said Oz, “especially when Don Sahlin
was around.” While all the Muppet staff enjoyed pranks and jokes, Sahlin was an especially notorious trickster, with the added advantage that he could invent and build nearly anything, which made him particularly potent as a prankster. “
I loved the way Don played,” said Jim. “Throughout his life he would play—pick up some bit of feathers and attach a long rubber band to it, stretch it down the hall, and release it as you came into the room. Or he’d put a puppet on the john. He had this sense of playfulness that he actually used, and inspiration would come out of these free-release moments.”