Jim Henson: The Biography (36 page)

Jim made his appearance on
The Tonight Show
in his version of dress attire, wearing a suede jacket over a dark turtleneck and dark trousers, his hair curling down onto his shoulders and his beard slightly shaggy. While he still looked vaguely uncomfortable, once he began performing Kermit, no one noticed Jim anyway: all eyes, including Carson’s, were on the frog. When asked about his role in the
Sex and Violence
special, Kermit complained that he had only “one lousy line!”—perhaps a winking acknowledgment by Jim that he had made a mistake in sidelining Kermit in favor of Nigel—and bristled in mock offense when Carson asked him about his love life. “Listen,
I work on
Sesame Street
. You don’t ask a frog questions like that!” Kermit replied. “Do you ask Captain Kangaroo about his sex life?” The line got a big laugh, but after the taping, Jim was upset about his performance, calling it only “
fair.”

Jim continued to fret into the evening, groaning and
hmmm
ing in his hotel suite and appealing to Lazer for reassurance. With the three-hour time difference between the East and West coasts, Jane would be able to watch Jim’s taped performance on
The Tonight Show
in New York even before Jim could watch it in Los Angeles. Jim eyed the clock, and at the appropriate time dialed home to discuss his appearance on Carson with Jane.
“He was very interested in her opinion,” said Lazer. “I liked that.” Despite their widening differences, Jim still relied on Jane for emotional support and professional perspective; when it came to assessing Muppet performances, her instincts were almost always dead-on.

The next afternoon, over Mexican food at Señor Pico, Jim asked Lazer if he would “ever consider joining” Henson Associates. Lazer was stunned. “That was a dream,” he said later. “I remember having a fork [in my hand] and it froze … it was such a shock. And I said, ‘Oh my God! Oh, probably!’ ” As Lazer got into his cab for the airport, Jim leaned in the car window. “I’m very serious, Dave. I want to hear soon. I want you.” Three weeks later—following a trip to Miami, where Jim had to soothe the hurt feelings of Lazer’s employers at IBM—Lazer was Jim’s new producer. His impact would be felt almost immediately.

With his impeccably tailored suits, bright red ties, and loosely curled head of hair, the New York–born Lazer looked as if he had stepped out of a central casting call for the role of Smooth Businessman—a stark contrast to Jim, who was still wearing his flare-bottomed slacks, brightly colored shirts, and at times a colored scarf under a leather jacket. As a master of promotion, sales, and public relations, Lazer was determined to bring the same polish to Henson Associates that he had brought to the IBM product line—and as far as Lazer was concerned, the product at Henson Associates wasn’t the Muppets; it was Jim.

To Lazer, Jim was more than just Muppets; he was a creative force, on a par with Walt Disney, whose name epitomized a high
caliber of entertainment that transcended any particular medium. “
We had to work on Jim’s image, for his own sake first,” said Lazer, “and then let the
world
know this man has such character.” That was easier said than done; despite the fact that it was Jim’s name over the door, Jim had never thought of himself as the face of the corporation. That had to change. “Jim was considered an act, instead of who he was,” said Lazer. One of Lazer’s first missions, then, was to turn his boss from merely one of Henson Associates’ performers into
Jim Henson
.

Not that he was going to change Jim
too
much—and Lazer had some lessons of his own to learn about Jim’s way of doing business. At Lazer’s first staff meeting, Jim had asked his new producer to make a brief presentation, and Lazer—brought up in an executive culture of flip charts and handouts—completely baffled the Muppet designers and performers with his endless handouts and lists of people, profiles, products, and personalities. “People were laughing and snickering,” Lazer remembered. “I was a suit … coming through a creative world. But,” he added rakishly, “I was a
maverick
suit.” Taking the hint, Lazer threw his flowcharts into the middle of the table and continued talking as if nothing had happened. Afterward, Jim sympathetically pulled him aside.

“It’s not the same, is it?” he said.

“Oh no,” said Lazer. “It’s better.”

Jim was delighted with that sort of response. His instincts about Lazer had been correct; he would fit in nicely.

I
n late July 1975, Jim spent two weeks in California to tape performances on several variety shows, including two appearances on
Cher
for CBS. Jim’s time with Cher would be notable more for what went on between takes than for what appeared on the show itself; Cher and her executive producer at CBS, George Schlatter, in fact, would play an important role in bringing
The Muppet Show
to television.

At the urging of Brillstein, Jim had intended to approach Schlatter to discuss the possibility of CBS picking up a regular Muppet series—and now that he was in Los Angeles, Jim, Brillstein, Lazer, and Schlatter huddled to discuss their options. While Schlatter
couldn’t necessarily approve a show, he
could
help actively promote it at CBS—but he needed more than just Jim’s written pitches or copies of the two failed ABC pilots to make his case. He needed something dynamic to take to the network that would show, not just tell about, Jim’s inventiveness and enthusiasm. Jim—who had spent much of the first decade of his career promoting other people’s products—thought he had a solution.

He would make a commercial.

Not just a regular commercial, but a lengthy
Muppet Show
pitch reel—one that would highlight some of the Muppets’ strongest performances, spotlight the versatility of the Muppets, and, ideally, do so in a way that conveyed Jim’s unique, and slightly skewed, brand of humor. Lazer was excited about the idea and suggested that the pitch reel mention by name the network executives who would be watching it and making the decision—a trick he had often incorporated into his presentations at IBM. Schlatter—the father of
Laugh-In
and a writer with a wicked sense of humor—volunteered to help Jim with the script. Even better, he also offered to make time available during the
Cher
taping to allow Jim to tape a few segments with Kermit interviewing Cher and her daughter, Chastity, to give executives an idea of how the Muppets might interact with human guest stars—an offer both Cher and six-year-old Chastity were happy to accommodate. The segment with Cher, in fact, ended up being particularly feisty, full of double entendres (many of which were fed to Jim by Schlatter, squatting on the floor beside him), which resulted in both performers laughing so hard that Jim eventually broke character.

On August 31, 1975, a little more than two weeks after his initial meeting with Schlatter, Jim was in the studios at Bevington Stage in Los Angeles to film the framing sequences for his
Muppet Show
pitch. Most of the twenty-five-minute pitch would involve Kermit introducing clips of Muppet appearances, mainly highlights from the two Muppet pilots and assorted variety shows, as well as snippets of Kermit’s conversations with Cher and Chastity. But the most memorable moment of the reel would turn out to be its final two and a half minutes, a new sequence written by Jim and Schlatter featuring a smooth-talking Muppet salesman performed by Jim who becomes
more and more manic as he makes his pitch for
The Muppet Show
, eventually building to a frothing, enthusiastic crescendo worthy of Guy Smiley:

Then, as a heavenly choir swelled, came Jim’s comedic promise of huge ratings:

Even God, however, wouldn’t get the last word—and with the CBS logo rising like the sun in the background, Kermit wandered into the shot and stared straight into the camera to ask, “What the hell was that all about?”—a joke Jim had written at the last minute, scrawling the line in pencil across the bottom of his script. After viewing the pitch reel with his fellow CBS executives, Perry Lafferty—one of the executives mentioned by name in the pitch reel—called Brillstein with congratulations. “
If they don’t buy this,” Lafferty told the agent, “they’re crazy.”

And yet, remembered Lazer glumly, “
it didn’t sell.” Standing partly in Jim’s way—at least at CBS—was the recently enacted Prime Time Access Rule (PTAR), a policy implemented by the Federal Communications Commission to encourage more diverse and independent television programming. Prior to enactment of the rule in 1971, the major television networks had essentially barricaded themselves inside the prime-time viewing hours—generally 7:00 to 11:00
P
.
M
. Eastern Time—which all but banished independent and local programming to early afternoons or late nights, where viewers and ratings were scarcer. Starting in September 1971, however, the PTAR required networks to open up the first hour of prime time to non-network programming “
so that [independent] producers may have the opportunity to develop their full economic and creative potential
under better competitive conditions than are now available to them.”

That may have sounded like an open door for the Muppets, but Jim’s real problem was a 1975 rule change within PTAR, which exempted Sunday nights from the restriction—exactly the spot where CBS was considering placing
The Muppet Show
. With the FCC exemption allowing the network to fill the entire Sunday night block with its own programming, CBS opted to move its floundering news program
60 Minutes
into the first hour instead. That move quickly established
60 Minutes
as the network’s Sunday night flagship, but doomed the prospects for
The Muppet Show
on CBS. (At least, said Brillstein later, the Muppets had lost to the best.) While disappointed, Lazer thought the pitch reel had still done “
something good for us. It said, ‘We … have what it takes to do it.’ ” It was “
a wonderful goddamn thing,” agreed Brillstein—and he would continue to show the reel to anyone who would watch.

A
t the same time Brillstein was circulating the
Muppet Show
pitch reel, he was also lining up an opportunity for Jim and the Muppets to become a regular part of a new late night sketch comedy series being developed by another of Brillstein’s clients, a thirty-year-old producer and former
Laugh-In
writer named Lorne Michaels. “
He described the show, and I really loved it,” said Jim. In August, then, Jim began meeting regularly with Michaels’s writers in preparation for the weekly late night series Jim referred to on his desk calendar only as the “
NBC Show,” but which Michaels was calling
Saturday Night
—and then, eventually,
Saturday Night Live
.

Saturday Night Live
was a comedy variety show, but, as envisioned by Michaels and his scrappy team of writers, one unlike any variety show that had ever been seen before. “
We wanted to redefine comedy the way the Beatles redefined what being a pop star was,” Michaels said later. The very idea of it—an unpredictable live show unafraid of taking on politicians, presidents, or pop culture—terrified the network even months before it ever went before the cameras. “
NBC was so scared of what Lorne … was doing that they insisted on Jim Henson and the Muppets [to] soften it,” said Brillstein.
Jim’s inclusion, in fact, had been one of the network’s non-negotiables. “In the first contract for
SNL
, there were three essential factors,” said Brillstein, who had brokered the deal with NBC: “Lorne Michaels, Jim Henson and the Muppets, and Albert Brooks’s [short] films.”

For his part, Michaels was delighted to have Jim’s involvement. “
I’d always liked and been a fan of [the Muppets] and Jim’s work,” Michaels said. “When we were starting
Saturday Night
, I knew that I wanted as many different styles of comedy as I could possibly have, and I knew some of what the ingredients would be.… I just assumed that the Muppets under Jim would be able to do one segment a week.”

Nestled safely in the deep end of late night television, Jim wanted to do something dramatically different with his segments, as far removed from the look and feel of
Sesame Street
—which, he knew, was still what audiences thought of when they heard the word
Muppets
—as he could possibly get. For Jim, the characters themselves were always the easy part: he knew he wanted monsters of some sort, scrawling out rough descriptions of five characters for a segment he was initially thinking of calling “Muppet Night Creatures.” But the universe in which these characters would exist was more problematic—a matter Jim had struggled with in both of his
Muppet Show
pilots, neither of which had clearly established where things were taking place. Jim made a long list of potential settings and scenarios—a TV game show or sitcom, a therapy session, a rock group—before finally settling on a vaguely described “
Mystic set up.” Eventually, Jim would hammer out a typed proposal for his segment and set it in “
a place called Gortch,” describing the world rather unhelpfully as looking “either like another planet, or earth, sometime thousands of years in the future.” The workshop began hurriedly constructing new Muppets—with an eye on character designs by Michael Frith, who had translated Jim’s rough descriptions into beautiful, brightly colored drawings—and Jim checked in on their progress most mornings, even as he dashed off to the UNIMA conference in Detroit or business meetings in L.A. “
He was the hardest-working person I’ve ever met in my life,” said Dave Goelz.