Jim Henson: The Biography (46 page)

By the third season of
The Muppet Show
, however, more and more of the media’s hurricane was revolving around the show’s break-out star—Miss Piggy—and, consequently, on her performer, Frank Oz. Oz claimed he scarcely noticed the attention lavished on Piggy—“
I had other characters to do, after all,” he said coyly—and Jim, too, seemed unfazed, generously praising Oz as “
probably the person most responsible for the Muppets being funny.” But for some Muppet performers, long used to the collegial atmosphere Jim encouraged on the set, it was tough to see one puppeteer promoted above the rest.

Richard Hunt, who had worked alongside Jim and Oz for eight
years, admitted to hurt feelings. Both Oz and Jim, he thought, were “
distancing themselves” from the rest of the performers as the Muppets grew in popularity. “It was very hard on us,” said Hunt, “especially Jerry [Nelson, who] was very equal with them” as a performer on
Sesame Street
. At one point,
Nelson had even confronted Jim at a party, demanding to know why he wasn’t being used more—a question Jim left hanging in the air. (Lazer later said it was because Nelson—at times emotionally ragged and
admittedly drinking too much while coping with the challenges of raising a child with cystic fibrosis—had a tendency to “
freeze a little bit.”) For his own part, said Hunt, “
I knew I was a great supporting player … but Jim and Frank had separated themselves and that in turn was at the expense of some of the others.” Still, Hunt tried to be diplomatic. “Jim owned the company, and Frank was an essential.… You can’t focus on everyone.”

Oz understood the bruised feelings. “I was the workhorse, the go-to guy,” he said. “I would say to Jim, ‘You’ve got to give stuff to the other guys!’ I worked really hard—Jim and I worked hard—but I sometimes felt I was getting all the work, and I know the other guys did, too.” Performances aside, there were other divisive differences as well. For one thing, Oz had the additional perk of receiving a “creative consultant” credit on
The Muppet Show
, which meant, as Oz described it, “I didn’t write, but I got to sit in on all the writing sessions and meetings and didn’t get thrown out. And I would let them know when I thought something didn’t work.” That was putting it mildly. “He would sit right with the writers … and he would just slash line after line to condense it,” said Lazer, “and the writers resented it, but they knew it was for their own good, too, because if the character was great, they were great.”

In many respects, the elevation of Oz was due to Lazer, who made the decision to provide Oz with his own dressing room, as well as with his own separate performance credit, tagging “and Frank Oz” at the end of the alphabetical list of Muppet performers in
The Muppet Show
’s closing credits. “The other people resented it,” Lazer admitted later, but he never regretted the decision. Oz was responsible for too many of the major Muppet characters, and Lazer “wanted to give Frank this kind of respect.” Hunt may have rolled his eyes,
but he eventually came to understand that treating Oz with a certain level of respect didn’t mean Jim didn’t value the rest of his team. “
There’s a sub-level that makes you think that, ‘Well, these are the
important
ones, and we’re just here,’ ” Hunt said later. “It took me years to realize the untruth of that.”

Ultimately, thought Lazer, the dynamics between the Muppet performers were much like the dynamics between the Muppets themselves. “
[The Muppets] may be fighting with one another and have interpersonal problems, but they were always united in their support of one another,” said Lazer. “And this is what Jim does. There’s always a little hell going on, because everyone’s vying for Jim’s attention. But somehow, when he pulled it together, we’d support one another and we’d go on.”

And go on they did, sprinting through a frantic spring schedule in which they completed eight episodes of
The Muppet Show
in six weeks. As the show entered its third season, the Muppets were more popular than ever, and ITC’s Abe Mandell gleefully reported that
The Muppet Show
had now been sold in
106 countries, with a total audience of 235 million (a number Henson Associates willingly circulated, even as some privately joked that Mandell would soon be claiming a viewership larger than the world’s population). It could even be seen by millions of viewers inside the Soviet sphere, including Hungary and Romania, where the show ran with subtitles, and East Germany, which dubbed the episodes in the native language (“
I hope they manage to make the jokes funny,” Jim said nervously. “A language gap is always a problem.”) “
[It’s] almost certainly the most popular television entertainment now being produced on Earth,” declared
Time
magazine matter-of-factly, and called Jim “the rarest of creatures in the imitative and adaptive world of entertainment: an originator.” To others, he was, quite simply, “
the new Walt Disney.” Jim would likely have argued that he wasn’t—at least not yet. Disney had conquered film, then moved into television. Jim had conquered TV, but had yet to make the leap onto the big screen. But now, with work on the first half of the third season of
The Muppet Show
completed in mid-May, Jim’s march toward the movie screen wouldn’t take much longer.

Earlier in the spring, Jim had brought in Jerry Juhl to polish Jack
Burns’s rough movie script, hoping that by stirring the two together, the final mix would capture both Burns’s rat-a-tat joke sensibilities and Juhl’s warmth for the characters. Paul Williams, too, had been pressed back into service, though after his positive experience of working with Jim on
Emmet Otter
, it didn’t take much persuading for Jim to get Williams on board. “
Working with Jim Henson was probably the easiest collaboration of my life,” said Williams later. “[He] had a sweetness about him, and I don’t think he ever got emotionally pulled off course. But I’ve also never worked with anybody who spent less time over my shoulder.” Jim never even insisted on hearing demos of the songs as Williams wrote them, merely shrugging that he would “
hear them in the studio” when he showed up to record them. Williams’s only other request, then—and one that Jim willingly granted—was that he be permitted to work with composer Kenny Ascher, allowing Williams to fully devote himself to writing the songs while Ascher undertook the more time-consuming task of scoring them.

Throughout May and June, Jim jetted back and forth between Los Angeles and New York, sometimes twice a week, to finalize the script, oversee production of the sets in California, and meet with director James Frawley, who had spent several days with Jim in London early in the spring to get a feel for the Muppet sensibilities. Jim had wanted to direct
The Muppet Movie
himself, but had been grudgingly persuaded by the argument that it was better to have an experienced director at the helm of the Muppets’ first foray into film. “
Up until that time they had never shot film. They had only shot tape, and they had never shot outside the studio,” said Frawley. “So [Jim] knew that he needed somebody who was a filmmaker and knew what to do with the camera.” Juhl—who had swallowed his own pride when the more experienced Burns had been installed as head writer of
The Muppet Show
in its first season—understood Jim’s disappointment at being bumped in favor of Frawley. “
[It] was actually a very frustrating experience for him in that he wanted to direct,” said Juhl. “
So
much. It drove him crazy.”

Regardless, Frawley—who had headed up several small comedies like
The Big Bus
and
The Christian Licorice Store
—was a fine choice. With a visual sensibility similar to Jim’s—he had cut his
teeth directing episodes of
The Monkees
, where he employed the same sort of quick-cut editing style Jim had used on
Time Piece—
and a low-key sense of humor honed by several years in an improv troupe, Frawley and Jim were a good fit. “
He felt pretty good about my sense of humor,” remembered Frawley. “It seemed like a good combination of talents for his Muppets. I had a very childlike approach to my work, and the Muppets fit in well with that.”

One of the first orders of business was to see how the Muppets would look when they were filmed outside, in the real world, under natural light instead of the more controlled, and forgiving, environment of the television studio. On a gray, drizzly spring day, Jim, Oz, and Frawley piled into Jim’s car and drove north into the English countryside, pulling over to film anything remotely interesting. With Frawley’s camera rolling, Jim and Oz poked Kermit, Fozzie, Piggy, and Animal up into the low branches of trees, peeked them around corners, sat them behind the wheel of the car, and chatted with real cows, who stared at Kermit so intently that Jim broke down in giggles. “
We’re taking the characters out of the show and bringing them into the real world,” Jim later explained. “Nobody has ever done anything like this using our technique.” After reviewing the nearly fifteen minutes of footage, they proclaimed themselves “very excited” with the results. It was going to work—just as Jim had known it would.

D
uring the final week of June 1978, Jim hopscotched across the country one more time, attending Lisa’s high school graduation ceremony in New York—she had already been accepted to Harvard,
an accomplishment Jim noted proudly in his journal with the appropriate number of exclamation points—then spent two days in Lubbock, Texas, at a Puppeteers of America convention, before finally arriving at Bernie Brillstein’s beach house in Los Angeles just in time to celebrate the Fourth of July. The next morning—a bright and sunny Wednesday—cameras rolled on
The Muppet Movie
.

For eighty-seven days over the summer and fall of 1978, Jim and the Muppet performers sweated in the sun on locations in California and New Mexico, rolling around on their backs on furniture dollies
or chairs with the legs cut off and wheels attached—almost anything that would roll and keep them out of the view of Frawley’s cameras. While the big screen allowed the Muppets the space to move about freely in the real world—many times out in the open where even their lower bodies could finally be seen—keeping the Muppet performers hidden from view required them to squeeze into even tighter and more claustrophobic spaces than ever. For some scenes, rectangular pits would be dug in which the puppeteers would stand to perform. Other times, the pits would be covered with a piece of plywood—which would then be covered by sand or dirt—and the puppeteers would stick their arms up through holes in the wood, watching themselves on monitors from their shallow underground crypt. As a first-time director of puppeteers, Frawley was surprisingly in tune with the physical demands placed on the performers. Jim, who had once made a particularly inconsiderate director stand holding his arm over his head for ten minutes to understand the pain involved in performing, found a sympathetic ally in Frawley, who would call out “Muppets relax!” between takes so the puppeteers could rest their aching arms and shoulders. “
If you don’t dig sore arms,” said Richard Hunt, “don’t work with puppets.”

In Frawley’s view, the most difficult sequences were those in which the Muppets drove or rode in cars. “
[The Muppets] had never been shot outdoors, or in a car or real locations,” said Frawley, “and we pretty much had to invent it as we went along. Every shot had never been done before, because nobody had taken Fozzie Bear and Miss Piggy and Kermit and put them in a Studebaker.” With four puppeteers and their monitors scrunched together in the front seat just under the dashboard, there was no room for a driver—so Frawley’s solution was to rig the car so it could be driven from the trunk by a stunt driver who watched the road on a monitor.

But it was Jim—in what Frawley called
“the single most difficult sequence to execute”—who ended up in the most cramped spot of all. In one of the film’s most memorable moments, a long swooping camera shot eases out of the clouds over a swamp, floats down through the trees, and eventually closes in on Kermit, sitting on a log in the middle of the swamp, strumming a banjo and singing “Rainbow Connection”—a pitch-perfect tune written by Williams and
Ascher, who had been directed by Jim to give Kermit a song similar to “When You Wish Upon a Star” from Disney’s
Pinocchio
. The take is seamless, slowly closing in on Kermit surrounded by water, in another of those
How’d they do that?
moments that Jim loved. In a similar scene in
Emmet Otter
, when Emmet and his mother had sung as they rowed a boat downriver, Jim had used remote-controlled puppets. In this case, however, the puppetry is so flawless—Kermit is clearly
not
radio-controlled—that it seems the only way it could possibly have been accomplished would be for Jim to have performed Kermit from underwater.

As it turns out, that’s just what he did.

In a water tank on a movie studio backlot, Jim had created an enormous and entirely convincing swamp set, with real trees—shipped in from the Georgia bayous—drooping their branches into a massive tank full of muddy-looking water. Jim’s idea was to sink a custom-made diving bell into the tank, lower himself inside, then perform Kermit up on the surface by sticking his arm up through a rubber sleeve in the top of the diving bell. It almost worked perfectly—but not quite. For one thing, the water in the studio tank was only four feet deep, while the diving bell being constructed—which Jim had initially intended to sink into a real swamp, before abandoning the idea—was nearly five feet tall. Rather than reconfigure the entire set with a deeper tank, Jim simply directed the construction crew to remove eighteen inches from the diving bell. It was going to make a tight fit that much tighter, but Jim wasn’t worried. “
Well, if I can fit,” he said with a shrug, “I’ll do it.”

Once the diving bell was secured in place underwater and Kermit and his log were arranged on top, Jim lowered himself into the cramped space, folding himself inside swami-style, with his legs crossed, his knees up, and a monitor and a copy of the script cradled between his legs. When the top of the tank was closed and sealed, Jim could reach up through the rubber sleeve and slide his right arm inside Kermit while operating Kermit’s banjo-strumming left hand with a wire rod snaked down into the diving bell. Even though oxygen was being pumped in through a hose and Jim was always in contact with the surface through his headset, it was like being buried alive—“
no place for someone with claustrophobia,” Jim said. Thirteen-year-old
John Henson, visiting the set for the day, thought “
it was a bit frightening” watching his dad go into the tank and disappear beneath the surface of the water. At one point during the five days it took to film the sequence, Jim was sealed underwater for over three hours—and when he was finally helped out, it took some time before he could get his legs to straighten out again. But that was Jim’s way, said Goelz. “
[He] would never ask us to do anything that he hadn’t done himself or wasn’t willing to do himself.”