Jim Henson: The Biography (50 page)

After meeting artist Brian Froud in August 1977, however, Jim had shelved the
Mithra
treatment in favor of working with Froud on their “Great Film” together, building a new fantasy world from the ground up, and concentrating more on the overall look and feel of the film than on the story. “I’m trying to create this film in a different way,” Jim wrote in his diary, “hoping to get all the creative elements going on it for a while before tying things down with a script.” In early 1978, as Froud sketched in the New York workshop and handed drawings off to Muppet builders to begin crafting puppets, Jim—while stranded with Cheryl at Howard Johnson’s hotel during the snowstorm—had scrawled out a rough outline of a plot, lifting a few key elements from the abandoned
Mithra
and finally deciding that the mystical source of power in the land he and Froud were building would be a crystal. Working off his handwritten notes, he quickly put together a sixteen-page treatment of
The Crystal
, and “set some of the [Muppet] builders working on ideas of ways to create characters unlike anything we’ve ever done before,” he wrote in his diary. “It’s such a wonderful challenge to try to design an entire world … like no one has ever seen before.”

For most of 1978, however, Jim’s focus was on filming
The Muppet Movie
, though the New York workshop continued diligently sculpting, building, and tinkering with puppets for
The Crystal
. Wizard heads and various potato-like peasants and slaves slumped on benches around the workshop, while handyman Faz Fazakas was building elaborate—and increasingly smaller—remote-control mechanisms to widen eyes, crinkle foam noses, and wrinkle latex foreheads. In October, Jim took a few of the completed figures out in the backyard of his house in Bedford to film them among rocks and trees, subjecting the puppets to the same sort of outdoor screen test he had put Kermit and Fozzie through earlier in the year in preparation for
The Muppet Movie
. He was pleased with the results of the screen test, yet he knew his preoccupation with the look of the
film meant he was approaching the project in an unconventional, almost backward way. “
Normally you write the script first and design around the story,” he explained later. “I wanted to change that and come up with a visual world first, although knowing vaguely the type of story I wanted.”

Six months later, there was still no real script to speak of—but in the summer of 1979, Jim flew to New York to pitch
The Crystal
to executives at Paramount anyway, perhaps hoping the success of the recently premiered
Muppet Movie
would convince the studio to invest the $15 million Jim was asking for his next film. He brought with him a beautifully produced formal proposal, printed on milled paper and brimming with Froud’s lavish pencil drawings—but typical of Jim’s approach to the project, the pitch book for
The Crystal
devoted most of its space to the characters and the world itself. That left just half a page to outline the story, only vaguely described as a “
struggle through terrible dangers and hardships” which built to a nonspecific “startling climax.” Paramount executives passed.

With Paramount’s demurral, Jim decided to once again approach Lord Grade, his reliable patron for both
The Muppet Show
and
The Muppet Movie
. During their initial negotiations for
The Muppet Movie
, Grade had been encouraging, though noncommittal, about financing a non-Muppet feature—but Jim was certain that, with
The Muppet Movie
turning a healthy profit, Grade would be more than willing to back such an ambitious project. Lazer, however, wasn’t so sure, and pulled Jim aside for a frank conversation. The success of
The Muppet Movie
, Lazer explained, had ramped up enthusiasm and demand for a sequel. “
I felt that if we gave too much time in between Muppet movies, we couldn’t keep that audience,” said Lazer, “and I knew Lew [Grade] was ready … to go for that second Muppet movie immediately.”

Jim was deflated. “
He was always interested in the idea of going beyond the Muppets,” said Cheryl Henson, “[there was a sense of] wanting to find something, wanting to work on something that had more depth to it.” “
Jim wanted to do
The Crystal
,” said Lazer. “His mind was off Muppets. He wanted to get
The Crystal
done.” And Lazer, who understood perhaps better than anyone just how important
The Crystal
was to Jim, instead “gave him every reason we
should do another Muppet movie.” However, Lazer offered to take up the negotiations with Grade personally, promising Jim that if he would agree to make the sequel to
The Muppet Movie
first, Lazer would ensure that any funding Grade put up for the second Muppet film would be contingent on financing
The Crystal
next. Jim agreed, and Lazer was as good as his word, convincing Grade to lay down not only a hefty $14 million for the next Muppet feature—nearly double what he had invested in
The Muppet Movie
—but also $13 million for
The Crystal
. Grade also agreed that Jim could shoot the movies back to back, beginning work on
The Crystal
immediately after wrapping the Muppet sequel.

Jim was disappointed, but pragmatic—delaying
The Crystal
in favor of the next Muppet film meant he could keep Froud and the team of artists and builders at work in the New York shop, where they could continue to refine the more realistic, and increasingly complex, puppets Froud was designing. “
The idea of doing very naturalistic creatures that looked like living things was exciting to me,” said Jim. “I could see that it would take an awful lot of technical know-how to make it work, but we had the beginning of a team of people who could tackle that.” In fact, several members of
The Crystal
’s design team—including one of its lead builders, a talented sculptor and doll maker named Wendy Midener—were especially knowledgeable in the technical know-how, having worked in tandem with director George Lucas on a lifelike puppet Lucas wanted for his second
Star Wars
film,
The Empire Strikes Back
.

It is not surprising that Jim and Lucas would eventually cross paths. Not only were they artistically cut from the same cloth, but for the better part of a year, they were practically neighbors. “
In England, while we were making [
Star Wars
], we worked across the street from [Elstree], which is where Jim Henson’s group was [taping
The Muppet Show
], and I got to know him,” said Lucas. “We were very much alike: independent, out of the spotlight, obsessed with our own films. And I really admired the Muppets … so I asked him if he thought we could get together and create a very realistic-looking puppet.” Lucas already had his own team of special effects wizards in place—including master makeup artist Stuart Freeborn, who had designed several large walkaround creatures like Chewbacca—but if
a puppet was needed, Lucas wanted to be certain he had the best puppet designers and performers working side by side with his own team at Lucasfilm. Jim, too, was anxious to learn more about the dynamic special effects technology Lucas and his team were known for developing, hoping perhaps to apply some of Lucasfilm’s expertise to
The Crystal
.
“It became a mutual thing,” said
Empire Strikes Back
producer Gary Kurtz, “because they needed some advice on their film and we needed their expertise in the puppet area”—and by November 1978, Jim noted in his journal that he and the Muppet team were “
Working with S
TAR
W
ARS
on Y
ODA.
”

Initially, Lucas had wanted Jim to perform the character. “I thought he was the best puppeteer,” said Lucas—but with his already cramped schedule, Jim was concerned he would be unable to give the project the time and attention it needed, and instead recommended Frank Oz for the job. “Jim called me into his trailer … and showed me a sketch of Yoda—and it felt right,” said Oz. “Sometimes you have to work at something before you have that feeling, but this felt really good.” Additionally, said Oz, “
it was acting, not just performing”—a skill at which Oz excelled.

Using concept drawings provided by Lucas, Wendy Midener had drawn and sculpted Yoda to make the character work in three dimensions—then watched in mild frustration as Freeborn and the Lucasfilm technicians built what was essentially a clunky and heavy doll, with thick cables trailing out of it to control the various eye, ear, and face mechanisms. “
They were building a special effect,” said Muppet performer Kathy Mullen, who assisted Oz with Yoda. “But Wendy really did work hard on that to make it work and I’m sure Frank [Oz] was over there a bunch of times to try to get it right. I mean
everybody
worked to try to get it right.”

Freeborn and his team continued to tinker with Yoda, but when Oz showed up at the soundstage at Elstree for the first day of filming in August 1979, the puppet, said Oz bluntly, was still “
really fuckin’ heavy.” Rather than carving and constructing Yoda from foam and lightweight materials, Freeborn had built Yoda out of heavy nonpliable rubber, putting extra weight on Oz’s wrist and severely reducing the puppet’s flexibility. A thick bundle of cables trailed from Yoda’s neck to a black control box under the stage, where Midener could
operate the controls for Yoda’s eyes—but the short length and additional weight of the cables only made the puppet that much heavier and more difficult to manipulate. Meanwhile, Mullen had to brace herself under Oz’s right arm to perform the character’s right hand and, at times, operate the mechanisms that wiggled Yoda’s ears or pulled his mouth back into a slight smile. The stage had been elevated, though just barely—and there was very little room for the three performers to move about as they watched their performance on monitors glowing in the darkness. “
It was
very
hard,” groaned Mullen.

And yet the experience was a success, not only for the wondrously memorable character that Oz and the Muppet team created for the film, but also because—as Jim hoped—it had served as a creative reconnaissance mission for
The Crystal
’s designers and builders. Yoda had been a kind of dry run for the sort of creatures Jim hoped to populate
The Crystal
’s world with—and by watching and working with Freeborn and his team they had learned even more about how the latest remote control technology could be integrated into a puppet, to blink or narrow eyes or turn up the corner of a mouth to give a character an even more lifelike appearance. Just as important, they had also learned what
didn’t
work. For one thing, the puppets—and all their incorporated technology—would have to be lighter and more flexible. Jim would also have to find new ways of keeping three or more performers—and all the necessary cables controlling eyes and ears and smiles—out of sight of the camera, especially if he hoped to have his puppets walking, climbing, and moving about out in the open. “
It was just the sort of thing that needed a lot of research, a lot of time and experimentation,” said Jim—and now with
The Crystal
temporarily pushed back, time was, for once, a luxury Jim and his team had.

For now, Brian Froud, Wendy Midener—who would marry Froud in May 1980—and the team at the New York workshop would continue their work, blending the lessons learned from their experience with Yoda with their own creative expertise in puppetry design and function. Jim, meanwhile, would start the wheels turning on the next Muppet movie, putting comedy screenwriter Jack Rose—who had penned
Road to Rio
, one of the early Hope-Crosby films Jim
loved—to work on a film treatment. Jim was also going to direct both the next Muppet film and
The Crystal
himself—of that, there was no question, and Grade had never even raised the issue—but now that he would be at the helm of his first big screen features, Jim wanted to be sure he had a reliable and experienced cameraman at his right hand. In early 1980, Jim met with—and “loved”—Ossie Morris, an Oscar-winning cinematographer who had been the cameraman of choice for director John Huston, shooting epics like
Moby Dick
and
Moulin Rouge
. Morris could read a script or walk a movie set and know intuitively if what Jim saw in his head would show up on camera, and his sure eye would make him an invaluable member of Jim’s production team.

And there was still
The Muppet Show
to attend to. The strike of 1979 had put the Muppet crew behind schedule, with nine episodes of the fourth season remaining to be taped in a little less than seven weeks. Even as the team speedily wrapped up their fourth year at Elstree, they remained one of London’s best-loved acts. Muppet fans continued to mob ATV so much that Jim finally had to put a stop to the popular tours of the workshop. Fan mail from around the world still poured into the Muppet offices at Elstree, most of it addressed to the characters themselves, asking for pictures or autographs. Children sent in drawings of their favorite Muppets or boldly invited Jim to dinner at their house, while their parents asked if they might be allowed to purchase a used or broken Muppet. And nearly every working puppeteer, comedy writer, or songwriter, it seemed, sent in a résumé or audition tape, begging, pleading, praying for a chance to work with the Muppets. Jim responded politely to all of them, saying a kind word or two about their material while letting them down as gently as he could. Still, Jim did find a few performers through the mail, including Karen Prell, a young performer from Washington who enclosed several photos of her handmade puppets and asked for an audition.

More and more, Jim was coming to regard London as home—as was Lazer, who had unconsciously developed a whiff of a posh English accent. He loved dining in the city’s finer restaurants, gambling in London’s most exclusive clubs, and liked being recognized by cooing British admirers as he walked Hampstead’s winding streets. And
yet, while Jim may have wanted to live in London full-time—and indeed, with the house in Hampstead, it seemed to many that he already did—he literally counted the days he spent in the city each year, making sure he never stayed a day longer than six months, which would put him at the mercy of England’s astronomically high income tax rate, which hovered just over 80 percent.