Jim Henson: The Biography (58 page)

While the lack of live actors actually wasn’t
Crystal
’s biggest problem, the suggestion of a human cast was enough for Froud to begin to address what really
had
been the film’s main weakness: the story. “
I immediately pictured a baby surrounded by goblins,” said Froud, “[and] I told Jim that traditionally goblins steal babies.” Jim nodded and
hmmm
ed thoughtfully. “That’s the beginning of our story,” he told Froud, “but what else?” Froud was stumped, but suggested that perhaps a maze “would make a really good metaphor for the soul’s journey.”

Jim was intrigued by Froud’s suggestion, and while promoting
The Dark Crystal
in Japan, he began filling pages of a notebook with notes for a film to be called
The Labyrinth
—or, perhaps,
The Maze
or even
The Labyrinth Twist
. Jim’s first outline involved two of his favorite archetypes, a king and a jester, working their way through a maze filled with elaborate traps and exotic monsters. Even at this stage, Jim already had a strong sense for the look of the film, sketching out a giant Buddha statue trapping the heroes in a cage, rooms filled with snakes, and an island with a trapdoor in it. He also knew he wanted a carved door that somehow came to life, as well as
an Escher-like sequence in which it was impossible to tell up from down—both images that would end up in the final film. While there were also some darker sequences—he envisioned a room full of jewels that would bleed if one was picked up—Jim very deliberately wanted to include plenty of humor, an ingredient critics had found distinctly lacking in
The Dark Crystal
.

At the end of March, Jim flew to London to meet with Froud and Dennis Lee, the Canadian writer and poet who co-wrote songs for
Fraggle Rock
, to see if they could tease a coherent story from Jim’s notes. “
What is the philosophy of [the] film?” Jim asked them. He was interested in exploring deeper themes of “attitudes toward God, religion, and women,” and wanted audiences constantly questioning their perceptions of size, shape, and reality. “
We played around with various story lines,” said Froud, “then I created some paintings just to give a general feel to the approach and style of the film.” One of Froud’s first paintings was a piece called
Toby and the Goblins
, featuring a baby smiling happily amid a sea of grinning, leering, and skeptical monsters. Jim loved it—it would “
define and inspire” their work over the next three years—and hung the original painting in his house on Downshire Hill. Lee, meanwhile, would begin trying to compress their conversations and notes into a viable first draft.

A
s Jim and Froud talked over their next big project, Oz had been hard at work on the script for the next Muppet film, overhauling the first screenplay submitted by
Muppet Caper
writers Jay Tarses and Tom Patchett—initially titled
The Muppets: The Legend Continues—
which Oz had dismissed as
“way too over jokey.” “I asked Jim if I could take a stab at it,” said Oz, “and I think Jay and Tom were both probably very unhappy that I did. But it just didn’t have the
oomph
of the characters and their relationships.” Jim encouraged the tinkering; Oz, said Jim, was “
very precise in terms of his characters and what they’re all about and thinks through that depth of why they are and where they came from … and all of that creates wonderfully real characters.” But capturing that spark of the characters—that
oomph
, as Oz called it—was the most important, and most difficult,
part of any Muppet project. “
There’s a sense of our characters caring for each other and having respect for each other,” agreed Jim. “A positive feeling. A positive view of life. That’s a key to everything we do.… Sometimes we’re too heavy in terms of ourselves and trying to carry an idea, and telling kids what life is about. I often have to tell myself that, too.”

While Oz put the final touches on the script, the New York workshop was constructing dozens of new Muppets for the movie, including a roller-skating Miss Piggy, a water-skiing Gonzo, and radio-controlled versions of nearly every major character. (As the workshop assembled multiple versions of Miss Piggy, Oz made certain he was always present when builders attached her eyes, just as Jim had insisted on doing twenty years earlier when overseeing Don Sahlin’s construction of Rowlf.) The Muppet builders had continued to refine the technology now being used on
Fraggle Rock
, making mechanisms increasingly smaller and allowing puppeteers to remotely control more and more functions of the puppet with the waldo mitt. When using the waldo, there was no need to find a way to keep the puppeteer crouched out of sight; instead, a remote-controlled Kermit could now be propped up on a bench out in the open, while Jim sat several yards away using the waldo to radio-control Kermit’s mouth and head.

The third Muppet movie—now titled
The Muppets Take Manhattan
—began filming in New York City on May 31, 1983. “
We did our first film in Los Angeles, and our second in London,” noted Jim. “I thought it would be nice to do the next one in our hometown.” All shots of the Muppets in Manhattan, then, were done on location, with the Muppet performers wheeling around on their backs on rolling carts in Times Square or Central Park. Even uninterested New Yorkers, long accustomed to seeing film crews in their city, would stop to watch the filming—their eyes locked on Kermit and Miss Piggy, rather than on Jim and Oz rolling around underneath—and beg to take pictures or just touch the puppets. Jim didn’t mind a bit. “
We got a very nice, happy feeling from people in the streets,” he said.

Shooting on location also required the Muppet workshop to set up camp close by where they could quickly make any needed repairs,
dividing duties between a puppet and costume shop to address puppet-related mishaps, and a mechanical shop to fix technical problems. Working in the mechanical shop that summer was nineteen-year-old Brian Henson, who had recently left his classes at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he had been studying astrophysics and art. Brian had entered the university intending to make a career in film, with a focus on special effects, a craft he had learned to love from Don Sahlin and Faz Fazakas. “
I thought, ‘Well, getting a degree in physics actually lends itself to that,’ ” said Brian. But he found his time taken up more and more by his film work—“I just kept getting movies,” he recalled—that he eventually abandoned school altogether in favor of working in the Muppet workshop, reporting directly to Fazakas. He wouldn’t stay there long; the following year, he would take on his first non-Muppet role when he was tapped by the Walt Disney Company to perform one of the lead puppet characters in
Return to Oz
.

While Frank Oz was, for the first time, sitting alone in the director’s chair, he knew
“it was under an umbrella of safety, because I had Jim and David Lazer’s full support.… But it wasn’t a pure handoff,” said Oz. “I made all the decisions, but it was still Jim and Dave protecting me, and coming to me to say, ‘Frank, we can’t afford this.’ So it wasn’t me doing everything on my own out in the world.” The Muppet performers, however, braced themselves. Now that Jim was no longer regularly at Oz’s side to temper Oz’s notorious tendency for multiple takes, Oz would often nitpick a scene to the point where the performers could no longer tell the difference between takes.

Even Jim could get irritated by Oz’s admittedly “dictatorial” manner, growing angrier and angrier one evening as Oz kept the performers around for a seemingly endless round of retakes. “I fucked up,” said Oz. “I was like, ‘I’m the boss and I can keep everyone around,’ and I made Jim stay on the set when he really didn’t need to be there.” Typically, Jim never got visibly angry, merely setting his mouth in a tight line beneath his beard. But “Jim was steaming,” remembered Oz. “He was incredibly angry, and he got so powerfully silent. I don’t even remember what he said to me, I just remember that blistering silence. I apologized, and Jim was very forgiving.” Jim
shrugged it all off. “
We sort of go up and down as all relationships do, but
we have a great deal of respect for each other.”

The Muppets Take Manhattan
featured yet more innovative puppetry—including a complicated sequence choreographed by Jim in which several rats take over a kitchen—but some of the most notable moments came from Oz’s script. Jim was particularly pleased with Oz’s treatment of Kermit, who was given “an opportunity to stretch,” said Jim cheerily, “to become a little bit more interesting instead of just … the more limited personality that he is most of the time.” In fact, it didn’t take much squinting at Kermit in
The Muppets Take Manhattan
to see where Oz had poked a bit of gentle fun at elements of Jim’s own personality. Not only did Kermit get to play several different kinds of characters, from a big-shot Hollywood producer to an advertising man—two roles Jim had played in real life—but there was even a moment when he finally got to lose his temper with the entire Muppet cast. “Tell us what we should do!” Fozzie implores of Kermit at one point. “I don’t know!” Kermit explodes. “How should I know? Why are you always asking me anyway? Can’t you take care of
yourselves
?? I don’t know what to do next!”

Steve Whitmire thought that was probably a moment of pure catharsis for Jim, who rarely, if ever, lost his patience with the Muppet performers.
“He’d say, ‘I can’t be expected to watch everything,’ ” said Whitmire, “which is very much the same moment when Kermit turns and really screams at everybody and says, ‘Why do you expect me to have all the answers?’ ” But that was about as irritated as Jim would ever get. “You’ve got Jim … and all of us crazies around him at different levels of ability, different levels of knowledge, different capability as performers, and him trying to hold it all together,” explained Whitmire, “but by and large … I never saw him lose his temper.… He had a real knack for getting to the problem without scratching open the scab.”

The moment in the film that created a buzz, however—especially after word of it leaked to the press before the film’s release—was its final scene, in which Kermit and Miss Piggy are married in a lavish wedding ceremony that may or may not have been merely part of a Broadway musical. To keep the sequence a secret—at least for a
while—the wedding had been filmed on a closed and sweltering hot soundstage at Empire Stages in Long Island City, where 175 puppeteers crammed themselves under a chapel set to perform the three hundred puppets attending the Kermit-Piggy nuptials. When word of the wedding scene—and its ambiguous nature—leaked out, reporters began frantically lobbing the same question at Jim and Oz over and over again:
Are they married or not?
But neither Jim nor Oz would provide any clear answers, engaging instead in an elaborate bit of performance art to keep the press guessing.
“I’m just an actor,” Jim would have Kermit entreat to reporters, “and when two actors marry onstage, they’re only acting!”
Not so fast
, Oz as Piggy would respond, and point out that the actor presiding over the on-screen ceremony was a real minister—which was true—and thus the two of them had been officially married. Reporters left more confused than ever, and Jim loved every moment of it. “The argument will continue on, hopefully into … I don’t know what.” He grinned. “We’ll wait and see.”

Still, while the
Maybe it was real
wedding scene got people talking, it was a dream sequence that would truly have audiences roaring with enthusiasm. Even Jim knew the sequence was something special, as the only production note he wrote in his private journal during
Manhattan
’s entire fifteen-week shoot came with three weeks left in filming, when he jotted down
“
SHOOTING
M
UPPET BABIES IN
M
OVIE.
”

The three-minute musical number, featuring baby versions of the entire Muppet cast—including a sailor-suited Kermit, a diaper-clad Rowlf, and Miss Piggy in an enormous bow—was one of the toughest sequences to film, requiring a combination of marionettes, radio-controlled figures, and specially designed baby Muppets with
“short, stubby arms and legs,” which made them “very difficult” to operate. Keeping the performers out of sight often required careful positioning of the camera and a few well-placed props to hide the holes that were cut into the set, just wide enough for the Muppet performers to stick their arms through. “
It becomes quite a game, working out all of these things,” said Jim. “To me, one of the more enjoyable things is to try to figure out how to stage sequences like this.” What had inspired the Muppet Babies, Oz wasn’t certain—“
Things spring up in your head, and you never know where they come from, you know?”—but the sequence would end up as one of the most memorable of all Muppet moments, and would soon take on a life of its own in a form that surprised even Jim.

While he had only grudgingly ceded the directing duties on
The Muppet Movie
to James Frawley five years earlier, Jim found that for
The Muppets Take Manhattan
he was delighted not “
to worry about it.… I was able to relax and kid around, and in between takes, I could talk to people and make phone calls and enjoy a cup of tea.” Filming in New York had its advantages, too. “Being able to go home in between takes or at the end of the day … was a lot of fun.” In the evenings, then, Jim would retreat to his apartment in the Sherry-Netherland, which was being gutted and put back together and redecorated by an expensive architectural firm. It would take more than a year before Jim would pronounce the work finished. With its pastel-tinted walls, expensive sculpture, custom-made etched glass, and hand-carved furniture, everything in Jim’s apartment was richly detailed and interesting to look at—an architectural embodiment of Jim’s unique design aesthetic: art noveau, with a dash of whimsy. The dining room furniture, carved by artist Judy Kensley McKie, featured wide-eyed rabbits peeking playfully around the backs of the chairs, while in the bedroom, alongside sculptures and carved furniture, lounged a puppet built by Rufus Rose, the puppeteer who had performed Howdy Doody. Like the house on Downshire Hill, Jim’s homes were always his oasis in the middle of a bustling city—and the Sherry-Netherland apartment in particular would always be his glowing, cozy sanctuary in the sky.