Jim Henson: The Biography (59 page)

Other days, when he wasn’t needed on-set at Empire Stages, Jim had begun working on a project that was small but close to his heart: a series of one-hour specials he was calling
Jim Henson Presents
, showcasing puppeteers he admired from around the world. With his continued involvement in both the Puppeteers of America and UNIMA, Jim took puppetry even more seriously than many of the Muppet performers, and he intended for
Jim Henson Presents
to be a kind of international puppetry primer, spotlighting both performers and their performances. In late July, Jim spent two days interviewing and filming Bruce Schwartz, who performed in a style
influenced by the Japanese Bunraku, at the Dance Theater Workshop in New York. In the coming months and years, he would tape five more specials, including programs featuring Australian shadow puppeteer Richard Bradshaw, Dutch puppeteer Henk Boerwinkel—who chatted earnestly with Jim about using puppets to create “magical realism”—and eighty-three-year old Russian performer Sergei Obraztsov, who, perhaps more than any other puppeteer, had inspired Jim in the art and craft of puppetry.

For Jim, the more he learned about different styles of puppetry, the more excited he got—and the more he wanted to incorporate those kinds of puppetry into his work. “
Puppetry is a very wide field,” he explained. “It encompasses a lot of different ways of operating hand puppets and marionettes and rod-control figures and people in black. There are many, many different techniques and … I feel that we can use them all. We try to use a lot of them. I believe in using any technique that will work.… I’m not a purist in terms of what puppetry is, or what it should or shouldn’t be.”

For someone who once considered puppetry merely a “means to an end,” Jim had become one of the leading authorities on—and chief promoters of—one of the world’s most ancient arts. Recently, in fact, he had established the Jim Henson Foundation to promote and develop the art of puppetry in the United States—to this day, still the only grant-making institution with such a mission. “
Jim started the Foundation … so that an artist would have a bit of money and breathing space to develop his own vision,” said fellow UNIMA member Allelu Kurten, “without having to give up or copy some one else’s.”

It was the copying, in fact, that bothered Jim the most. “
We see frequently puppets which have the overall ‘Muppet look,’ but which do not look like our individual Muppet characters,” he wrote in
Puppetry Journal
. “We feel that the people creating these puppets should create, as we did, their own concepts and not use ours.” If puppetry was going to grow and expand as an art form, it needed to move beyond the Muppets—which, given their popularity, was easier said than done. Jim was fine with performers using the look of the Muppets for inspiration—just as he had been inspired by the design and working styles of Burr Tillstrom and Obraztsov—but encouraged
puppeteers to “find their own unique style of puppetry.… It seems to me that each of us expressing our own originality is the essence of our art and professionalism.” The foundation, then, was Jim’s effort to encourage such originality—and in the first year alone, the foundation awarded $25,000 in grants to performers and organizations, including $7,500 to a young puppeteer named Julie Taymor, who would later win a Tony Award for her groundbreaking puppetized version of the musical
The Lion King
on Broadway.

On other days, Jim was in Toronto, meeting with his writers on
Fraggle Rock
, or in London, where he had decided to begin building the various creatures and props that would be needed for
The Labyrinth
—or, at least, the building would start once the script was finished. In the meantime, there was more than enough work to be done hammering the old workshop at 1B Downshire Hill into shape. In early July, Jim moved Muppet builder Connie Peterson—who had been part of Caroly Wilcox’s ambitious Piggy Research and Development Department—from the New York shop over to London, where she was put in charge of turning the trash-filled former postal sorting facility into a fully functional, state-of-the-art workshop.

“
Getting started was really difficult—it was hard to know where to grab hold of the project,” said Peterson. “The situation was made harder due to an architectural modification of our building … before our arrival. The main work space was filled with an impenetrable pile of stuff from the front of the building to the back … ranging from heavy machinery to feathers and sequins all jumbled together and coated with construction dust.” The job also required some politicking with the neighbors and local council, since the workshop was the only industrial building in a residential area, and tended to vent slightly noxious fumes from time to time. Faz Fazakas, too, was dispatched to Downshire Hill to help establish the electromechanical side of the workshop, and spent weeks measuring floor thicknesses to determine the best locations for all the heavy equipment needed for metalwork. Under the watchful eye of Duncan Kenworthy—who often joked that part of his job was to “
be Jim when Jim wasn’t there”—Peterson and Fazakas would spend the rest of the year banging the London workshop into shape.

J
im spent his forty-seventh birthday at the wrap party for
The Muppets Take Manhattan
, earnestly toasting Oz for completing his first film as director—and now that Jim had opened that door for Oz, he was going to find it impossible to close. Two years later, Oz would be asked to direct the musical comedy
Little Shop of Horrors
for Warner Brothers, on his way to a successful career as a film director, racking up a run of well-received, eclectic hits like
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
and
What About Bob?
“
I was always chomping at the bit to go beyond the Muppets,” said Oz, “but Jim was amazing, because he never said, ‘Hey, you can’t leave me! I gave you all this stuff and you learned so much from me.’ Instead, he said, ‘Of course you’ve got to go do that.’ He was always amazing that way.”

Jim was earnestly watching another blooming career that autumn as well. In June, twenty-three-year-old Lisa graduated from Harvard with two distinctions: not only was she graduating
summa cum laude
, but she had also served as the first female president of
Harvard Lampoon
. Now she was spending her summer preparing to attend film school, and after a series of strenuous interviews—during which she discussed at length the interactive movie concept she and Jim had pitched several years earlier—she had been accepted to a school in London. As she prepared to attend classes in the fall, however, she was offered a position at Warner Brothers by executive vice president (and Harvard alumnus) Lucy Fisher—and off Lisa went to Warner Brothers, never to look back. Over the next ten years, she would serve as a production executive and later a vice president for the studio, overseeing blockbusters like
Lethal Weapon
and
Batman
.

Jim devoted much of the fall to tinkering with various television projects, including a music education program and a children’s television series he and Lisa had kicked around called
Starboppers
, notable more for the technology he was proposing to use than for its underlying concept. In its early draft,
Starboppers
—a terrible name, but Jim could never come up with a title he liked better—followed the adventures of several star-hopping aliens, with personalities based on the Freudian ideas of id, ego, and superego. More exciting, however, Jim was planning to film his characters against a green screen, then insert them into entirely computer-generated environments. He had even approached Digital Productions, a Los Angeles–based
computer animation company, about using their powerful Cray X-MP supercomputers to create the virtual backgrounds. Unfortunately, Jim could never get the idea to catch fire with a network, but he loved the technology—he had been playing with computer animation since even before
Sesame Street
—and was determined to find a use for it.

While he awaited Dennis Lee’s first draft of
Labyrinth
, as he was now calling it, Jim was excitedly looking for a screenwriter with whom he could collaborate on the script. Very briefly he had considered enlisting the help of Melissa Mathison, who had written
E.T
. for Steven Spielberg, but then abandoned the idea, deciding that if he was hoping to give
Labyrinth
the more lighthearted, comedic edge that had been missing from
The Dark Crystal
, he was better off collaborating with a comedian. An early fan of
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
—he would regularly note on his desk calendar the dates and times when the show was airing on PBS—Jim was particularly impressed with Terry Jones, one of the group’s most versatile members, who seemed to share his penchant for fantasy and folklore. Jones had co-directed and co-written the Arthurian spoof
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
, had written a serious, literary analysis of the knight in Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
, and had recently published a children’s book called
The Saga of Erik the Viking
, which Jim greatly admired. In late fall, he approached Jones about collaborating on
Labyrinth
—“
a really marvelous idea,” fellow Python member and former
Muppet Show
guest John Cleese told Jim approvingly—and was delighted when Jones said yes. “Your contributions to
Labyrinth
will surely make the script jump to life,” Jim wrote Jones.

At the end of December, after nine long months of waiting, Jim finally received a treatment of
Labyrinth
from Lee, who had transformed Jim’s rough story outline and his own meticulous notes into a ninety-page novella. In early 1984, Jim handed Lee’s novella and an enormous pile of Froud’s drawings (“
I filled sketchbook upon sketchbook,” admitted Froud) over to Jones to begin the task of writing the screenplay. While Lee’s novella provided a guiding track of a plot, Jones didn’t find it of much use, calling it a “
poetic novella [that I] didn’t really get on with.” Instead, he was much more inspired by Froud’s drawings of monsters and goblins. “
I sat at my desk with
Brian Froud’s drawings stacked on one side of the desk and writing away sort of to see what would happen,” said Jones. “And every time I came to a new scene … I looked through Brian’s drawings and found a character who was kind of speaking to me already and suddenly there was a scene.” Jones would complete his draft by early spring, at which point Jim would pass it off to another writer for revisions—and then another—cooking up an increasingly murky screenwriter stew that would send the
Labyrinth
screenplay veering through nearly twenty-five revisions and rewrites over the next two years.

W
ith
The Muppets Take Manhattan
due to premiere in July 1984, Jim and the merchandising department at Henson Associates spent their spring reviewing agreements on toys and other movie-related tie-ins, including deals with Frito-Lay, McDonald’s, General Mills, and even Oral-B, which would be marketing a line of Muppet toothbrushes. While the Muppet films had always generated a good share of revenue for the company with related merchandise,
The Muppets Take Manhattan
would prove particularly profitable because it had something going for it the other two Muppet films didn’t: Muppet Babies. To Jim’s surprise, lucrative offers came in from companies wanting to produce items targeted specifically toward families with infants and toddlers, including Procter & Gamble, which wanted the Muppet Babies to help sell Pampers diapers. Jim arched an eyebrow coyly. “
You’re going to let kids shit on my name?” he asked in mock annoyance—then agreed to the deal.

The most successful Muppet Babies–related product wasn’t in stuffed animals or diapers, but in a market Jim had intentionally long avoided: Saturday morning cartoons. “
I’d always stayed away from Saturday morning, not really thinking it was an area in which I would feel comfortable working,” said Jim. Jerry Juhl, too, was wary of putting animated Muppets on Saturday morning television, as he was concerned whether this was “
the right way to meet our characters for the first time.” But Jim eventually shrugged off that particular concern. “If the kids are already watching on Saturday morning, then
we
should be there, too,” he told Juhl, “and maybe we could do
something different.” When he was approached by executives from Marvel Productions—the animation wing of Marvel Comics—and CBS television about developing an animated Muppet Babies series, Jim was willing to listen, bringing in Michael Frith and several others for an all-day “concept meeting” in March.

It was important to Jim that the
Muppet Babies
—like
Fraggle Rock
—“
have a nice reason for being.” Where
Fraggle
’s overarching theme was one of harmony and understanding,
Muppet Babies
“
can be used to develop creativity,” Jim told his writers. “I think we can try to do something rather important with this show. There is almost no ‘teaching’ of creativity that I know of.… We can … show the Muppet Babies using their individual creativity in how each one can do the same thing differently. There is no right or wrong to it.” In the same way five different people could look at an ink blot and see something different, Jim wanted
Muppet Babies
to examine how different creative approaches could all solve the same problem—by “trying many different approaches, trying something no one has ever tried before, and not being satisfied with the way it’s always been.”

With that objective as its guiding principle, then, Jim agreed to create a joint production with Marvel that allowed Henson Associates to maintain quality control of the project while handing off the majority of the day-to-day work to Marvel’s writers and animators. With both Jim and Marvel on board, CBS gave its enthusiastic backing, paying $250,000 per show for the initial thirteen episodes, and putting it at the center of its Saturday morning lineup. Frith was enlisted as a “creative consultant,” overseeing not only the look and design of the series, but reviewing scripts and story ideas with the same fervor he had devoted to
Fraggle Rock
, and sending the same kind of detailed—and entertaining—notes back to Marvel’s story writers that Jim had once sent to Jerry Juhl. The commitment paid off: when the first episodes went on the air in September 1984—only six months after closing the deal
—Muppet Babies
was an immediate critical and commercial success, winning its time slot, pulling in huge ratings (though it usually finished second to another CBS juggernaut,
Pee-wee’s Playhouse
), and winning the Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program for the first four years of its seven-year run. It would also spawn a cringe-inducing sub-industry of
Your Favorite
Characters as Children!
cartoons like
Flintstone Kids
and
A Pup Named Scooby-Doo
, none of which had quite the spark of
Muppet Babies
—probably because they didn’t aspire to Jim’s lofty objectives.