Jim Henson: The Biography (70 page)

Jerry Juhl wasn’t certain that the show would ever have been
salvageable, no matter how much time they might have spent on it. There was “
a kind of craziness about that project that we could never put our finger on,” Juhl said. One of
The Jim Henson Hour
’s underlying problems was a familiar one that had plagued Jim since the days of
The Dark Crystal:
namely that new technology—the visual effects, the virtual backgrounds, the CGI Muppets—had gotten in the way of storytelling or character development. “
He was in love with technology and future-thinking stuff,” said Henson Associates producer and creative consultant Alex Rockwell, “and so, when he revisited the Muppets on
The Jim Henson Hour
, he wanted to bring that sense of futuristic techno-hipness into the show [and] the marriage of those technological visuals and CGI with the Muppets didn’t work that well.” In the case of the CGI character Waldo, even Jim agreed he was “
one of those characters I don’t think we ever really got a handle on in terms of how to use him.… He hasn’t really gelled as a major contribution to the show except technologically, I suppose.”

At the heart of it, however, the real problem with
The Jim Henson Hour
was that it had a massive identity crisis. “
It was like the show didn’t know what it wanted to be,” said Juhl. “This was Jim trying to do a whole lot of things at once, and it always puzzled us, and we couldn’t talk him out of it.… Most things didn’t work on that show. It was a huge frustration and a great sadness.” Rockwell called it “
a chaotic hour” that took a physical toll as well. “It was rigorous to make … because one minute you’re shooting the Muppet stuff in Toronto and then you’re up in Nova Scotia doing one of those Creature Shop stories,” said Rockwell. “It was really exhausting, and Jim’s energy got pretty diffused—unlike on
The Muppet Show
, where it was so focused.”

Oz, too, thought the disarray in the show was reflective of Jim’s increasingly divided attention, split between the creative work he enjoyed and the obligations of “
flying around and getting money for the overhead.” “Whatever Jim did, even some of the things that failed, there was always amazing stuff in it,” said Oz. “But
The Jim Henson Hour
just didn’t have the usual Jim focus. It was more like a grab bag of the brilliant things he’s done.”

Running the company was slowly sapping his creative energy, making it more difficult for Jim Henson to do the things that made
him Jim Henson.
The Jim Henson Hour
was proof of that. Jim knew the strain was showing, both in the way the company was run and in the on-screen product. “
I know that this period of time has been somewhat filled with a sense of uncertainty and an apparent lack of direction,” he wrote in a memo to his entire staff, “but I want to say that we are working and looking at various alternatives, and we should have a resolution in the not too distant future.”

Resolution was closer than he let on; he was already pursuing a course of action that, he hoped, “
releases me from a lot of business problems. As anyone in the business knows, you spend a great deal of your time raising financing, finding distributors and all.” If everything worked out as planned, he explained, “I’ll be able to spend a lot more of my time on the creative side of things.” That spring, as he and Rockwell rode in the back of a town car in Toronto, Jim reached for the enormous brick of a cellular telephone he kept under the seat. He had talked with Brillstein and Lazer, he told Rockwell, and they both agreed with his decision. Now he was going to make a phone call to put the plan into motion.

He was going to sell his company to Disney.

Agent Bernie Brillstein (left) and producer David Lazer were two of Jim’s closest and most trusted colleagues and business advisors. Brillstein, however, was largely sidelined during the Disney negotiations, while Lazer continued to argue that Disney was getting Jim too cheaply
. (
photo credit 15.1
)

F
OR
D
ISNEY
CEO M
ICHAEL
E
ISNER, THE VERY IDEA OF
J
IM
H
ENSON
joining the Walt Disney Company was a match “
made in family entertainment heaven.” For Jim Henson, it was a lifelong dream come true.
“The first film I saw was
Snow White
,” Jim noted, “and ever since then, I’ve had a secret desire to work with this great company.”

Jim may have loved Disney’s animated features—“outside of my own films, these are the only ones I buy for my video library,” he wrote privately—but he was an even bigger fan of the Disney theme parks. Disneyland and Walt Disney World were, he said, “two of my favorite places,” and he had made regular vacations to the two parks
for decades, even making a point to visit the newly opened EPCOT center in early 1983, within months of the park’s grand opening. Putting himself and the Muppets in the hands of Disney, then, would, in a sense, be like going on an extended vacation—one in which he would be expected to work and create, certainly, but then that was just the kind of vacation Jim liked best.

While Jim was working in the spring of 1989 to put his company in the hands of Disney, five years earlier things had very nearly gone the other way. In 1984, Disney had been on the verge of a hostile takeover at the hands of financier Saul Steinberg, who intended to dismember the company and sell its assets. With Disney’s stock plunging, Jim had asked Bernie Brillstein to make some discreet inquiries about Jim either stepping in as Disney’s new president or buying the company outright. The discussion went nowhere, due largely to bad timing; the Disney ship was in the process of righting itself, and later that year Paramount executives Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, along with Warner Brothers vice president Frank Wells, were chosen by a new Disney board to steer the company. Jim let the moment pass with no regrets, said Brillstein, “
but a seed was planted about how perfect a Disney/Henson pairing might be.”

Still, Jim had a good relationship with Eisner, who had given the go-ahead for the first two
Muppet Show
pilots while working as an ABC executive in the early 1970s. Shortly before starting work on
Labyrinth
in late 1984, Jim had called Brillstein and asked the agent to set up a meeting with Eisner, now Disney’s CEO, and Katzenberg, the head of production. Jim’s projects were getting
“very expensive” to produce, said Brillstein, and Jim wanted to discuss the possibility of Disney financing and distributing projects for Henson Associates—or, better still, having Disney buy Henson Associates outright. Brillstein called to set up the meeting, enthusiastically telling Eisner, “I have the best thing in the world for you: Jim Henson.” Jim and Lazer flew to California for a private dining room at Chasen’s restaurant in West Hollywood (“like a Mafia dinner,” joked Brillstein). This time, however, finances doomed any agreement. In 1984, the Muppets were entering a post
–Muppets Take Manhattan
holding pattern—and Jim was still negotiating with Holmes à Court to bring the Muppets back home—making their earning potential, in Eisner’s
assessment, “very soft.” “
The Muppets’ world renown wasn’t enough to carry the deal,” said a somewhat annoyed Brillstein, “so Disney passed.” But Brillstein assured Jim that if he wanted to sell his company to another major studio—and in fact, Disney rival MCA was interested—he could make it happen. But Jim refused; he wanted Disney, or no one.

Now, five years later, Jim had decided to try again—and in early spring 1989 had casually reopened discussions with Eisner. From a purely financial standpoint, Jim’s company was on sturdier footing than it had been on that day at Chasen’s in 1984. All of his properties were now safely back in his hands.
Muppet Babies–
and
Fraggle Rock
–related merchandise was steadily filling the company coffers, Muppet videos were selling well internationally, and
The Muppet Show
was in regular rotation on cable. The company had come a long way in the last five years, as Jim had expanded the company more broadly beyond television and into motion picture production.

As a reflection of the company’s growing film presence, Jim was in the process of changing the name of the company from Henson Associates to Jim Henson Productions, which made the company sound more like a major film studio than the small, independent organization of around 150 employees it actually was. He had even recently unveiled a new logo, built around his stylized signature (in Kermit green) with a swooping J and dramatically crossed H. Jim called it “
disarmingly simple”—and perhaps intentionally, it also looked a lot like the logo for the Walt Disney Company, which was centered on Walt’s own widely recognized signature.

Clad smartly in its new logo, Henson Associates—it wouldn’t officially be Jim Henson Productions until November—had become a major player with an international reputation, entirely worthy of Disney’s growing company and legacy. But Jim felt he was bringing to Disney more than just a financial asset or a valuable stock option; he was bringing them a creative commodity that they couldn’t put a value on—for no matter what the transaction or the logo on the letterhead, Disney wouldn’t just be getting the Muppets or Henson Associates or Jim Henson Productions; they’d be getting
Jim Henson
.

And Disney could use him. As Jim and Eisner casually chatted that spring, Disney, despite its new administrative stability, was still
feeling its way creatively. In early 1989, the seemingly unstoppable string of Disney blockbusters—beginning with the ambitious animated musical feature
The Little Mermaid
—was still to come; the 1988 hit
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
was the first real smash for the company in years. But with
The Little Mermaid
still months away from its November 1989 release—and no certainty for how it would be received by audiences—Disney needed not only reliably bankable characters to add to its slowly expanding character base, it needed a blast of creative energy and talent as well. Jim was their man. “
It was
never
just selling the Muppets,” said Frank Oz. “It was always in conjunction with him being there as the main creative guy, who could help the company. Jim felt he could
be
Walt Disney.”

And so, Eisner had been not only responsive, but enthusiastic when Jim had called him from the car in Toronto and asked to meet at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles on May 22. Over breakfast that morning, Jim told Eisner he had made up his mind, and laid out his intention to sell his company to Disney. For Eisner, there was never any doubt that Jim Henson was exactly what the Walt Disney Company needed. “
It’s special because you get a guy like Jim, who brings a new creative vitality to the company,” said Eisner. “That’s really the reason for the whole deal—plus you get the Muppets.”

As much as Disney wanted and needed Jim Henson, Jim, too, needed Disney. “
On a personal level,” wrote Jim, “I think this move will enable me to free up my life and to focus more time on the creative and conceptual aspects of our work, and less time worrying about the business and financial side of everything.” It wasn’t that Jim wasn’t up to the task of running his own company; more than anything, it was a matter of how much of his precious time and energy he wanted to devote solely to business.
“It’s not easy on an organization when you’re doing a lot of other activities,” Jim told the American Film Institute. He knew his extended absences had taken a toll on morale in the New York office in particular, where personalities often clashed and jurisdictions overlapped. “When I went off to do
Labyrinth
 … it pulled me away from my core business, which has been in New York, and it became a major draw there on energy,” he admitted.

Despite Jim’s best efforts, the company, said David Lazer, “was
getting unwieldy, and there were personnel problems and all kinds of stuff.” Brillstein, who had sat in on a few of the endless meetings with Jim and his managers at Henson Associates, had seen firsthand how “
people would go to Jim directly about everything, and he hardly had the time.” “He was a very
good
businessman,” said producer Larry Mirkin, “but that isn’t what he cared about. He cared about the work, he cared about what it meant in the world, and he cared about making the art grow and develop.” Going with Disney, then, would be the first step in lifting the administrative yoke of running a company from Jim’s shoulders—“
the organizational albatross,” as Brillstein called it, “that drained his creative energy.” And he
was getting tired; he had been splitting his time between the creative work that was so much fun and the tedium of running his own company since he was seventeen years old. With Disney’s money and machinery behind him, he could finally be creative full-time. “He was an artist first and foremost,” said Brillstein appreciatively, “and he needed to concentrate on his work and come up with magnificent ideas like he always had.”