Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (10 page)

This “us” feeling began with Henson’s first employee—a woman
who would become his business partner and eventually his wife. In 1954, Henson met
Jane Nebel in his freshman-year puppetry class at the University of Maryland.
^[5]
Falk says that “the class gave Jim an opportunity to assess the talent around
him and he quickly saw that Jane had a lot to offer.”
^[6]
By the start of the next semester, they were working together at
Afternoon
with Inga
, and that summer they launched
Sam and Friends
. This was
the start of the snowball, but it was about to hit a bump.

Three years into the show, Jim Henson left the
show to go on a six-week summer trip in Europe—his “walkabout.”
^[7]
After experiencing bewildering success, the death of his brother, and
graduation from college—in quick succession—Falk writes that “he needed a
break.”
^[8]
Henson later said, “I was going to take the shows off the air—just quit for a
while.” He explained:

The station prevailed upon me; they said, “Look,
we’ll pay you money and you can put somebody else doing the show,” and so I
realized I can get money and at the same time be off painting, so I brought in
a friend of mine—an art student from the University of Maryland—and he worked
with Jane.
^[9]

This summer hiatus—coming at the moment when the snowball
was just staring to coalesce—would have a profound effect on the way Henson ran
his business. Imagine for a moment that you built a television show based on
your sense of humor, personality, and hard work. You kept it going for three
years. What would it take for you to let someone else take over? In an era
before email and texting, Henson’s trip to Europe meant that he truly
gave
up
creative control. It certainly took faith in others.

When Henson came back, the show was still on the air and
doing fine. Through stepping back, Henson learned he
could
step back,
because the show was bigger than just him. This experience set the stage for a
business that may have started with Henson, but became a powerful force of its
own, made up of the collective creativity of all involved.

At the time of the walkabout, Jim and Jane were
both engaged to other people. When Henson returned to the show, re-energized
and sure of purpose, they decided they were meant to be together. Soon they
made it official—they went into business together. Henson recalled:

Janie and I own the company. We set it up that way in
1957, before we were married. We were married in 1959.
^[10]

Henson’s first employee became his business partner as well
as life partner. This had the unique effect that the “us” of his company would
resemble the “us” of marriage, another radical altering of the ego. Henson’s marriage
effectively set the tone for the kind of relationship he would cultivate with
his next employees—that of partnership, family, and brotherhood.

In 1960, the Hensons attended their first
Puppeteers of America festival.
^[11]
The PofA and its festivals—like Henson’s puppetry class—allowed him to scout
and assess talent without a formal hiring process. In 1961, Jerry Juhl joined Muppets
Inc. as a puppeteer, cowriter, and all-around collaborator. Something clicked
between Juhl and the Hensons, and “Jerry jumped at the opportunity and moved to
Washington to work with Jim that August,”
^[12]
Falk explains.

By 1962, Henson had used the PofA to meet many
talented puppeteers, and he had even become the president of the organization
that year. One such “connection”—as we might call it today—was Burr Tillstrom,
a friend who was at the time “the most successful puppeteer working on
television,”
^[13]
according to Falk. Tillstrom introduced Henson to Don Sahlin, who would become
his next hire.

Sahlin was a puppet builder, and Henson first contracted
him to build Rowlf in 1962 to use in commercials. The next year, Henson moved
to New York and rented an office. With more business, Henson hired Sahlin on
salary as a builder, designer, and all-around tech guy with expertise in stop-motion
and explosions.

Next came Frank Oz.
The Saturday Evening Post
explained that Henson had met Oz three years earlier:

Over the years, Henson has judiciously expanded his
team, tracking down expert puppeteers in the manner of a major league baseball
scout. In 1961, as an example, Henson attended the National Puppetry Convention
in Carmel, California, where he spotted Jerry Juhl and Frank Oz working in
tandem. With Jane Henson pregnant with their first child, Jim promptly hired
Juhl, who was 23, to take her place with the Muppets—but Frank Oz, a prodigy
among puppeteers, was barely 17.

Henson exercised patience and waited for Oz to
come close to majority. In 1964, he signed him as a puppeteer.
^[14]

At this point, with a master puppeteer on board, Juhl
switched to writing—“for self-protection.”
^[15]
Each time someone new is squashed by the snowball, it seems, the mix changes. According
to Juhl:

In the beginning, it was just Jim and Jane and me and
the three of us did everything. We all did a lot of writing together at first.
Then Frank Oz joined later, and with this talented performer with us now, I
could concentrate more on the writing which had been my strong suit. So the
transition from performing to writing just sort of happened, I had no idea at
the beginning that that’s how it would turn out.
^[16]

During this time, Jane spent much of her time raising the
family, which would eventually become quite large at five children. Roles were
shifting, with work tending to find the person who was best suited to it. To
picture the snowball in the sixties, it was part office, part playroom. Oz recalled:

It was on 53rd Street and
2nd Avenue where the first New York City Muppets Studio would be. It was only
two cramped rooms, one flight up, where Jim, Don Sahlin (the Muppets’ puppet
builder), Jerry Juhl, (the Muppets’ writer) and I (the Muppets’ performer),
worked.

In the front room, there
was the counter where I would practice lip syncing day after day with a Muppet
character; where Jerry would have his small desk pushed up against the wall
working on Muppet scripts … where Jim would lie almost horizontal in his
beloved Eames chair as he read and created.… The second room was the
workshop where Don would work on making the Muppets and creating the special
effects. The work was often uncomfortable, painful, exhausting, and intense.
But we still had fun.

The main feature of the office was not the Eames chair, Henson’s
Shrine to the Almighty Dollar, or the dartboard hung on the wall. It was the
four exterior walls that created a space for these four men to work together.
It made physical a kind of invisible glue holding the snowball together.

In the beginning of
The Muppet Movie
,
Robin asks Kermit, “Is this about how the Muppets
really
got started?”

“Well, it’s approximately how it happened,”
Kermit answers.

The Muppet Movie
is a fable of the
Henson’s company’s growth, but the true story has the same structure. For the
Muppets, the road to Hollywood really did start with an agent named Bernie and
ended happily with the beneficence of a producer named Lew Lord—or rather, Lord
Lew Grade. Along the way, Kermit picks up other stragglers who share his dream—affectionately
called weirdos. Kermit begins his journey alone in the swamp, and similarly, Henson
grew up in Mississippi, playing in a swamp, an “idyllic”
^[17]
childhood. In the movie, Kermit collects brothers and sisters everywhere he
goes, until there are enough Muppets in the end to fill a warehouse.

One quality of a snowball is that the bigger it
gets, the more internal cohesiveness— collective gravity—it possesses. When
people worked well with Henson, he tried to keep them. Fifteen years later,
that would remain true. Duncan Kenworthy explained, “At the end of
Labyrinth
,
rather than laying everyone off, Jim wanted to start a permanent workshop,
where research and development could be continued.”
^[18]
This became The Jim Henson Creature Shop. There, Anthony Minghella was brought
in to write the script for
The Storyteller
. When it was finished, and Minghella
started to pack up, Henson stopped him to say it “was no good reason to leave,
just because the project was over.”
^[19]
If people worked well together, they should continue to work together—that was
what Henson believed. Fortunately, he also had the means to keep them together:
paying jobs.

There is a reason these movies touched us and
continue to, because while the lines may be simple and sweet, Henson and his
crew truly believed them. When Kermit sings “Getting there is half the fun,
come share it with me,” it’s a basic sentiment, but one that was at the heart
of the company’s philosophy. More somberly, at Henson’s funeral, all the people
he had brought together and
kept
together sang “Just One Person,” a
favorite of his that says that if just one person believes in you, that’s
enough to make someone else believe it, and someone else, and so on. It ends
with the poignant line, “When all these people believe in you … maybe even
you
can believe in you, too.”

The collaboration at Henson’s company came out
in their songs, their plots, and every frame of their work. It’s a big part of
why we like the work. You may not know that Sprocket’s head and his tail are
two different people, or that Rowlf’s head and right hand are two people, but
you know that you like it. It’s just plain fun to watch—because of
collaboration.

FIND YOUR PEOPLE
WITH A SILLINESS AUDITION

A snowball is indiscriminate, but Henson didn’t just pick up
everyone
he met in his life. Jane was one out of a classroom of
students, and Oz was one out of a festival of puppeteers. You need to find the
right
people, people like you.

Puppeteers Karen Prell and Dave Goelz once tried
to put into words what it’s like to “assist” or “right-hand” for another a
puppeteer:

Goelz:
It’s actually really fun to assist, because
you have this exercise in just tuning in, it’s almost like becoming a radio.

Prell:
And it was that way working with Jim, cuz
you’d go to assist him, and you wouldn’t know what was gonna happen. You just
knew that it was gonna be fun and you’d just jump into it and explore and
discover with him and the same way if you were just kinda open to the energy
and went with it, you would surprise yourself. You would constantly surprise
yourself performing, just to see what came out of two people at the same time.
^[20]

Not everyone would be able to “tune in” or “jump in” in this
way. How did Henson know who could do this?

The nice thing about the PofA conferences was
that it allowed Henson to actually watch other puppeteers perform—a kind of
public audition that was more collegial than businesslike. Later, Henson held
workshops—a sort of extended audition process lasting a week.

He explained that technical skill was just
one
of the things he was looking for:

Generally we’ll have a series of auditions.… We
look for a basic sense of performance, a sense of humor. We look for the type
of person who sparks to what you think everybody else would spark to. You have
to find people who put their whole performance into their hand.
^[21]

Often, Henson hired people who had never puppeteered before.
Terry Angus said that “some of [the new hires on
Fraggle Rock
] were just
actors, jugglers, and mime artists and a few of them had never had a puppet on
their arms in their lives.”
^[22]
When asked if puppetry could be taught, he answered yes:

It can be taught if there’s a basic kind of
receptivity there. It’s hard to know. I so often don’t know myself and so
usually what we do is after that first series of auditions, we go through a
workshop period.… We’ll work with all of them for a week.…
[W]e basically know whether or not the person will become a good puppeteer or
not. The whole process of learning our style and becoming good at it takes
nearly a year, I would say, at least.
^[23]

One such trainee was Fran Brill, an actress who had done
voice-over work. In 1970, she saw the call for a workshop in the want-ad
section of a trade magazine:

One day I picked up
Backstage
(every
actor’s favorite periodical) and there was an ad saying that Jim Henson was
looking to train puppeteers for an upcoming Ed Sullivan Christmas special …
and they were paying $75 a week to the attendees! On a whim, I called the Jim
Henson Company explaining that I had no experience whatsoever with puppeteering
but a meeting was scheduled soon after. I came to the company’s offices and
there was Jim Henson, Frank Oz and a trunk full of puppets.
^[24]

Henson first narrowed his search with that magazine,
Backstage
.
Then, he winnowed them down further using that trunk of puppets. Karen Falk
writes:

Over a period of days, Jim could determine who had an
aptitude for Muppet-style puppetry, a sense of comic timing, and, perhaps most
importantly, got along with the team.
^[25]

Reading these accounts, it almost seems like the most
important
thing to display at the interview was an ability to have fun while working
together. Brill said: