Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (14 page)

Henson’s art relied on keeping a core group of people
together. But to keep your collaborators with you long enough, you need to keep
paying
them. Without financial incentive, collaborators tend to move away,
get families, get other jobs—ones that
do
pay. Art alone doesn’t usually
pay the bills, so what is an artist to do? Go where the money is. Jim Henson
learned early that for his generation and line of work, that meant commercials.

Effectively, making TV commercials was Henson’s second
job to finance the rest of his artistic projects. In the 1950s and ’60s, he made
hundreds of commercials, and was quite successful. As Henson put it, “At that
point, I was making a lot of money.”
^[1]
Money is a good thing, and Henson himself admitted, “I rather enjoyed having
money in my jeans.”
^[2]
But like most artists’ “day jobs,” it was not his passion. In fact, Henson felt
ambivalent about commercials.

He explained to an interviewer that he decided
to stop doing commercials in 1969, and didn’t do another until 1981:

Judy Harris:
You’re not in the commercial
business anymore, are you?

Henson:
Not really.… [I]t was a pleasure to get
out of that world. If you’ve ever worked in commercials, it’s a world of
compromise and a world of …

Judy Harris:
You’re right. I used to think it would
be fun to be behind the scenes and produce something like that, and I did work
in an ad agency for a year, and I hated every minute of it. You’re right about
compromise. I was constantly told to talk down to people and pick the lowest
common denominator, and it really made me grit my teeth. I was very unhappy.

Henson:
Yeah, it’s interesting when you’re working at
the lower levels through agencies and that sort of thing, it’s really quite
difficult.… [B]ut even [when you’re at the level where they respect you
and your opinion] it’s still a matter of every meeting is a meeting with a
dozen people, who all have opinions and the whole process is really not easy on
a creative person. So, anyhow.
^[3]

Henson’s Vonnegutian so-it-goes signoff implies he was happy
to leave his past—the frustration of commercial work—in the past. But
commercials, as they say,
paid the bills
.

In Lewis Hyde’s conclusion to
The Gift
,
he explains that painter Edward Hopper’s career required a “day job” for many
years:

For years before he established himself as a painter,
Edward Hopper used to hire himself out as a commercial artist to magazines with
names like
Hotel Management
. Hopper was an expert draftsman, and the
illustrations and covers he drew during those years are skillfully rendered.
But they are not art. They certainly have none of Hopper’s particular gift, none
of his insight, for example, into the way that incandescent light shapes an American
city at night.… Hopper’s magazine covers—happy couples in yellow sailboats
and businessmen strolling the golf links—all have the air of assignments, of
work for hire. Like the novelist who writes genre fiction according to a proven
formula, or the composer who scores the tunes for television commercials, or
the playwright flown in to polish up a Hollywood script, Hopper’s work for
magazines was a response to a market demand, and the results are commercial art.
…

In a sense Hopper’s work for magazines should be
considered not a part of his art at all but a second job taken to support his
true labors.
^[4]

Hopper’s career was split in two, and this allowed him to
reserve what Hyde calls a “protected gift sphere” for himself, a space for his
work to grow on its own terms, free from market demand. He spent half the week
in this gift sphere, painting for its own sake, and half the week paying for
that time with magazine covers. It wasn’t until he was forty-one that his
artwork began to earn him enough of a living to give up the second job.

The commercials Henson made for coffee and
gasoline are like Hopper’s magazine covers. It was a secondary career that
helped him preserve his “protected gift sphere.” It is no surprise, then, that
the sixties—a time of heavy
commercial
work for Henson—was also the most
experimental
time in his career; within the gift sphere, money was not
an issue and his highest boss was his own imagination. In this period, Henson
made wild, out-there projects like
Time Piece
, a nine-minute film that
used jazzy, music-timed cuts to convey meaning, in place of traditional filmic
conventions like dialog or plot.
Time Piece
was nominated for an Oscar,
but not because it was box-office successful—it is the kind of “short” that
makes people think. Other projects Henson was working on at the time included
The
Cube
, a teleplay about existential claustrophobia, and Cyclia, a nightclub
that would feature projections of “light coming through trees” timed to music.
^[5]
In the sixties, Henson also made the incisive documentary
Youth ’68
, and
a show for PBS called “The Muppets on Puppets.” These projects were all
forward-thinking, independent-minded, and very much a gift to viewers. But one
imagines none of them were all that profitable. These projects were “made
possible” because of commercials.

Commercials protected Henson’s art because they
allowed him to do projects based on their merit, not for the money, until, of
course, one came along that made its own money—the surprise hit
Sesame
Street
. It seems advisable, then, for an ambitious artist to take on a
second job like Henson did, in commercials. Yet Henson’s relationship to
commercials was complex. Years later, he advised his Creature Shop not to “get
involved” in commercials. The Shop’s creative supervisor said, “I think [Henson
had] had one or two bad experiences with commercials early on, and decided he
didn’t like doing them, and he wasn’t very keen that the Creature Shop should
get involved.”
^[6]
Commercials can be good money, but they are not to be undertaken lightly by
artists.

An episode of
Fraggle Rock
overtly
criticizes commercials. In “Manny’s Land of Carpets,” the Fraggles find a radio
that they believe to be transmitting wisdom from another world:

“Manny’s got everything you want. Manny’s
got everything you need. Manny wants you.”

“Me?”

“Yes,
you
to get down here to Manny’s
Land of Carpets right now. Your happiness is guaranteed at Manny’s!”

The show parodies our relationship to television—and in
particular—ads. Writer David Young explained it was “a show about the kind of
delusional system that’s projected by people’s belief in the world that seems
to be inside that box in the corner of the room.”
^[7]
The Fraggles almost abandon the rock to search for this land of eternal
happiness, except that they begin fighting—some factions thinking they should travel
instead to Bubba’s Burger Barn, where they were promised something even more
magical: all you can eat.

Television and its ads are a delusional system,
and it takes a special kind of mindset to participate in them without losing
your way as an artist. Henson had to be quite careful when treading these murky
waters.

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
IN BED WITH BAD COMPANY

We think of Henson as artsy-craftsy, philanthropic, and
slightly revolutionary, so it is strange to think of him making commercials for
gasoline, banks, or junk food in good conscience. Part of the problem with ads
is that when you endorse a for-profit business, you never really know who
you’re in bed with.

In 1966, Henson made commercials for prepackaged
Wilson’s sandwich meats that showed Henson enjoying perfectly folded bologna
slices in a fluffy deli roll. Yet later he decided to become a vegetarian.
Though this lifestyle didn’t last, Henson’s work expressed vegetarian leanings.
A 1967
Muppet Show
sketch parodies hunting, in which forest critters
tell the viewers at home to “Stop, children,” using a Buffalo Springfield song
protesting violence. Later, in
The Dark Crystal
, the cruel, militant
Skeksis are gluttons for roast “nebri” meat, a gentle creature that Kira is
seen communicating with in the previous scene.

But if you make commercials, you don’t get paid
to express your reservations about the product. And though Henson was a strong conservationist
in the 1980s, he nearly froze to death in 1968 for an oil company. He noted in
his journal that it was “6 degrees” when they shot footage of a robot pumping
gas for American Oil.
^[8]
Frank Oz recalled that Henson “had walking pneumonia.”
^[9]
It is very strange indeed to think of Henson going to these lengths to promote
an industry that we now associate with oil spills and wars in the Persian Gulf.
But effectively, when you make commercials, you are often helping a for-profit
company with a good deal of money, and often the reason that company has so
much money is due to exploitation and disregard for humanity.

Henson seemed to be somewhat selective in the
kinds of companies he worked for, and at the time, we perhaps didn’t know how
harmful oil dependence or factory farming could be. To see things from Henson’s
perspective, let us take a moment to go back to the 1960s.

Imagine a world without iPhones, without laptops
or e-mail. A time before the mouse, before computer printers. Without GPS or
texting. Nobody you knew had attention deficit disorder, and instead of
checking Facebook, you would dial a friend for a long chat or take a walk down
the street. You worked at an office with typewriters, a telephone switchboard,
and a secretary pool, and a company called IBM was hoping you’d buy some of
their new time-saving devices, a dictation recorder and a word processor that
let you fix mistakes without X-ing them out. So they hired a man named Jim
Henson to make an ad to convince you that your company was missing something.

In the 1967 commercial “Paperwork Explosion,” IBM
salesmen promise their machines will help you keep up with the stacks of paper
that now plague your existence. We are told that “in the past, there always
seemed to be enough time and people to do the paperwork.” But today there is
more paperwork than ever. IBM is here to help us. Henson ends the five-minute
pitch with an inscrutable statement: “Machines should work. People should
think.” It’s a nice idea, but computers didn’t really solve the paperwork
explosion; they merely moved it from filing cabinets onto e-mail servers. In
the arms race of office technology, the company these new tools helped
most
was IBM.

Henson did even more for the growing technology
company, creating entertainment for the salesmen themselves to watch for
inspiration. In the late sixties, Henson made a series of “Coffee Break” films
for IBM’s “100% Club.”
^[10]
The idea is that salesmen would aspire to sell 100 percent of their yearly quota,
and if they did, they would be rewarded with a trip, dinner, entertainment—including
a humorous Muppet film—and recognition. One year, Henson performed live for
this corporate event.

When IBM flew its “Golden Circle”-level salesmen
to the Bahamas, part of their reward was a live performance by Rowlf the Dog.
Henson, Juhl, and Nelson all earned a vacation to Nassau, where Henson was
thrilled to win $75 at the casino.
^[11]
For Henson, a puppet show is a puppet show, and a trip to the islands was
surely appreciated, yet this is not the image we typically have of the bearded
hippy, patiently laying out a shot. It is more like a puppet dancing on a
string for a powerful corporation. One of the problems of work for hire like
this is that Henson effectively affixed his name to IBM’s, and their mission
was quite different from his.

INTO THE LIAR’S DEN
HOW HENSON COULD BRING
HIMSELF TO PROMOTE THIS JUNK

With everything that makes commercials worlds of compromise,
and at their very
best
trying to take your money, how did Henson—an
artist—convince himself to do them?

Henson’s first true “commercials” were for
Wilkins Coffee in 1957,
^[12]
yet he had been doing something commercial-
like
before that. When
Sam
and Friends
went on the air, it needed a sponsor to pay for it. With
network television, since viewers didn’t pay for programming, someone had to.
So, like it or not, some of Henson’s five minutes of airtime would be taken up
by Esskay Meats. Henson had a choice—either air something the sponsor hands you,
or do the spot yourself. If he used the sponsor’s ad, he would be giving up a large
chunk of his five-minute show. If he did the ad himself, he would be making
claims about “quality chicken” and “tender, meaty drumsticks.”
^[13]
This seems—artistically—like a setback, but it wound up
giving him extra time and control. Though it would seem like a hassle to have
to read copy about juicy chicken wings, Henson created skits around these
lines, often tongue-in-cheek.

So, in every episode of
Sam and Friends
,
Henson’s characters did a “brought to you by” spot. Henson’s characters extolled
how Esskay “combines the wonderful taste of pure pork sausage with the
delicious flavor of hickory smoked quality bacon,” how it “cooks to a tender,
meaty richness, every time” how you should get some “soon,
today
!”
[14]
These ridiculous lines, when read with Henson’s slightly off-kilter delivery,
seem even more ridiculous. An early version of Kermit even sings a song about
meat accompanied by his banjo.
^[15]