Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (19 page)

As proof that differing socioeconomic systems do not
deter the Muppets, in 1983, Big Bird starred in the first co-production between
a U.S. television network and the People’s Republic of China.
Big Bird in
China
, which aired in both countries, had the bird functioning as a
goodwill ambassador, learning about China.… A year after
Big Bird in
China
, Jim Henson made the first of many visits to the Soviet Union,
performing Kermit and meeting with noted Russian puppeteer Sergei Obratzov … culminating in the Muppet involvement in the first joint co-production
between the Soviet Union and the United States. This project was the 1988
special
Free to Be … a Family
, broadcast in both countries through a
satellite hook-up.… The purpose of the special was to emphasize the fact
that kids in the U.S. and Russia are much the same and can relate to one
another, in hopes of bringing peace between the two nations. Coincidentally or
otherwise, the Berlin Wall collapsed the following year, and the Cold War
officially ended.
^[22]

Frank Oz once said, “Jim didn’t think of it in
hit terms.”
^[23]
So when he told CBS that his show would be watched by “every Nielson home in
the country,” that it would have a “forty share” of the ratings, he had a different
reason
than the TV executives. Brillstein said the Hensons wanted to do
everything “for the right reasons.”
^[24]
And so whether you want to enchant a huge number of people for the ratings
dollars or for your ego or, as Henson did, for the togetherness it can inspire,
the result is ironically the same—you can earn a good deal of money.

Many artists today refuse to aim for a broad
audience, because they feel it will water down the quality of their work. If
you seek to please everyone, the saying goes, you will please no one. There is
wisdom to this—often times the more “pop” an artist gets, the less they
actually have to say, the more hollow the work becomes, and the more beholden
to market demands. Yet Henson’s message did not seem to turn hollow even while it
became more expansive to attract more audiences—to get closer to “everyone.”
It’s impressive.

To answer this question of the
real
Jim
Henson, let us return to “Business, Business,” the 1968 skit on
The Ed
Sullivan Show
. Ed Sullivan was shown in primetime to a “family” audience,
and that makes it more properly Henson’s ideal stage than a corporate or
educational show. It’s getting closer to the “everyone” that was Henson’s intended
audience. In “Business, Business,” the puppets were abstract, but the message
was evident: idealists were a threat to the business establishment, the
youthful idealists would win, but they would in turn become businesslike. And
then when it cut to a commercial break, the camera showed the audience.
Remember that businessman without any hint of a smirk? Many men’s wives around
him were happily clapping, and his own wife turned to him for a reaction.
Instead, he sat stoic, unamused.

Now, skip forward nine months to November, when
Henson has returned to
The
Ed Sullivan Show
. He performs a nearly
identical sketch about the conflict between two groups of long-necked puppets. But
this skit is called “Sclrap Flyapp.” They are now clearly aliens on another
planet, and instead of “Business, Business,” the first group says “Sclrap Flyapp.”
A new species comes up and says something different, “Merp.” He even gets the
younger Sclrap Flyapper to say it. A nearly identical fight happens, but this
time when the young innovator wins, he says “Merp.” The idealistic innovator
didn’t
change his tune.

Ending aside, the premise is the same as
“Business, Business,” but Henson altered the details so that it could be a more
accessible comment on society. The eggheads in the audience could still sit and
ponder the “underlying symbolism of it all,” but it was no longer simply about
the conflict he was in. “Sclrap Flyapp” wouldn’t offend businessmen. It was
about a broader human tendency to distrust those in new groups. By making “Business,
Business” into “Sclrap Flyapp,” it became more abstract and more universal.
Perhaps, Henson likely hoped, that man in a suit would crack a smile.

With “Sclrap Flyapp,” Henson invited the outside
in. The real Henson started as a young idealist artist, and he remained an
artist throughout his career. But he cultivated a universal appeal in order to
try to bring the whole world into
his
fold, as it were.

In
Fraggle Rock
, the Minstrel’s goal is
to “unite the rock with music.” In the
New York Times
, Henson said, “I
want to unify everybody,” referring to a spiral staircase in the center of the
new offices. Unification was so deeply embedded in his mentality that it became
part of his business’s architecture.

If we are looking for a way to become more
successful, more
Hensonlike
in our own careers and lives, we might start
by trying to see beyond our own culture. Each one of us, whether we like it or
not, is entrenched—stuck—in our own place and time. We speak a certain
language, operate under a certain economic system, have a certain idea of what
is and isn’t cool. And to see
around
our culture, it makes sense that we
must first see our selves clearly—to picture ourselves, perhaps, as aliens on a
strange planet, or silly puppets.

Watching these
Ed Sullivan
appearances from the late sixties
and early seventies, we can see many specters of “Sclrap Flyapp.” In “The Wild
String Quartet,” a jazz drummer comes into conflict with classical musicians.
“Man-Na-Ma-Na” is similar, but with pop instead of classical. In one skit, a
giver—Santa Claus—encounters takers, a band of thieves. In “The Art of Visual
Thinking,” a hip Kermit meets a square, and optimist meets pessimist in “The
Happy Girl Meets a Monster.” It starts to become apparent that a recipe for a
Hensonlike skit is to put two different worldviews together, and to let the
ensuing conflicts turn into comedy. This trend can be seen throughout Henson’s
career as it built to the grand proportions of species such as the Mystics versus
the Skeksis, or a whole ecosystem with the Fraggles, Doozers, and Gorgs.

Like a clam worrying a piece of sand into a
pearl, Henson seemed to be constantly turning over this problem—the paradox of
outsides and insides—in his work. Each of us can see only so much of the world,
and others see a different chunk than we do. It’s something we really can’t avoid,
and it causes conflicts in all of our lives. If you hear your friends laughing,
it brings you joy, but if you hear a group of strangers laughing, it makes you
insecure. Are they laughing
at you
? This inclusion/exclusion feeling
holds us back. But if you closely watch Henson’s works, they seem to offer a
way out, especially
Fraggle Rock
, as the DVD interviews with the show’s
writers and producer make clear:

Duncan Kenworthy:
Underpinning it all was this idea
that as Jocelyn said Jim wanted to stop conflict. So it was a sort of layered
approach. That if you want to stop war in the world, well how do you do that?
Well, it’s about conflict resolution. And how do you teach people to resolve
conflicts amicably? And obviously, adults are somehow lost causes so let’s
approach the kids … so then this idea I think about different perspectives
got incorporated, so that the notion that everyone looking at the world from
their own point of view had a particular perspective, and then if you somehow
reversed the perspective and were able to take on other peoples’ perspectives
and see that in fact even though if it was opposed, it was very similar to your
own, maybe that would loosen those conflicts. The Gorgs think of the Fraggles
in the same way the Fraggles think of the Doozers, that came from that.

Jerry Juhl:
And all three of these species, they are
interdependent in various ways. They really need each other and have no idea
why they need each other.

Jocelyn Stevenson:
The kid was the only one watching who
could see all the inner relationships, which we were hoping would make people
go, oh wait a minute, so they could understand the Gorgs, they could understand
the Fraggles, and they could understand the Doozers, and see why they couldn’t
understand each other.
^[25]

In short,
Fraggle Rock
showed kids how
the paradox
works
. A group is called a cult from the outside. From the
inside it is called a family. The key is to be able to see it from both sides—to
understand that it, truly, is both.

The paradox applies to any group of humans you
can name—families, religions, colleges, political parties, countries, ethnic
groups, subcultures, economic classes, corporations, start-ups, bands, high
school cliques, gangs, and professions. They look one way from the inside and
another way from the outside. The paradox of outsides and insides seems to show
up thematically in Henson’s work, and always with a sort of lighthearted
positivity. To me, that suggests that Henson believed there was a way out of
society’s perpetual conflicts.

Henson’s puppetry was able to rise above the
paradox—to break free of commercials or the stigma of children’s TV. Part of
his ability to garner universal appeal was that he looked within each group to
find that which was human. You might say he spoke to the wise “inner child” in
us, and perhaps this is why his work was so often misunderstood as being
childish.

ADULTHOOD IS ANOTHER CULT

Muppets writer Jerry Juhl once said the success of the
Muppets “has something to do with the fact that it crosses over generational
lines. It reminds adults of childhood and innocence. There’s a sweetness we get
away with without being sentimental.”
^[26]
By seeing the good people inside all of us, Henson treated his audience as innocents.
This wasn’t childish of him. But to the cult of adulthood, it seemed like kids’
stuff.

Children, it should be noted, exist almost 100
percent in the gift economy. Children do not have jobs, money, or transactions
with their friends and family. Their meals are given to them, and at Christmas,
they are bestowed mountains of gifts. They give their parents back affection,
but for the most part, they are given far more than they have any hope of
repaying. If karma works, then they will go out into the world and behave
generously, perhaps to their own children one day. Someone once said that all
children are artists, but adulthood avails us of this habit. It makes sense, then,
that while art tends not to pay, children’s books, toys, and television is a huge
market. Adults, it seems, are far more willing to buy art if it is a gift for a
child.

But Jim Henson was determined to make art for
adults
.
Muppets writer Jerry Juhl remembered: “Jim would pound on the desk and say, ‘We
are not doing children’s puppetry here! … He wanted to make puppetry for
adults.”
^[27]
So, in 1975, six years into
Sesame Street
, Henson joined the original
cast of
Saturday Night Live
, creating weekly skits where he puppeteered a
group of unhappily married aliens. It was not out of character. In 1971, the
Muppets had performed in Nancy Sinatra’s Las Vegas nightclub act in an attempt
to escape puppetry’s G-rated stigma. Henson said, “I don’t particularly like
people to think that’s all we do. We have always worked in the realm of adults.”
^[28]

Yet, even though Henson pitched a primetime
Muppet Show to all three major US networks, they had no interest. “Why would
adults want to watch puppets?” the networks asked. Henson said in
The
Saturday Evening Post
, “It’s something I’ve always faced, this slight
condescension toward puppets. I think of Edgar Bergen, a very sophisticated
man, who always worked to an adult audience—in theaters, vaudeville,
nightclubs, radio, movies, TV. But it’s always been practically impossible to
talk the networks into any kind of puppet show for adults.”
^[29]

Although ABC did not pick up
The Muppet Show
,
they did pay for a couple of pilots in addition to what they really thought
Henson should do, an Afterschool Special. In classic irreverent style, Henson gave
them a raucous special called “Out to Lunch.” Henson explained the premise:

The entire staff of ABC-TV goes out to lunch, and all
these wild people break into the studio and take over. It’s really a parody of
commercial television.
^[30]

The pilot Henson gave them was even wilder. Falk
writes, “It was titled ‘Sex and Violence with The Muppets’ (Jim’s
effort to make it clear that he could work for adult audiences), but
researchers at ABC got negative reactions so the show was promoted as
The
Muppet Show
.”
^[31]
In the CBS pitch reel, a salesman promises that God will bestow ratings upon
the show. Kermit’s reaction to this spiel was quite adult: “What the
hell
was
that all about?”
^[32]
It’s a word you don’t see in children’s television, but strangely, it sounded
innocent coming from Kermit.

What unites all adults? The fact that we were
all once children. Uniting adults is a very wise thing for a self-supporting
adult to do. Trying to be edgy and hard as so many “serious” artists do
prevents them from reaping the benefits of a truly
universal
audience.
In exposing that
everyone
, deep down, is childish—is meek, innocent, and
goofy, and has a sense of wonder and a capacity for joy—Henson’s
Muppet
Show
, when it finally received funding from London’s ITC, broke down the barrier
between adulthood and childhood.

Alex Rockwell recalled:

When it came on, I had that very common experience for
the whole family sitting down and watching. And I can remember laughing at
jokes and then turning and seeing my father laugh at the same time, and for
some reason that’s what made it this very special show, that was very different
from other television that was out there.
^[33]

What is so different about that? It’s not that TV could make
a teenage girl laugh. Or that it could make a middle-aged father laugh. It’s
that something could make them
both
laugh at
the same time
. Today,
even films like
Shrek
and
Toy Story
, which aim at universality,
tend to make adults and children laugh at different times, with physical humor
for the tykes and innuendo for mom and dad.

The Muppet Show
actually achieved what Henson
couldn’t in that early
Ed Sullivan
skit—he made that woman’s husband
laugh. It took years of insistence that his puppets could work for adults, but
eventually the grown-ups gave in. At the height of the
Muppet Show
’s
popularity,
Time
magazine wrote, “Stop giggling and pay attention,
because we are going to discuss what may be the only adult show on television.”
^[34]
Not only was it an adult show, it was
the only adult
show. The
Saturday
Evening Post
said 75 percent of its audience were adults.
^[35]

The
Post
continued:

These little open-bottomed sacks with outrageous
expressions have taken on genuine personalities and are much more humanly
genuine and complex than the stock police, hospital and soap opera series which
clog our networks.
^[36]

In those days,
Sesame Street
, too, had a
large adult viewership, including my own grandfather, a retired textile
salesman in his fifties. Going back to watch
Sesame Street
“Classic,” as
it’s now branded, it rather resembles MTV’s Liquid Television cartoons—clearly
made with adults in mind. Originally, as
Sesame Street
writer Joseph
Bailey put it, “an effort was made to make the show fresh and entertaining to
adults as well as children so there would be less chance of adults changing the
channel.”
^[37]
Sesame
Street
’s first head writer, Jeff Moss, said, “I used to
say to the writers, ‘You’ve got two jobs. One is to do a television show that a
four-year-old wants to watch. The second is to do a show that you want to watch.”
^[38]
Today, because of the Barney-driven nineties, much of this spirit has been
lost, which is a shame, because without Henson and Stone’s vaudevillian sense
of humor,
Sesame Street
is just a philanthropist, a room of child
psychologists, and Elmo. Most adults would turn down such a dinner party.

On the other hand, in 1983, none of the creators
of
Fraggle Rock
seem to think it was a children’s show at all, and in
fact, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which funded it, put it in the
“Variety” department, not “Kids.” Producer Larry Mirkin said, “Because it
wasn’t a sitcom and it wasn’t a kids show we could just tell whatever story we
wanted to tell.”
^[39]
Netflix may categorize the show today as “feel-good” and “family-friendly” and
certainly children watched it, but according to one director it was too
intelligent to be a children’s show. Writer Jocelyn Stephenson disagreed: “It
was
exactly
as intelligent as it needed to be to be a kids’ show.”
^[40]

Henson’s “family programming” was not
lobotomized or candy-coated, because he didn’t see an insurmountable difference
between adults and children. Jerry Juhl explained:

We the adults [at
Sesame Street
] doing the
show were entertaining ourselves. We knew that it wasn’t going to work for the
four year olds and five year olds if it didn’t work for us too. And that was a
basic attitude of Jim’s that permeated everything he ever did.… By the
time we got to Fraggle rock, … we didn’t pick an age group, we never
thought about it. We knew that this would be children’s entertainment, but it
was a view of the world and a philosophy of looking at the world that was
important for us and we thought kids could grasp, and get something out of.
^[41]

When choosing the songwriters for
Fraggle Rock
, Juhl
choose Phil Balsam and Dennis Lee, “because it just did not have the
sensibility that this was for little children. It had the sensibility of having
innocence and yet a kind of perceived wisdom.”
^[42]

And though Henson was at one time mad at Cooney
for
Sesame Street
“ruining his life,” it was, perhaps, an advantage to
be underestimated. Universality is rare, which is often why it is misjudged as
simplistic or watered down—things that are much more common. It takes courage
to stand up for something dismissed as childish, and that again makes Henson
rare. Rarity in business is quite advantageous—it means there will be less
competition for your profits.

Working in what is considered a children’s
medium gave Henson the element of surprise. So, when he made a pitch reel for
Sesame
Street
to be shown to adults, it was a pleasant surprise. In one skit,
Muppet execs “boardroom” the title. One suggests a tongue-twister: “The
Itty-Bitty, Farm and City, Witty-Ditty, Nitty-Gritty, Dog and Kitty, Pretty
Little Kiddie Show.” Another Muppet interjects: “Hey. These Kids can’t read or
write, can they? Then how about we call the show … ‘Hey, Stupid!’”
^[43]
This pitch made adults laugh because it put kids on the same level as adults—as
being strong enough to take a joke. We could imagine that a child watching this
clip today might even laugh at its unexpectedness.