Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (24 page)

There seems to be some sleight-of-hand involved in making art pay, almost like the creation of a market bubble whereby the value of your work increases consistently over time because of people’s belief in it. It’s the difference between real dollars and “Disney dollars.” Companies like Pixar, Henson, and Disney built their reputation based on quality that they had to
borrow
to pay for. The value of the company rises, and often makes back more money in the long term with toy sales, resyndication, or video recordings. But the value of the reputation demands even greater expenses, and so the bubble grows only as long as there are passionate artists working at its behest.

And then sometimes you get lucky. Legerdemain aside, Henson
did
earn millions with
Sesame Street
and
The Muppet Show
, because of their quality, and because of the continuous evolution of technology. In both cases, Henson didn’t earn money based on the show
itself
; he earned money
after
the shows were made—almost karmically because it would have been hard to predict at the time. In the days before VHS and Betamax, Henson could sell only music records to fans who wanted to relive a show. But then in the late seventies, home video came along and opened up a new revenue stream. It’s luck, but it’s luck you can’t capitalize on without quality. If a show is cheap, it’s not worth watching once, but if it is
quality
, it can be rewatched, sold, and rented again and again. Today, the Sesame Workshop sells full episodes of
Sesame Street
“Classics” for $1.99 on YouTube. I don’t think that anyone in 1969 could have predicted that—not even the forward-looking Jim Henson. But it’s just the kind of luck innovators tend to hit upon.

WHAT WAS SO INNOVATIVE ABOUT SESAME STREET?
EVERYTHING

One of the most innovative works in Henson’s career was
Sesame Street
, a show many of us take for granted. Looking back, he took an extreme gamble in 1968 joining up with the Children’s Television Workshop to change the face of children’s television, especially when he was making a pretty good living at the time and just starting to break into experimental film. Looking back, few of us could imagine it. Here was an established entertainer, famous for commercials and late-night acts, who could sink his time into anything—documentaries, a nightclub, a Broadway show—and he ended up doing exactly what he said he
didn’t
want to do—children’s puppetry. Not only that, but joining
Sesame Street
required him to give up his commercial revenue in order to do something that paid quite little—nonprofit television. Why?

His agent, Bernie Brillstein, saw it as a natural fit: “It seemed perfect for him. He always did odd and unusual projects and this seemed to fit the mold.”
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Put simply,
Sesame Street
was innovative. The never-before, the what-if, the why-not,
Sesame Street
was more experimental than anything else Henson had done in the sixties, and that was saying a lot. A collaboration between Madison Avenue, Harvard curriculum experts, nonprofit television, and network comedy writers,
Sesame Street
took a technology—television—and asked, what can we do with it to help people?

Today
Sesame Street
is an American institution, the longest-running children’s show in history. In order to be part of this moment in history, Henson relaxed his stance against making kids’ TV, and he didn’t negotiate for a big salary. Davis wrote that his “compensation was modest by show-business standards, perhaps an accommodation made to the fledgling nonprofit enterprise.”
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Henson stood to gain very little financially from joining
Sesame Street,
since, according to Brillstein, he
never intended to license toys. Despite all the obstacles, the appeal of
the new
was so strong that Henson decided to not only provide the puppets for the show, but to create many of its original animations.

His daughter Cheryl recalled, “He used to stay up almost all night, painting each and every little stroke for the numbers that would go, you know, count up, and then count back down again.”
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The number films were some of
Sesame Street
’s most iconic bits—and because they are works of art, they are still exciting to watch today. Henson also made stop-motion films using pebbles—they demonstrate three ways to cross a pond or stack themselves into the number twelve. He said it “took about eight hours to shoot these little rocks.”
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Henson clearly did this work not expecting profit. You can’t license a stone. But I think any artist will agree: getting to do a project
worth doing
is actually a very good deal.

Jim Henson joined
Sesame Street
because, as Oz said, he loved breaking barriers. It was a first—a show devoted to social justice that used television in a
new way
—as a tool for change. Michael Davis writes, “Never before had anyone assembled an A-list of advisers to develop a series with stated educational norms and objectives. Never before had anyone viewed a show as a living laboratory, where results would be vigorously and continually tested.”
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Innovation is not the
easy
path. It’s not the road to short-term financial profit. It’s the never-before. The miracle of creation. The first. The first full-length animated movie, the first full-length puppet movie, the first full-length computer animated movie. When you’re working on the never-before, your employees feel exhilarated and invested in their work, and so do you. Everyone does their best, and in that sense, it is of quality. If you create quality, you create value.

Like Henson,
Sesame Street
used an existing technology, television, in a new way. But it’s important to note that it is possible to innovate even with technology that is very old. Do not overlook the potential of old technologies—puppetry, writing, a tribal drum. Innovation is not just about using the latest tools; it’s an itchy temperament that is always looking to surprise itself.

Not a new technology at all, puppetry was many millennia old by the time Henson came along. In 1979,
The New York Times
wrote: “If it’s possible with puppets, Henson will probably try it. ‘His passion,’ said Jerry Juhl, ‘is to push the art form as far as he can.’”
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And while our image of “innovation” often looks like a gadget described in
Wired
magazine, innovation at its best looks timeless, such as the way Henson “pushed the art form” of puppetry.
The New York Times
noted:

Miss Piggy’s emotional range may be the broadest of any puppet in history. In fact, at her best, she may be the first round character in puppet history.
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Frank Oz was an innovative puppeteer. His “tech” was little more than human ingenuity, play, and the tilt of his own hand. Innovation is experimenting, seeing what is possible, using whatever is at hand.

TO REMEMBER IS TO MISREMEMBER, THAT IS, TO IMAGINE
CHANGE THE PAST

When we praise Henson with words like “imaginative,” “creative,” “original,” and “innovative,” we are misrepresenting what it actually means to do something
new
. Creation does not resemble the fiat “Let there be light” out of darkness. Those things that are really and truly new are so unrecognizable to us as to be invisible. Just as it takes a baby a while to see shapes in the shadows, new things confound us. “Creating,” for artists, is then a process of making incremental changes to the familiar in order to let us see—to learn—the new. There is great footage of Henson playing around with googly eyes, shifting the angle a little wider from the nose and looking at the result to determine how it affects the puppet’s personality. He is not inventing eyes; he is more like the “tweaker” that Gladwell describes Steve Jobs as in his 2011
New Yorker
profile. To be original, you
must
play with the familiar.

Copying is the start of any artist’s style. In his first TV show,
Sam and Friends
, Jim Henson regularly lip-synced to other people’s records, and this continued even when he went on national TV, for instance the Rosemary Clooney recording, “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.” In one famous story, a peeved Stan Freberg called Henson up, complaining he hadn’t gotten any credit for the use of his songs. Freberg recalled:

He said well you want some credit? Come on to the show tonight and I’ll give you credit. I came down to the show and he said just stick your head up there any time that you want.… So I said excuse me … my name is Stan Freberg and I’d like a little credit once in a while since you seem to be doing all my records on the Ed Sullivan show … and so Kermit said you want some credit? I said yeah. Well here’s a little credit! And he has this big mallet and they’re pounding me on the head, pounding me down out of sight.
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Today, this would be seen as copyright infringement, since Henson didn’t ask for permission or pay for it. Copyright lawyers have conditioned us to think that artists create something out of nothing and then retain full, exclusive rights to that something. This version of art makes the lawyers and entertainment companies a lot of money. But the truth is that all artists borrow from the work around them, which often contains someone else’s tweaks.

Henson added to what Freberg had done, and his effort and spirit determine the novel-ness of what is now
his
intellectual property—the lip-sync. This is never a clear-cut line, though, and the way it is settled is usually very similar to the Freberg case—by a gentleman’s agreement. In questions of copyright, courts tend to ask, is anyone hurt by the borrowing? Is it profits, potential profits, or simply hurt feelings? Can this damage be assuaged? Artists might ask themselves, does the borrowing hurt or help the person being copied? Arguably, Henson helped Freberg’s career with this exposure.

In the current climate of copyright litigiousness, many artists look to the public domain for raw material. Copyright, according to Hyde, was intended as a way to speed works
into
the public domain where they are free for all, originally lasting only fourteen years, renewable only once.
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Today, companies like Disney have lobbied for copyright to include the author’s lifetime
plus
seventy years. For that reason, smart artists tend to tweak the uncopyrightable—works like Shakespeare and the Bible that are so old their copyrights have clearly expired—or tropes from the never-copyrighted: folk tales, fairy tales, and legends.

Henson avoided copyright problems by writing many parts for witches, princes, and kings. Early in his career, many of his shows drew on fairy tales:
Tales from the Tinkerdee
,
Hey, Cinderella!
and
The Frog Prince
, much like Walt Disney before him. Even in the last years of his life, Henson drew on folktales to make “The Storyteller,” recombining Russian Cinderella tales with Celtic myths. Folklore allows an artist to play with
what’s there
without getting sued.

Both Henson and Disney also drew on an American theatrical tradition—the vaudeville variety circuit. In the thirties, Walt Disney hired vaudeville comedians to perform silly gestures for his animators as inspiration for the seven dwarfs. Many
Sesame Street
comedy routines were adapted from vaudeville by director Jon Stone and “reinterpreted for our young audience,”
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according to writer Joseph Bailey. In
The Muppet Show
, “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady,” was a song popularized by Groucho Marx. Kermit sings it with a hat and cane, jacket and bowtie, the same ones used for “Simon Smith and His Dancing Bear,” to give it the feel of the variety act tradition. English dance hall numbers were also used, such as “Waiting at the Church” and “Any Old Iron.” These tongue-twisting audience sing-alongs used traditional songs that were considered “standards.” The songwriters likely copyrighted them, but it was harder to prosecute infringement when a musician moved his act from theater to theater each night.

We might think of all those egghead writers who draw on Shakespeare as pale-faced grammar-dusters, but many times, they’re doing it out of economic necessity. You can’t play around with David Foster Wallace’s or Jonathan Franzen’s characters, or a lawyer may issue a cease-and-desist letter. Cinderella, a folk tale, you can always play around with. No one can own her.

Doing a new take on an old tale is something Henson did throughout his career, from
Hey, Cinderella!
to
The Storyteller
’s “Sapsorrow,” from “The Frog Prince” to “Hans My Hedgehog.” In fact, he used these old standards many times over, creating multiple versions of the tales. Much of Henson’s style as a creator can be linked back to his love of jazz, and its theme-and-variations approach.

Jerry Nelson was asked how he invented the voice for Pa Gorg. He answered:

My bad impression of Wallace Beery. If I did a good impression, people would say, “Oh, he’s just doing Wallace Beery, or Jimmy Durante.” Doing bad impressions makes it seem like I do all kinds of characters. Shh, don’t tell anyone.
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Many artists will recognize this process—doing an impression so badly people hear it as new. By copying, the flaws in our copy often alert us to the skills that are uniquely ours. Like dreaming, art reassembles the familiar into something new. It is in the
misremembering
or the
reimagining
that the actual “creation” occurs.

REIMAGINING TELEVISION
BECOME BOTH PERFORMER AND AUDIENCE

Henson didn’t invent puppetry. He was certainly aware of his place in a longstanding tradition. He noted in 1979, “Puppetry has been around for thousands of years.”
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Henson brought the ancient art of puppetry to a new medium and, better than anyone else, adapted it to look good on TV. But according to Henson, “When I started out, I didn’t know that much about puppets, and not having seen that many, I wasn’t overly influenced by what had gone before.”
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