Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (25 page)

We think of originators as
sui generis
bootstrappers, blazing their own path. A lack of education can be a boon, forcing an artist to make it up as he goes along. Yet, it would be unrealistic to think of anyone cutting an entire path in the Amazon alone. There is much talk of influences on Jim Henson—so who really
was
and who
wasn’t
an influence?

Articles often cite a walkabout to Europe in 1958 as instilling in Henson the appreciation for fine puppetry, yet Henson discredits this in 1982:

Andrew Terhone is a very good French puppeteer, does some marvelous things, and I’m sure I picked up some things from him but that was, as I say, three or four years into my work at least.
^[48]

Other journalists note his similarity to Edgar Bergen, the radio ventriloquist. Henson recalled hearing Bergen’s characters as a boy: “I tried to imagine how they all looked as they made their jokes, but I don’t remember ever thinking of them as one man and his puppets. To me, they were all human.”
^[49]
While there is no doubt that Henson learned much about humor from Bergen, he also learned more. Perhaps listening to the radio is what taught Henson to be such a “visual thinker,” as is often said of him.

Henson spoke at Bergen’s funeral. His speech was described in the
New York Times
:

Certainly, Edgar Bergen’s work with Charlie and Mortimer was magic. Magic in the real sense. Something happened when Edgar spoke through Charlie—things were said that couldn’t be said by ordinary people … We of the Muppets, as well as many others, are continuing in his footsteps. We’re part of the cycle.”
^[50]

But though Henson’s characters similarly “spoke through” him and said what “couldn’t be said by ordinary people,” ultimately, Henson’s puppets were different from Bergen’s dummies in that they were far more visual, and part of that was an innovative camera trick he devised.

Henson describes the difference:

The ventriloquist is out there facing the audience. The puppeteer works below. In that way, on television, I can watch the monitor and see how my own performance is going. No actor can do that. It’s an eerie feeling but a great one because you become both performer and audience.
^[51]

This innovation was revolutionary, yet has no name. In behind-the-scenes footage of the Muppets, you can see each puppeteer looking down at their feet at a monitor, performing, almost as though in a mirror. But the television monitor is more than a mirror, because left and right are reversed, and so using it tends to take up a lot of focus. When Henson says “you become both performer and audience,” he is implying that though you yourself are moving your hand, you might be surprised by what you see on screen, being from a different perspective than your own. For this reason, watching the Muppet performers backstage has the funny look to it of dancing while being
tethered
by the constant eye contact with a TV monitor. A
New York Times
reporter described Henson watching a monitor “as if he were waiting with some vague hunger at a microwave oven.”
^[52]
It is an intense focus.

For Caroll Spinney, his monitor is tiny and sits inside the belly of his Big Bird costume. What this does for the performer is to allow him to become a director of the scene—to position his character in the frame in a deliberate way—and to use the subtlest of head tilts to convey emotion. More than that, it functions much like Errol Morris’s Interrotron, a camera system set up so that a person can be interviewed while looking into the eyes of an interviewer. Both Henson’s monitors and Morris’s function in essence as eye-contact-creating machines, because when Kermit is looking out into the audience and it feels like he is looking at you, that is because he really
is
looking out
at Jim Henson
, who was watching the performance on his monitor. The puppet and puppeteer are locked in eye contact through the monitor system, just as Morris and his interviewee really
are
making eye contact, and empathizing—as humans do.

It’s easy to miss how incredible this invention was. Adding a screen into the equation is key. It means the puppeteer is actually performing gestures for himself to delight in. The real innovation is in using TV to watch
yourself
.

Journalists often portray Henson as being influenced by Burr Tillstrom of
Kukla, Fran and Ollie
or by Bil and Cora Baird’s
Life with Snarky Parker
. Tillstrom and the Bairds had cut their teeth in live puppet theaters, where the performer crouches behind a wooden puppet stage, performing by feel, not really able to know what the audience sees. Both outfits televised puppetry before Henson, and he would eventually become friends with them. At a Puppeteers of America gathering, they can all be seen sitting around a table together, smiling. However, neither of these forbears used an extra monitor the way Henson did, and as a result, they didn’t discover the need for softer puppets that gave Henson’s Muppets their incredibly subtle expressions. Henson explains:

A painted expression on a doll is all right when the audience isn’t up too close, but on television it’s very important that you put life and sensitivity into a puppet’s face. I learned early on that the Muppets would have to have a flexibility.
^[53]

Tillstrom helped Henson find an apartment in New York, an agent, and his first “tech guy,” Don Sahlin. Tillstrom even used a backstage monitor in his show. However, according to one archive, it was used to watch other performers, not his own performance:

[Tillstrom] operates standing erect, behind a translucent screen, resting his puppet-clad arms on a ledge and keeping his eyes to the right, watching a tiny monitor-screen that shows him what the kids and Fran are doing out front.
^[54]

Even so, by the time Henson met Tillstrom in 1960, he was already five years into his work, and had already developed a monitor system of his own. Likewise, the Bairds may have given Henson the idea to lip-sync to records on TV, a staple of his
Sam and Friends
work, but he was too old to have been influenced by their puppet show
Life with Snarky Parker
. Essentially, Henson learned a little bit from many people, but avoided being
overly
influenced.

Henson’s humor was influenced by listening to Bergen and
The Shadow
on the radio as well as many visual artists. Falk notes, “Jim loved comics and cartoons and collected books of Pogo, Peanuts, Dennis the Menace, Li’l Abner, Charles Addams, Jules Feiffer, Roger Price, James Thurber, and Johnny Hart.”
^[55]
Since his empire was often compared to Disney’s, especially in the later period, Henson was asked whether Disney was one of his main influences. His answer is clearly measured but declines the invitation:

Ah, I love Disney’s stuff, you know all of his early animation stuff in particular, I always enjoyed very much. I don’t think there’s any main influences on me.
^[56]

When asked if he resisted the comparison, he said, “Yes, I do.”
^[57]
An eternal pluralist, Henson seemed more influenced by artists
working for
Disney than by the man himself. Nelson recalled Henson’s excitement over a balloon-animal performer from Disneyland named Wally Boag.
^[58]
On his first trip to Disneyland, Henson bought an animation stand and camera and played around making a cat-and-mouse film.
^[59]
Henson was especially interested in a few of the animators who
left
Disney—the creators of Pogo and Mr. Magoo.
^[60]
But Disney changed the face of popular entertainment, and Henson acknowledged that Disney’s “big fantasy films, animated films that he did over the years were certainly an influence on me.”
^[61]

Though influenced by many, Henson didn’t live in the shadow of anyone. He gave this advice:

Many of the things I’ve done in my life have basically been self-taught … if you learn too much of what others have done, you may tend to take the same direction as everybody else.
^[62]

Perhaps the way around the anxiety of influence is to combine as many good things as possible into your style. You cannot help but draw on the past if you wish to innovate. Henson describes his innovation of TV puppetry modestly: “I made extensive use of the mouth, and combined a lot of technology other people were using.”
^[63]
It sounds simple: combine a lot of technology. And yet buying the latest iPhone or tablet won’t turn you into an innovator.

When we look at the technology developed by Disney, Henson, and Pixar, we start to notice that, like the puppeteer, it seems tethered to something. When Disney developed the multi-plane camera, a ten-foot-tall contraption that pointed a camera down through five panes of glass, he did it in order to make
Snow White
, a story he told and retold to anyone who would listen.
^[64]
When Pixar created the RenderMan program that made computer graphics
move
, they did so to achieve their dream of making the first full-length computer-animated film. When Henson invented the monitor-feedback system, he did it in order to make his characters look more alive on TV. All of them invented new technology, yet none of them did so for the sake of technology; they did it for the sake of art. They invented a technology that would help them achieve their narrative needs. They were working on art
first
.

For artist-entrepreneurs, tech—when it is innovative—grows in tandem with the needs of the artist. Tech follows ideas. It
hugs
them—closely.

HOW TO USE NEW MEDIA
WITHOUT LOOKING LIKE A CHUMP

When Henson was in his fifties, he made
The Jim Henson Hour.
In its “Inner Tube” segments, it featured a computer-generated backdrop that was quite new for the time in order to create a control room filled with TVs. Looking back, it appears to work a lot like the Internet does today—Ted Danson magically appears on a TV set and converses with Kermit in real time, erasing distance and reveling in simultaneity. But in hindsight, it’s pretty schlocky. It uses technology in a way that calls attention to itself—it’s almost a celebration of technology for technology’s sake. And the trouble with technology is that it keeps changing, so what’s super cool and new today might just be old hat tomorrow. More than any other genre, futurism dates itself quickly.

What made “Inner Tube” schlocky? Henson was trying too hard to
keep up
with the times. The Electric Mayhem were updated to a slick MTV-looking crew whose futuristic keyboardist was named Digit. They’re totally unlikable and less interesting to watch than a real music video from the era. “Inner Tube” is reminiscent of executives today who suggest a “social media initiative” headed by an intern. It’s using technology when it doesn’t fit a purpose—just for the sake of keeping up with the Joneses.

In the same year, Henson also made
The Storyteller
, which used music video production plus magic lantern storytelling of folk tales. This combination of old and new was graceful, beautiful, and enduring. Today, it still looks fantastic. But Henson used a digital “paint box” here, too. What makes
The Storyteller
’s technology good?

The Storyteller
used technology to service the story. The good use of technology had to evolve to an end. The “Inner Tube” segments of
The Jim Henson Hour
had no story—the story was just a demonstration of the tech. The tech was its own empty achievement. To be fair, “Inner Tube”
didn’t have much R&D time to find a story before being hurried onto
The Jim Henson Hour.
The Storyteller
, on the other hand, had Oscar-winning screenwriter Anthony Minghella. It won BAFTA Awards and an Emmy.
^[65]
One gets the sense that Henson used flash-in-the-pan tech tricks for “Inner Tube” mainly in order to appear attractive to Disney to give him the deal he wanted for their impending merger. It was almost as though Henson knew that what many large, well-established corporations value is the
appearance
—not the reality—of innovation.

TO CGI OR NOT TO CGI

Since the 1995 hit
Toy Story
, there has been a great shift in animation from analog to digital in order to “catch up” with Pixar, a shift that has turned hand-drawn animation into something of a lost art.
Toy Story
was an amazing film, but sadly, after its box-office success, Disney—under Michael Eisner—“shut down hand-drawn animation at the studio” and started their own secret computer lab in an attempt to keep up with the times.
^[66]
It’s a classic wrongheaded business move. Because Pixar and digital animation were beating Disney at the box office, they decided to stop doing what Disney does best and start trying to copy Pixar. Similarly, Ray Katzenberg left Disney to found DreamWorks, and made
Shrek
using another California CGI studio. It’s typical competitive thinking.

But Eisner’s decision failed to consider that it wasn’t Pixar’s tech that was beating them; it was their story. Disney’s animators complained of their management in 2003 that “[t]he unique traditions of visual storytelling, humor and personality animation on which the Walt Disney Studio had thrived, gave way to politically correct sloganeering, stale one-liners and film seminar formulae to which audiences have failed to respond.”
^[67]
In short, it was the stories of Disney’s films that should have been improved, not the tech.

With the exception of “Inner Tube,” this is absolutely an un-Hensonlike approach. Henson’s relationship to digital technology was decidedly pro—he delighted in tinkering with cameras and toys—but again, it’s not about the tech you use, but in how you use it.

Henson’s “Monster Eats Machine” bit is a classic that he did on
Ed Sullivan
,
The Muppet Show
, and a Muppet Meeting Film. A state-of-the-art piece of office gadgetry has a built-in tape recorder that explains all its features. As it describes them, a monster gleefully rips it off and eats it. This is, at its best, Henson’s attitude toward technology. A monster knows tech is there to be eaten. Technology lives and dies by its
people
. But after the monster has devoured the entire machine, including the tape player, the machine explains its own self-destruct mechanism, and that destroys both it and the monster. The tech has been destroyed in irreverent glee. But what remains is the intention of the inventor, another
person
. Machines are just pieces of junk, we see, but the true players in this drama are the monster and the voice on the tape recording—the person who made the junk.