Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (26 page)

Eisner’s mistake was that it wasn’t the tech that made
Toy Story
great—it was the people who could use tech to suit their artistic goal. If Disney truly wanted to compete with Pixar, they should have increased funding to their hand-drawn animation studio. But by fetishizing the
effects
of innovators, Disney defunded innovation. Today, Pixar president Ed Catmull has taken over Disney Animation Studios, in part because his idea of how to run a creative company worked much better than Eisner’s. In an article published in the
Harvard Business Review
, he argued openly that it is more important to find good people than to find good ideas. About 50 percent of businesspeople he’s talked to think that ideas—something created by people—are more important than people. “It reflects a profound misunderstanding …”
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Catmull writes. According to its president, the most important part of Pixar was its people.

Many exalt tech, but the monster is irreverent, as is the inventor. All technology is a mechanical embodiment of someone’s dream. The machine can be destroyed, taken apart, and
used
to create something new, but the voice of the inventor is what endures. Henson’s attitude toward technology resembles this gleeful monster—he was excited to be on the cutting edge of digital technology, but his excitement wasn’t about the tech itself, it was about how he could eat it.

Henson would undoubtedly be creating in digital media today. In 1988, he pronounced that hi-definition TV was the future.
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He said he would have used digital video effects on the ending of
The Dark Crystal
if the resolution had been high enough at the time.
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As early as 1970, he visited the Scanimate computer image software lab and experimented with its graphics—glowing green circles resembling primitive screen-savers.
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In 1990, working with Pacific Data Images—now DreamWorks’s studio—Henson made the world’s first computer-generated puppet character, Waldo C. Graphic.
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According to Falk:

Jim was always interested in the next technological advancement to further express his creative vision, so it’s not surprising that he would seek out the earliest innovations in computer animation.… It’s unclear how Jim learned about Scanimate, but he had been interested in electronics in general and had used his Moog synthesizer to great effect on numerous projects. His colleague, Jerry Juhl, was an early adapter of computers and would have been intrigued with the process as well.
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Steve Whitmire perhaps put it best in a fan interview when he said, “Whatever the new technology there was, he always wanted to jump right in the middle of it.”
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Digital was certainly where Henson was headed.

Yet I don’t think Jim Henson would be thrilled about some uses of digital technology. Today, the Disney Company scrubs the arm-rods out of every shot in which a Muppet arm rises into the camera frame. Whitmire explained to a ToughPigs interviewer:

One of the things that Disney wants to do, and it’s very expensive, but they do it on virtually everything we do, is they digitally remove the rods. You see Piggy sitting in a chair on that special and motioning, and there’s no arm rods. It throws me sometimes, I expect to see the arm rods, but they removed every one from that piece, so Kermit’s just leaping through the air.
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Although Henson loved “to jump into the middle of new technology,” he jumped in to
experiment
, to
play
, not to perfect. The kind of perfection Disney gives the Muppets—erasing flaws—is not at all thrilling. It asks graphic artists to work for hours with a little “erase” tool on their console. What’s fun or interesting or new about that? Nothing, except more cases of carpal tunnel syndrome. This is not the kind of thing that Henson would “spark to,” to use his phrase.

Even Pixar, which has not been without its “repetitive stress injuries,”
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is run with the philosophy that “[t]echnology inspires art, and art challenges the technology.” Catmull writes, “Walt Disney understood this. He believed that when … technology and art are together, magical things happen.”
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Scrubbing rods out of film frames is technology without the art.

Frank Oz once said of Henson, “He pulls together technological elements in such a way as to achieve an artistic end.”
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Not to achieve a seamless, flawless, perfect end—an
artistic
end. Art
isn’t
perfect. It’s human. It’s about expressing something about life, and if it doesn’t do that, it’s not art.

When creating his lush, expensive
Muppet Show
, sometimes Muppets were improvised from items bought at the hardware store.
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I’m guessing bathmats and toilet scrubbers. For the fan, knowing this actually makes the Muppets even
more
magical. Knowing that someone scrubbed rods off film for hours doesn’t. It’s depressing to picture. The poor technician who had to do that didn’t get to play, to build, or create. He was essentially an in-betweener, like in the days of Disney’s first factory studio, the grunt workers who filled in the cels between major gestures, essentially RenderMan programs. In 1941, Disney’s in-betweeners went on strike, one holding a sign that said, “1 G
ENIUS
A
GAINST
1,200 G
UINEA
P
IGS
.”
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In contrast, Henson’s workshop sounds more like the kind of place an artist would enjoy working hard. In the eighties, Finch described the Henson creature shop boldly: “Such a seething tide of vitality … the Muppet universe is infinitely protean.”
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It’s hard to imagine such energy in a room of rod-scrubbers or in-betweeners. There is tech that enlivens the soul and tech that dulls it.

This is how
Henson
removed the rods from his characters. In 1980,
The Muppet Show
did a Pinocchio number. It used a new technology called Chromakey to remove the puppeteers’ heads—which were covered in the same blue as the backdrop. Henson effectively CGIed them out, but at the same time, he
added
strings—fake strings that Pinocchio broke free of. Henson used the CGI to do something surprising, showing a Muppet moving in a new way, to make a joke
about
puppetry, not hide it. When you hear this, it makes the scene even more magical. The how’d-they-
think
-of-that factor is high. Henson always seemed to be aware that how he used technology would be—or would eventually be—part of the story, part of the act. It was Henson’s job to hide the rods, and it was our job to find them. It was our job to wonder,
how’d they do that?

Disney’s rod-scrubbing is by contrast a simple deception. It’s trying to make puppetry resemble animation, which of course, it isn’t. Our job as audience members is to not think too hard about how they did it.

It is perhaps unsurprising that Karen Prell, the puppeteer who performed Red Fraggle, later went on to work at Pixar. So did her husband, another Henson puppeteer. Prell told a fan interviewer, “I think Jim would have loved what Pixar is doing. The exciting, creative atmosphere there is very similar to that at Muppets when they were doing
Fraggle Rock
. Maybe that’s why I’ve been able to fit in so well at Pixar and feel at home.”
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With the experience of working as both a Muppet performer and a Pixar animator, Prell describes the difference:

There’s such a joy in spontaneous performing and expression in puppeteering that I miss very much and hope I can get a chance to do again sometime. There’s such a totally different mindset with animating. You’re able to get a lot more detail and flexibility in the movement and able to revise and revise and revise, and really able to get things perfected a lot more than you can with live action. Still, something about the energy and spontaneity of performing live puppets brings its own flavor to characters and storytelling.… [With animation] there’s a lot of planning, a lot of working with numbers. I equate it to performing while doing your taxes.
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Animation and puppetry are different, and one should not try to be the other. Both Pixar and Henson valued
people
as the creators of both art and innovation. Pixar was able to achieve great technological feats because it kept a core group of talented people together—from the days of Lucas to Jobs and now Disney. Henson created the Creature Shop as his in-house technological lab for engineers, machinists, and builders, because, “By keeping a group of people together … you can make it better every time and build on your past work.”
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For Henson, it was important to bring together the
people
, not the technology itself. That would be stupid.

One of Henson’s most important tech guys, Faz Fazakas, made “mechanicals.” He was a machinist—a lost art in our age of computers, but many of his rigs look better on film today than your average CGI-scape. That’s not because he used radio control vs. a computer—it’s because he was a person who really
cared
about doing his job well. Prell explains what made working at
Fraggle Rock
great: “Everybody wanting to do it well and not wanting to compromise and cut corners.
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The message that great technology conveys is this: there are people in this world—tinkerers—who will work on things until they get them to work. That’s what’s so exciting about Pixar and the Henson Company. With these companies, it’s not the medium; it’s the message.

Henson is quoted in the
New York Times
:

“I like mixing all things together,” says Mr. Henson, as if all the assembled flesh and blood, ingeniously hinged creatures and colorful electronic stuff were troughs of finger-paints for squishing and smiling over. A tall, thin, bearded man, he often speaks of his work: “One technique doesn’t negate the other. It becomes more exciting. You can do almost anything in terms of image.”
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Henson seemed to “spark to” technology used like finger-painting. He used it to cut corners or to cover up, and he wouldn’t use it when it became too robotic, like the robots in the Hall of Presidents at Disneyland. “The automated shows very often look incredibly wooden to me because it’s that sense of performance that’s not there,” Henson said.
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Technology is not across-the-board innovative. He told Judy Harris in 1982:

[It] always has to be a key thing to us: that all of the mechanical things and all of the radio controlled stuff is always at the service of the performer in order to try to get a more complete performance … the performance is where the humanity is, where the relationship is and I think that has to stay at the heart of it all.
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If a technology didn’t express “humanity,” Henson wouldn’t use it.
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Waldo C. Graphic—the computer-generated Muppet created in partnership with Pacific Data Images—clearly wasn’t yet good enough yet to use for any length of time. Still, it was fun to tinker around with, and maybe that’s the point.

THE SCHOOL OF FAILURE
THE ONLY WAY TO LEARN WITHOUT COPYING

Henson was careful not to copy other artists. On
The Muppet Show
, he rejected one bit in a writers’ meeting for being too similar to a Mel Brooks movie. “I think,” said Henson, “the idea is just too close.”
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This was not an issue of copyright. While expressions can be copyrighted, no one can own an idea. It was more like a professional courtesy. Innovation tends to lead to differentiation, which is good for the whole guild. It makes room for everyone.

But if you don’t copy someone, how do you know what works? Trial and error.

Henson saw it as a “good thing” that he had learned in this manner:

I think we, as the Muppets, broke new ground because we approached puppetry from a different angle. I had never worked with puppets when I was a kid, and even when I began on television, I really didn’t know what I was doing. I’m sure that this was a good thing, because I learned as I tackled each new problem.
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Though Henson did earn a college degree at the University of Maryland, his path was incredibly self-directed. Irreverent to peoples’ opinions, he took classes in the “Home Ec” department, traditionally a women’s major, in order to practice the skills like sewing and puppetry that he needed. Falk also notes of his first puppetry class, “According to [Jane] and the professor, Edward Longley, the freshman Jim was the star and practically taught the course.”
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Henson graduated in six years because he was a part-time student. For the most part, he was learning by doing at the local TV station. There, he learned about cameras, drawing and photographing them.
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He said he wasn’t “creatively very proud of” that work, but it was “really experimenting.”
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The best way to educate yourself is not necessarily to enroll in school, but to learn by doing, learn by trying, and often learn by
failing
.

You do not need to go to school to be successful. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Walt Disney did not have college degrees, and certainly not MBAs. They learned by doing, and often by failing.

Yet while these entrepreneurs didn’t get MBAs, they did read books. According to Falk, the teenage Henson “checked out some books from the public library for instruction—one was Obrtazov’s 1950 book, 
My Profession
.”
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Walt Disney took night classes on animation, picked the brain of an animator he knew, and may have taken a correspondence course. He also took out the only book on animation from the Kansas City Library,
Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made, Their Origin and Development
.
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Pixar also looked to a book, when they incorporated. “The executives then running Lucasfilm, [Smith] said, didn’t seem to realize that the true value of the computer division was the talent that had produced the technology, not the technology itself. So Catmull and Smith got a “How to start a business” book, drew up a plan for a 40-person company … it was agreed—the Computer Division would strike out on its own.”
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