Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (28 page)

As we have seen, both Disney and Henson were innovators, and
yet there have always been key differences in their companies—one being scale. In
2012, The Disney Company employed 156,000 people while The Henson Company employed
only 300.
^[1]
Much of the size of Disney today can be attributed to the eighties-era
expansion by the team of Frank Wells, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Michael Eisner,
who saved a company that was essentially failing.

Yet the difference goes back further. Though
they each started with just one person, the most telling comparison would be
when each company made its first movie.

 To make 1937’s
Snow White
, Disney’s
studio grew from 300 to 1,200 employees.
^[2]
At the time of 1979’s
Muppet Movie
, “between 1975 and 1980, the company
went from having 30 people on the payroll to employing over 130.”
^[3]
And discounting freelancers, in 1979, Henson’s
full-time
employees were
numbered at a meager 71.
^[4]
Movies require many hands; however, the Henson and Disney companies differed by
an order of magnitude—roughly 100 vs. roughly 1,000.

Though it was compared to a college campus in
the thirties, Disney has always been a
huge
corporation, and by contrast
Henson has always had “a very fuzzy, Grateful Dead kind of sensibility,”
^[5]
according to one
Sesame Street
writer in 1990. The same year,
Newsweek
called Henson’s a “family-run … shop.”
^[6]

Over the years, more than a few journalists have
made comparisons between the companies, implying Henson would eventually grow
to match Disney’s scale. He chose not to, for very good reason. But with this
key difference set aside, the
structures
of Henson and Disney’s companies
look similar. They started, respectively, in a basement and a garage, and they
each had a triumvirate.

A TRIUMVIRATE

In a 1979
New York Times
article, John Culhane noticed
the appearance of the triumvirate:

Walt Disney Productions in the 30’s was only a little
company in which Walt Disney ran the creative end; his brother, Roy, ran the
business end, and an attorney named Gunther R. Lessing did their legal work.
Henson Associates, too, is run by a triumvirate. Henson is free to control the
creative end, he said, ‘because of working with lawyer Al Gottesman and
producer David Lazer,’ a former I.B.M. executive. ‘The two of them run the
business side. It’s wonderful for me.’
^[7]

Culhane gives us a good picture of the business side of both
Disney’s and Henson’s operations. Yet this is not the full picture. Both
Gottesman and Lazer are responsible for the business side of Henson’s company,
and to this list, we should add Henson’s agent, Bernie Brillstein, and—for a
while—producer Lew Grade. Though they are not technically part of the company,
Henson’s business couldn’t run without them.

But in my mind, there is also a second triad
structure at play. The real triumvirate that we see at Henson, Disney, and even
Pixar contains three necessary ingredients for success: business,
tech
,
and art.

We might think of it as the three species in
Fraggle
Rock
: Gorgs (business), Doozers (tech), and Fraggles (art). The Gorgs own a
castle, wear crowns, and think they are royalty. The Fraggles love to play,
sing, and dance all day. The Doozers enjoy building, preferring to work their
cares away. Each one of these groups made Henson’s company successful—businessmen,
artists, and engineers. But they have very different modes of working, and
though they are interconnected, it is very important that they sometimes be
kept separate.

Perhaps the most similar of the groups are the
builders and artists. Art and technology are both innovative, and Pixar’s head
engineer, Ed Catmull, went so far as to call his work “art.”
^[8]
In Henson’s company there was much overlap. Dave Goelz started at the company
as a puppet builder, but decided he wanted to puppeteer. He went on to create
the character of Gonzo by adding an eye-opening mechanism to an old Frackle
puppet that was lying around the workshop from 1970’s
The Great Santa Claus
Switch
. Similarly, the engineers at Pixar dabbled in animation. Catmull’s
senior thesis was a graphic of a moving hand. And at Disney, animator Ub Iwerks’s
tinkering led to both the multiplane camera
and
the first sketch of
Mickey. And yet technological innovation is very different from artistic
innovation. In
Fraggle Rock
, Cotterpin Doozer envied the exciting lives
of Fraggles, but ultimately decided she wasn’t one. There are things that
Doozers hate—such as swimming—and those are some of the things Fraggles love.

Though a famous animator in his own right, ultimately,
Ub Iwerks decided, after developing the first multiplane animation camera, that
he would rather work on technical problems in Disney’s studio. Similarly, Ed
Catmull and his fellow Pixar engineer Alvy Ray Smith decided to bring on a true
“artist,” CalArts-trained John Lasseter, in order to give their technology
beauty and pathos.

In Henson’s company, there were many
non-performing builders in “the shop.” Don Sahlin rigged explosions and built
Rowlf from one of Henson’s sketches. Faz Fazakas built radio-controlled
puppetry systems for Doozers and Gorgs, and the puppet builders in Caroly
Wilcox’s workshop sewed puppets together that brought storybooks like
Emmet
Otter
to life. Together with Henson, costume designer Bonnie Erickson
discovered a new way to create puppets by sculpting foam and then electrostatically
“flocking” it, so foam Piggy has the same fleece look as cloth-covered Kermit. Builder
Kermit Love designed marionettes as well as Big Bird and Snuffleupagus. None of
them performed on-screen. Their work was art-of-a-sort, but art that was
decidedly backstage and, for lack of a better word,
impersonal
. What I
mean by this is not that the builder didn’t leave his mark on the puppet, because
great craftsmanship always retains a trace of a human touch. What I mean by
“impersonal” is that the work could be easily removed from its person.

By contrast, performers and other artists create
things that are more
personal
, in the sense that their developments can
be used by them alone, and cannot really be transferred. Artists can’t tell
someone else how to do what they do. In the artist category, Henson had
himself, his puppeteers who performed characters (Oz and Nelson), his writers
(Juhl and Stevenson) who imagined scenarios, and his conceptual designers
(Frith and Froud) who sketched people and even worlds. These are the people who
get to dream up intangibles that others are tasked with building. And in many
cases,
figuring out how
to build. I do not mean to imply that the
builders’ work was easier or less important, but that it didn’t require as much
of an ego.

Like the dwarfs in
Snow White,
the tech
side spends all day digging for jewels, but when they leave the mine, they
leave the key hanging right next to the door, not seeming to bother with ownership.
The Doozers spend all day building constructions out of radishes, only so that
the Fraggles can eat them. The “art” of engineers is a kind that is meant to be
used by others. It doesn’t bother with displaying the mark of its inventor,
working best if it looks like whoever is using it. On the other hand, the dance
of a Fraggle is distinctly
personal
; it resembles that Fraggle and that
Fraggle alone. Red and Boober move nothing alike. This is art in the more
traditional sense—writers, painters, and performers, makers of intellectual
property that feels decidedly
human
.

This is something we all acknowledge, because we
treat copyright and patents quite differently. With the patent, the inventor
registers clear instructions at the Library of Congress for how to make the
invention. With a copyright, the work itself is registered and the “how-to” is
left an object of wonder. Many artists don’t know
how
they do what they
do, let alone how to teach someone else to do it. Patents last only twenty years
before the product enters the public domain, much less than the seventy-plus
years of a copyright. The implication is that a tech advance is meant to be
used by all; an art advance is meant to be used by the artist. In practice,
this means that the names of tech developers are often left to obscurity.

We all know the names Walt Disney and Jim
Henson, but few of us know the name Ub Iwerks, who gave Mickey his iconic
circles-and-ovals shape, a true pioneer of animation and Disney’s first partner.
Disney biographer Neal Gabler explains:

Iwerks’s remoteness and social awkwardness … made
him a perfect compliment for Walt Disney, which is no doubt why Iwerks sought
him out. While Iwerks, who was diligent, meticulous, and extremely facile with
the brush, stayed at his drawing board, Walt could talk up customers and hustle
business.
^[9]

History has not immortalized Ub Iwerks for
creating Mickey Mouse. Likewise, we don’t know the name Larry Jameson, an
electro-mechanical tinkerer for the Henson workshop, but we know his
woodworking—Kermit’s banjo, for instance, and the intricate replicas of a Les
Paul guitar and Fender bass we see in
The Muppet Show
.
^[10]
These technicians contributed to the quality of the art, and yet the credit
seems to go elsewhere.

This may be less exploitative than
symbiotic
,
as some prefer to work in obscurity and avoid the anxiety of the limelight—the
way notoriety tends to isolate a person from his peers. In an episode of
Fraggle
Rock
, the Doozers don’t understand the concept of “taking credit.” They
build “for the joy of building.” When two Doozers named after tech devices—Flange
and Modem—fight over who is to get credit for a particularly good tower,
Cotterpin tells them, “You two are acting like a couple of Fraggles.” For
Doozers, the work is its own reward and credit; jealousy and competition are un-Doozerly.
^[11]

The relationship between art and tech is
mutually beneficial. The art that builders make is impersonal—it can be used by
others to make
their
art. When Fraggles eat Doozer constructions, far
from upset, the Doozers are
happy
. It means they get to build even more
the next day. It goes without saying that artists are excited about new
technology—it gives them more opportunity to dream up something never seen
before. As Catmull said, “technology inspires art, and art challenges the
technology.”
^[12]

Disney was fascinated by the multiplane camera
that Iwerks built when he was running his own company, and had his engineers
make one for
Snow White
to give it the depth of background movement that
we see in real life. John Lasseter used Pixar’s RenderMan system to turn everyday
objects like desk lamps and plastic toys into characters that are fully human.
Jim Henson, fascinated by television cameras, set up a monitor feedback system
to give puppets microexpressions like real people. He used Sahlin’s explosions
to express hard truths about humanity in a way that makes you laugh out loud.
And he used Faz Fazakas’s radio-controlled puppets to make surprisingly big
puppets, surprisingly tiny puppets, and puppets rowing downstream with no
puppeteers drowned underwater.

Each of these technologies became art, but
notably, each was developed
alongside
an artistic goal, hugging it like
a double helix. The tech guys—Pixar’s Ed Catmull and his team, Disney’s Ub Iwerks,
and Henson’s special effects guys—all had artistic aspirations in mind,
developed technology to suit artistic aims, and
then
handed off their
creations to artists who could truly make those tools
sing
. We have seen
with Henson’s “Inner Tube” what happens when technology becomes disjointed from
art: it dates itself quickly and it lacks heart. The relationship between art
and tech is thus one that works best when the two work
closely
, with
constant cross-pollination.

While the combination of tech and art is crucial
to Henson’s success, it is a relatively uncomplicated relationship. Those who
like to tinker get to, and are happily paid to do so without stamping their
personality on it. For Sahlin, perhaps, it was enough to create an explosion; he
didn’t need to trademark it “A Don Sahlin Production.” Artists tend to
understand inventors. The artist recognizes the glee the techie feels making a
device as the same high he gets from making stories and characters. As a boss,
the artist perhaps implicitly understands how a techie thinks—he loves to
tinker, just like the artist.

On the other hand, the relationship between the business
side and art is
hard
to get right. Moneymen tend to treat tech and art
in the
same
way—at worst like commodities and at best like talent. In
his
Harvard Business Review
article, Pixar’s Catmull notes in a section
titled “Power to the Creatives” that the creative power in a film
has
to
reside with the creative leadership, not with the corporate executives. So, at
Pixar, the development department’s job is not to tell the artists what to do,
but to “help directors refine their own ideas” and “give them enormous leeway.”
^[13]
Yet, Catmull says, most companies aren’t run this way, because most executives
want to minimize the financial risks of art. It a rare businessperson who can
stomach artistic risk. This is why Jim Henson carefully selected the right kind
of businesspeople for his organization, and trained them over the years—the way
he trained his creatives—to understand the process.