Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (31 page)

Pixar could have used a copyright clause like
Henson’s when they made
Toy Story
, because unfortunately, their deal
gave the copyright of the characters over to Disney. This gave Disney the upper
hand in negotiations, since, as David Price wrote in
The Pixar Touch
, “the
idea of Disney cranking out [sequels] drove Lasseter to distraction.…
Disney-made sequels under Eisner, it seemed, would be objects of commerce above
all. ‘These were the people who put out
Cinderella II
,’ Lasseter later
said mordantly.”
^[57]
In
To Infinity and Beyond
, Lasseter said, “Steve Jobs stayed at the
negotiating table with Disney about two to three years longer because of me.
Because I wanted our characters.”
^[58]
For the time being, Pixar had to walk away, leaving their characters behind.

Legalese is of critical importance to artists. Whitmire
said of Henson, “I don’t think he took a lot of legal action [against copyright
infringement].”
^[59]
Yet Henson acknowledged in 1979, “We do have copyright lawyers who try to
prevent the name
muppet
from becoming generic. That would not help.”
^[60]
Henson needed lawyers to negotiate contracts with toy companies that wanted to
license Muppet characters. His lawyers arranged clearances for
others
to
use his work, but they also arranged clearances for
Henson
to use his own
work. For example, When Henson hosted
The
Dick Cavett Show
in
1971, he showed clips from
Sam & Friends
, which aired on another
network.
^[61]
Legally, Henson had to clear the rights to air those clips. In this case,
lawyers secured Henson the ability to build upon his earlier work in a natural
way.

Another role for Henson’s lawyers was to foster
collaboration. In most cases collaboration costs money. In order to make the
film
Emmett Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas
based on the book by Russell and
Lillian Hoban, Henson made a deal with the authors to use their intellectual
materials. Lawyers are of great value, not just because they are experts at
contracts and legalities, but because their work means that artists don’t have
to be. Henson and the Hobans most likely did not bicker in person over the
price of adapting their book. Can you imagine what kind of movie it would have
been if Henson had been resentful of his character’s authors? Or if he thought
of each quotation as a sum of money?

Jerry Juhl parodied this attitude in a greeting
card that went out to his friends. A disclaimer warned the reader to read the
fine print before opening:

The Muppets© “TM” are trademarked and copyrighted
properties belonging to The Muppet Studio LLC (TMSLLC). The project herein described
is independent of TMSLLC, The Sesame Workshop, and/or The Jim Henson Companies
(“Organizations”). The pig-like, bear-like and other anthropomorphic images on
the inside of this card exist as an attention-getting device only and in no way
implies an endorsement by the Organizations.
^[62]

This was a
Christmas card
. And while it is clearly is
a joke, there very often must’ve been warnings such as this on scripts,
treatments, and communications. The parody and frustration with such
requirements is understandable to any artist—legalities are decidedly uncreative,
or more accurately, un
pro
creative.

So, legal counsel, while serving as a protective
barrier, can also go too far. For that reason, Henson was as picky about his
lawyers as he was about his puppeteers.

After hiring writer Joseph Bailey, Henson referred
him to talk to Al Gottesman, “the head of the Muppet legal department … about
money”:
^[63]

I was to get so much per script plus appropriate
Writers Guild residuals, so much
per diem
expenses; a certain number of
trips home from England and first class travel.… Al
Gottesman is such a decent, straightforward guy that I never needed ‘people’ to
talk to Jim’s ‘people.’ I could talk to Al myself.
^[64]

It is essential that the lawyers for a creative company
understand how to work with artists. How did Henson secure such “decent” legal
counsel? It begins with Henson inviting the outside in, as Gottesman literally
met Henson for the first time in Henson’s own offices:

I had never before been in such a remarkable place.
On the lower floor was the pure fantasy of the company’s workshop with its
several designers and builders (one who looked like Santa Claus) surrounded by
colorful costumes and puppets. I soon learned that these were hallowed premises
that you did not enter unless you were invited. However, each time I passed
them in the next few years, walking up the carriage house stairs, I’d steal a
look, which always made me feel good and reminded me that I was in a very
special place.
^[65]

There are lawyers who go into the profession for the money
and there are lawyers who go into it for other reasons. Not everyone in
Gottesman’s place would have found Henson’s workshop “special” in the good
sense. Yet, as he recalled:

I knew pretty much then or shortly afterwards that I
wanted to work with this man. I could sense his essential decency and his
desire to produce, with his puppets, only, engaging, meaningful and quality
entertainment. And I was right.
^[66]

It is telling that Gottesman noted Henson’s
“decency” and was himself called “decent” by Bailey. It is nice to think of a
marriage between art and business—show business—as running smoothly, but we
can’t forget that the executives at Goldman Sachs famously called their clients
“muppets.” For
some
corporate professionals, “muppet” is a pejorative,
and for the ignorant Gorgs, Fraggles are dirty pests. Sometimes, though, there
is defection—a Gorg can become a Fraggle.

On
Fraggle Rock
, Junior Gorg rejects his
father’s tradition when he has the courage to blow the royal kazoo. While his
father never tried—for fear of failure—Junior, with the Minstrel Fraggles’
help, succeeds merely by
trying
to play. While the prince of the Gorgs
is still ten times the size of the Fraggles, he has a newfound appreciation for
them. Perhaps the way for businesspeople to truly appreciate artists is to try
to make art themselves, and to see—usually—that artistic talent is actually
quite rare, and so it is something worth protecting.

By taking a chance and joining up with “muppets”
in the Goldman-Sachs sense, Al Gottesman was able to make real change in the
world by helping to “produce … meaningful entertainment.” A few years
later, another businessman would become a Muppet.         

HIRE A BOSS

When asked about his workaholism, Henson once told a
magazine, “I hired a boss,” and then chuckled, “a business affairs manager.”
It’s unclear whether this was David Lazer, but he said it “lessened his load.”
^[67]
Henson had met Lazer in the sixties when he was a manager at IBM and had arranged
to have Henson do “Meeting Films” for the electronics company. According to
Brillstein, Lazer “thought Jim was brilliant and approached him with funding.”
^[68]

In 1975, Henson hired Lazer as the Executive
Producer of
The Muppet Show
, where
it was Lazer’s job to interact
with all the show’s guest stars. Once he joined Henson Associates, Lazer truly
enjoyed
working in show business, describing his trip to the Cannes Film Festival by
saying, “What a thrill!”
^[69]
Lazer would become instrumental in developing Muppet Meeting Films and
producing Henson’s big Hollywood movies. But was Lazer Henson’s boss? Sort of. David
Lazer described his role like this:

Jim’s an astute businessman and he knows everything
that’s going on in this company but he just doesn’t have time to attend to
everything personally so it’s up to me to give him the breathing space so he
can run the creative side of the operation.
^[70]

In many ways, he took over for Diana Birkenfield, who had
worked on
The
Jimmy Dean Show
before becoming Henson’s producer
for various television projects.
^[71]
Why was “breathing space” important for the creative side?

Well, for one thing, Bailey recalled a time at
The
Muppet Show
when the walls were too thin and he could hear Lazer’s phone
calls. So Bailey put up a sign explaining that for a few coins, the employees
could listen in to “HEAR YOUR SALARY AND RAISES DISCUSSED!”
^[72]
Lazer learned to make his calls quieter. It is hard to imagine what a totally
transparent business–art relationship would look like, but I can imagine there
would be a lot of unhappy artists and not a lot of productive collaboration.

There seems to be overlap in Henson’s business
department, as Brillstein, Gottesman, and then Lazer all have been referred to
as Henson’s manager. It is likely that, as Henson hired each new businessman, the
roles became more specialized. When it came to firing someone, for instance,
one would think Lazer would handle it, but in one case, Henson asked Brillstein
to do it, since he also represented the employee in question. Brillstein
explains:

Jim was patient and rarely raised his voice. He
didn’t like confrontation, so he usually gave me the unpleasant jobs. I know it
was dead serious time when he told me to fire his head writer, Jack Burns, who
was my good friend and client. The way Jim did it was perfectly Jim. He called
from London and said, “Hi, Bernie, how ya doing?”

“Fine. How does everything look?”

“Fine,” he said, and paused. “You know
something, Bernie? Jack Burns gives me a stomachache.”

I knew exactly what he meant. Time to make a
change. “How soon?” I asked.

“Soon,” he said.
^[73]

Cooney reiterated Henson’s aversion to firing:

Jim didn’t run his company like a good businessman.
He could never fire anybody, couldn’t accept any plan for downsizing that was
drawn up for him by his advisers. Jim feared that he couldn’t face people
afterward, so he just kept them on.
^[74]

The fact that Henson kept Brillstein (agent), Gottesman
(lawyer), and Lazer (producer) all on the payroll rather than having these
managers replace one another demonstrates this. And, in fact, when Diana
Birkenfield returned from her other projects in 1981, she too rejoined Henson’s
business team as vice president of television production.
^[75]

Henson was a collaborator. In a business where
collaboration is more important than minimizing overhead, where hierarchies
dissolve, and people often come to work with one another again and again, it
does not make sense to burn bridges by firing.

Luckily, Henson didn’t even have to express his wish
to fire someone before Brillstein said “How soon?”
This
is how
Brillstein kept Henson a hippie, and how the businesspeople that Henson
selected insulated him and his artists from the market economy, from
money
.
Yet they alone were not enough for Henson to make movies. Film, like Broadway,
is incredibly expensive to produce. For that, Henson needed an angel.

FIND THE ANGEL FUNDER
LORD LEW GRADE

The academic William Wetzel used the term “angel” to refer
to a rare kind of investor. Borrowing from a Broadway term, an angel funder is
one who takes on great risk for a start-up for reasons besides pure monetary
reward. Henson found his angel funder in the British entertainment mogul Lord
Lew Grade, without whom there would be no
Muppet Show
, no
Muppet Movie
,
and no
Dark Crystal
.

Throughout the sixties, Henson attempted to sell
American television networks on a Muppet series in prime time. In the seventies,
using
Sesame Street
’s cache, he produced two pilots that aired on ABC
and a pitch tape for NBC, but no one in the US wanted a puppet show for adults.
Watching both the pilots and the pitch tape on YouTube today, it is evident how
much
work
went into Henson’s bid for a network show. Yet it came to
nothing—in the US.

However, because of Henson’s hustle, his pilot
The
Muppet Show: Sex and Violence
had been seen by the public, and it was strong
enough to convince an angel funder in the UK to invest in it. According to
Finch:

In the summer of 1975 … Abe Mandell—head of ITC
Entertainment, the American division of ACC, Lord Grade’s entertainment
corporation—wrote an enthusiastic letter to Jim Henson, expressing great
interest in the potential of the Muppets. As Lord Grade himself recalls,
Mandell had seen the second of the ABC pilots and had advised that ITC should
make every effort to sign the Muppets for a syndicated series.
^[76]

Though it wasn’t technically “prime time,” but instead the
syndicated lead-up at 7:30 p.m., Grade’s London-based ITC had “the same kind of
production facilities and financial backing that could be expected from a major
American network.” Finch continues:

Henson Associates’ business arm—headed by David Lazer,
Al Gottesman, executive vice president of Henson Associates, and Bernie
Brillstein of the Bernie Brillstein Office, Henson Associates’ management
company—began serious negotiations with ITC. The one thing they were after,
above all else, was an assurance that they would not be underfinanced. Lazer
and Brillstein visited Mandell in his home and asked for a guarantee of a
budget that would ensure high production values, along with a promise of
creative independence.
^[77]

They would get both generous funding as well as creative
freedom from Grade. They also argued for more—as with
Sesame Street
,
Henson’s suits ensured a favorable merchandizing split, seeing that Henson
Associates was already reaping the benefits of Bert and Ernie toys. According
to a 1979
New York Times
article, Henson’s company split the licensing
revenue for
The Muppet Show
“on a 50–50 basis” with Grade’s ITC company.
^[78]
The article points out, though, that Kermit was not included in either deal. Those
profits went entirely to Henson Associates.