Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (32 page)

Grade’s 50 percent deal
seems
like a lot,
but it was Kermit that the kids really wanted, since they already knew him from
Sesame Street
. Piggy and Fozzie were new in 1975, and when Fisher Price
released the
Muppet Show
character toys, one can imagine Kermit was the
bestseller. Henson’s “people” drove a hard deal with Lew Grade to keep Kermit
off the table, and here we see another instance where
they
were tough so
that
Henson
didn’t have to be. What Henson received from Lew Grade was a
gift, a generous funding, and so if Henson had had to negotiate with his “angel,”
it would have been a different relationship. With the barrier in place, Henson
was able to receive the gift of “creative independence” and to truly experience
it
as a gift
. As Finch wrote:

It may well have been a blessing that
The Muppet
Show
was not picked up by one of the major American networks. Had [Henson]
found himself working in Hollywood and answerable to network executives, the
pressures might well have made it impossible for him to sustain the atmosphere
that now exists in the Muppet world. Lord Grade’s hands-off policy has been
vital to the success of the enterprise.
^[79]

This “blessing” was another sense in which Lew Grade was an “angel.”
The Muppet Show
wasn’t just a risk, it was also one he couldn’t manage—he
had to trust in Henson’s vision. Moreover, it was expensive, costing $250,000 an
episode by the fifth season. It was said the show didn’t make a profit on the
books in its original run. Rare indeed is the investor that can stomach an
arrangement like this. Brillstein notes Grade was a “robust entertainer and
one-time champion Charleston dancer.” Perhaps Grade’s own history as an artist
is why he invested the way he did. As we know, he “spent a bundle” on a
terrible flop,
Raise the Titanic
, according to Brillstein.
^[80]
That film effectively ended his movie-making career.

According to Brillstein, when Grade ordered a
twenty-four-episode season, “My packaging fee would be $4000 per show, or
ninety-six grand. I managed to keep the merchandising for Jim, but gave 10
percent of the net merchandising profits to Grade.”
^[81]
This was perhaps renegotiated up to the reported 50–50 split later, or perhaps one
source has misreported the split. But either way, we see that Grade essentially
agreed to fund a show which would only make him money if the toys sold well
or
if they re-syndicated a few years later—making
The Muppet Show
a wildly
expensive project with only a dream’s hope of returning on his investment.

And once Grade was in, it seems his generosity
kept going. Brillstein writes:

When Jim was ready, David Lazer and I sold Lord Grade
on the idea of making
The Muppet Movie
… the budget was $9 million.
A couple studio heads I told thought Grade was a moron because Disney was
making kids’ movies for a million and a half. Grade, God bless him, believed in
Jim—and not only because he made millions from
The Muppet Show
. Jim had
proved himself. Grade … said, “Here’s the money. Go do it.”
^[82]

From there, Henson made a movie twice as expensive. According
to Brian Jay Jones, the budget for
The Dark Crystal
was initially $16
million, and later David Lazer was able to get Grade to raise that to $25
million.
^[83]
On
Dark Crystal
, Grade
still
didn’t ask a thing of Henson’s art. Henson
said:

There was no pressure from anyone but ourselves [on
creative decisions] because we were the ones doing this from the beginning. Lew
Grade, who financed the film, never put any pressure on us, which was very
nice.
^[84]

This “angelic” belief-in-art philosophy can be
contrasted with the entrepreneur who bought out Grade’s sinking movie business
in 1982. Sir Robert Holmes à Court was,
according to Wikipedia, “one of the world’s most feared corporate raiders.”
This put
The Dark Crystal
, set to release that year, in jeopardy.
Brillstein recalled:

Jim didn’t like the way Sir Robert was handling the
film, so he called me and announced he wanted to buy back the movie.…

“I’ll control its destiny,” he said. “I love
it.”
^[85]

Henson had been incredibly fortunate to have an
angel funder like Grade. Letting the average corporate raider control Henson’s
masterpiece was unacceptable. As with Pixar and their
Toy Story
characters, Henson couldn’t stand to have his masterpiece reside in the wrong
hands.

The Dark Crystal
is Henson’s masterpiece,
and it could not have been made without an angel funder like Grade. In a way,
Grade found Henson, yet in another, Henson’s incredible work ethic helped him
find Grade by putting enough work out there for Grade to stumble upon. Grade is
immortalized in the end of
The Muppet Movie
as the character Lew Lord,
played by Orson Wells. It is he who calls in his secretary to say, “Tracy,
prepare the standard rich and famous contract.”
^[86]

Angel funders are anything but standard. And
while our cynical age has come to distrust the Hollywood happy ending, Grade
really did give Henson the ticket to achieve his dream.

HOW TO
GET THEM ALL TO WORK TOGETHER

As we see, it is very advantageous to have business guys. Especially
if you wish to
remain
an artist—a hippie, a moonbeam, or a “muppet” in the
corporate sense of the word. You have to partner with someone who understands
business and can shield you from it. It should be someone you trust, a brother
(Roy Disney), someone who gets you (Brillstein), someone who respects your
creative freedom (Grade). The relationship should in no way resemble
“professionalism.” It should more rightly resemble a matrimonial, paternal, or
fraternal relationship. You must trust your businesspeople, but that does not
mean you should trust
any
businessperson.

Michael Eisner, Steve Jobs, Robert Holmes à Court—as successful businessmen, they have great
power to help art and great power to hurt it. The words
raider
,
egomaniac
,
robot
, and
shark
describe some of the most abrasive kinds of
business guys. The best relationship to have with your business people is
distant
.
You can be personally “close” with your businesspeople—Henson vacationed with
Brillstein—but the business side needs to respect your “magical space” in
Gottesman’s words, and give you “breathing room” in Lazer’s. They need to wait
outside the door of the creative collaboration before rushing in and turning it
into negotiation. Henson selected his “people” well so that they would not
damage the spirit of his enterprise. The first step was to invite them in—into
his world—and make them
want
to be a part of it, to share his dream.

If you have an unreachable goal—to win an Oscar,
to get to Broadway, or to make a video game—you need to find your angel funder.
There are organizations of angels that an artist might look for; however, they
are more likely more interested in technology rather than art. Patrons for the
arts are often just normal people with money to spare. To find someone who
loves
your work, you might have to let your benefactor find
you
. But in order
to be seen, put out all the work you can. Henson’s Muppets were on television for
twenty years before Grade saw them. Let your entire body of work be your pitch
to your imaginary angel funder.

The complex triad that Henson brought together
can be recreated on any scale you wish—Disney’s massive scale, Henson’s more homespun
scale, or your own one-person start-up. Even the most solitary of artists, the
writer, employs business partners—an agent, financial advisors, and publicists—or
sometimes a
cloud
of investors through Kickstarter crowdfunding. The
writer may also employ artists like a photographer or illustrator, and tech
people—a web designer, copyeditor, or e-book maker.

If you already engage with the parts of the
triad, what conflicts have you encountered in their differing points of view? The
relationships between the three groups—the Gorgs, Fraggles, and Doozers—are not
equilateral, though they are interconnected. While tech and art should work
together
closely
, business should protect art and tech with
distance
,
because in essence, their role is to be a barrier, a silent Ouija-board
collaborator.

The right business partners for artists are
indispensable. While many artists write off all businessmen as heartless suits,
Henson understood the debt he owed to them. They, too, participate in the gift
cycle of art. And in 1982, he tried to pass along the gift they had given him.

In his forties, Jim Henson started a foundation
for puppeteers. The Henson Foundation “has awarded over 600 grants to more than
250 American puppet artists for the creation and development of innovative,
contemporary puppet theater,”
^[87]
according to Falk, including Julie Taymor. With this foundation, Henson gave
artists something indispensable that had been given to him—funding. In essence,
a grant could take over the money arm for another artist, sit in for
Brillstein, Gottesman, Lazer, and Grade, and allow the artist money to play
with. Whether it is a grant or a business investment, funding is truly a gift.

Your masterpiece may be years away still, but it
makes sense to start thinking today about how you could combine business,
technology, and art to give the world something it’s never seen before. Do the successful
artists in your medium know any good tech guys and money guys? Maybe you should
know them, too.