Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (33 page)

When you hear the story about how
The Muppet Show
came to be, it sounds like a
deus ex machina
. Lew Grade’s ATV studio went
looking for Henson and gave him a show. Brillstein’s breezy style certainly
makes it appear that it was easy:

A little guy named Hal Huff, working out of a back
room at the local CBS station in New York, got the idea that the Muppets might
make a great syndicated show.…ITC’s president, Abe Mandel, heard Huff’s
idea and went looking for me.…I explained what we wanted to do.…Mandel
was sold.
^[1]

Most of us have never thought about what it took for Henson
to get his shows and movies made—we were given the story in
The Muppet Movie
—Orson
Welles playing Lew Lord says, “Prepare the standard rich and famous contract,”
^[2]
and that’s that. Yet the truth is that Henson had been pitching this show for
years prior to Mandell’s offer. This windfall—the angel funder Lord Lew Grade—would
never have come had Henson not cultivated his inner preacher, his inner pulpiteer.

It is something that separates the successful artist
from the starving artist, the ability to sell oneself effectively. Walt Disney
was “quite a salesman,” according to his animator Rudy Ising.
^[3]
In his essay “Muppets and Money,” Andrew Leal named one section “P is for
Pitchman.”
^[4]
Watching Henson’s pitch reels on YouTube today, it is clear he, too, could sell
his socks off. And while many social marketing “experts” tell us to
“self-promote,” bad preaching is more likely to turn audiences off. So how did
Henson, an artist, hustle
effectively
? How did he become a pitchman for
his art?

Partly, it must’ve helped to have a manager who
could see the steps it would take to get a major network interested. Brillstein
urged him to take as many TV appearances as possible, saying, “I feel you need television
exposure,”
^[5]
and “We needed to create some media momentum.”
^[6]
In many ways for Henson, the late sixties and early seventies were all one big
pitch—leading up to
The Muppet Show
. The fact that Mandell happened to
see Henson’s work on TV was not luck; it was the result of throwing hundreds of
darts at the board. After long enough, one of them has to hit the bull’s-eye.

What Mandell saw in the Muppets was precisely
what Henson
wanted
a network to see. The ABC special
The Muppet Show:
Sex and Violence
clearly outlined the show Henson wanted to make
^[7]
—a
quick-moving variety show with an at-the-dance number, the Electric Mayhem
band, a backstage section, and even Sam the Eagle. This ABC special was
essentially a pitch tape proving that puppets could work in prime time, telling
whoever was willing to listen exactly what Henson wanted to do.

ARE PITCHMEN BORN OR MADE?

Jim Henson performed two characters on
Fraggle Rock
. One
was Cantus, the wandering minstrel. Cantus could play every song in the rock on
a mystical pipe, because he spent most of his time
listening
. It was
hard to get him to make a concrete statement at any time. He preferred to
ponder life’s mysteries rather than endorse any message. He was a bit of a
mystic.

Henson’s other character was Convincing John,
who could convince anyone of anything. One of the most powerful and dangerous
Fraggles in the rock, Convincing John spends most of his time
talking
.
He is almost manic in his “preachification,” so sure of his opinion he can
convince anyone of it, even if it is something as ridiculous as insisting
everyone wear cups on their hands. Jerry Nelson said these rather
opposing
characters shared something: “The intensity of Convincing John or Cantus the Minstrel
always had a kind of intensity that kind of was Jim.”
^[8]

Both these characters show Jim Henson in partial
relief, because they are two of his modes. A good artist is likely already
skilled at listening, learning, and appreciating. These traits fit well in the
gift economy that is art. But going beyond
The Gift
, Henson shows us that
it is possible to channel one’s inner Convincing John in the service of one’s
inner minstrel. Quite often, financially successful artists resemble con artists.
This is not always a good thing, as the con-man persona often seems to take
over and suppress the minstrel. However, when kept in check—in the service of
the art—channeling one’s inner fanatic can break the artist out of his self-imposed
poverty.

It is hard to say whether pitchmen are born or
made. It is my suspicion that they are grown. Was Henson always fervent and
outspoken? Hardly. He described himself as shy. At his funeral, Brillstein
said, “Henson rarely spoke above a whisper. You had to lean in to hear him most
of the time.”
^[9]
And yet, in spite of his quietness, Henson can be seen on camera working up a
sweat—pitching as though his life depended on it.

If you want to find your inner pitchman, I would
recommend getting ahold of the Muppet Meeting Film
Sell, Sell, Sell
. In
it, a character named Leo—puppeteered by Jim Henson—works himself up into a
frenzy trying to inspire you to go out and sell whatever it is you sell:

For the sake of free enterprise, for the sake of the
company, for the sake of the family, for the sake of the children, for
motherhood, for apple pie, for puppy dogs and kitty cats, for everything that
is near and dear to us, I ask you to remember just one word, and that word is
sell
!
I want you to get out there and sell, sell,
sell
! I want you
to sell your socks off! I want you to sell! Sell!
^[10]

Leo’s bit started as an outgrowth of what was
really going on at Henson Associates in earnest. As Jerry Juhl explains, “This
was in the early days before the shows were taped. We were pitching ideas to
networks.”
^[11]
As we saw with Henson’s work in commercials, no matter what Henson was selling,
he was
really
selling the Muppets—and more work for them.

Specters of the “frenzy” bit can be seen in many
Henson productions. The song “I Wanna Help” from
The Great Santa Claus
Switch
, and
The
Muppet Show Pitch Reel
both feature
characters who work themselves into a state of manic preaching, just like
Fraggle
Rock
’s Convincing John. Juhl said of the pitch reel that it “started out
quietly and just built and built and BUILT where it ends up with a shot of the
heavens.”
^[12]
He said that Leo became “more frantic” with time.
^[13]
This tendency of enthusiasm to
build
upon itself suggests that you can
teach
yourself to pitch; you can work yourself up. The skill can be
grown
—for
the right reasons.

Henson was different from your average salesman.
When you have the gift of the pitch, you can sell as many vacuum cleaners or
financial derivatives as you want. But Henson didn’t sell products for profit;
he pitched his heart out for Cantus, that is, for the music, the dance, and the
art. What is the difference between a salesman and a pitchman? A salesman sells
a commodity. A pitchman sells his own future work.

This starts to resemble a gift more than a real
“sale.” Hyde writes in
The Gift
:

It is the cardinal difference between a gift and
commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people,
while the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection.
^[14]

When a product is sold, it means the salesman
can go home and have no further contact with the buyer. When a pitch is sold,
it means the pitchman must to work for the buyer—
gets
to work for the
buyer. A bond is formed.

Becoming a pitchman was instrumental in getting
Henson’s work aired and funded. He started pitching early in his career, and
though he might have liked a break, he never stopped. An examination of his
journal shows that the ABP lifestyle—Always Be Pitching—held true in every era
of his career. Except, perhaps, one.

THE CONSTANT PITCHMAN

Searching for the word “pitch” in the Henson Archives’
Jim
Henson’s Red Book
blog, the word comes up often. If we start at the very
beginning and work through some examples, we see a narrative emerge that helps us
think about cultivating our own ability to pitch.

1)
Washington
1954–1962 |
At the beginning,
pitch like hell

When my students read that Henson’s career began
with a stroke of luck—a visit to his high school puppetry club by some
producers at WTOP-TV
^[15]
—they
tend to think he had it easy. Yet, as all the articles made clear, he still had
to
audition
for this first job, and that audition required that he make
his own puppets. When this show was cancelled, Henson worked on three more
shows before he was given his own show,
Sam and Friends
. Even then, it
was only five minutes long.

And even when
that
show had run stably
for six years, he still had to pitch commercials. A good illustration of this
is his behind-the-scenes film showing the Wilson’s Meats sales team how his
company worked—which suspiciously involved a lot of lunchmeat. Though much of
it is parody, Henson says incredibly
pitchy
things like, “In short, the
Jim Henson Muppets have become famous as a delight to children all over the
world.” The implication was that since everyone loves the Muppets, Wilson’s Meats
should keep paying them to make commercials.

What is surprising about these meeting films is
that they essentially promote a set of commercials that have
already
been made for Wilson’s. Henson already had a contract with the company. But
even then, he couldn’t stop pitching—he had to pitch for his
next
set of
commercials with them. He did, in fact, produce a second Wilson’s meeting film
a few months later. When you look at the long list of companies Henson made
commercials for, you can imagine an equally impressive list of pitches.

At the end of this era, beginning around 1961, agent
Bernie Brillstein started helping Henson pitch his work.
^[16]
Falk writes, “Brillstein spent the 1960s marketing the Muppets to variety shows
and pitching other projects developed by Jim and Jerry Juhl that ranged from
experimental television specials to live-action feature films.”
^[17]
It would be nice to think that Henson could stop pitching now, once he hired a
pitchman to do it for him.

Yet, as we will see, the opposite is true. Even
with an agent, Henson still had to hustle. Even if it was Bernie who made
initial contact, sussed out deals, or delivered the pitch, it was Henson who
had to provide the material to be pitched. He seemed to pitch even
more
after Brillstein joined him, likely due to the growth of the company.

And to get that agent, what did he have to do?
He had to walk into Brillstein’s office with a bag of puppets and make a pitch.
In the last chapter, we saw that getting an agent was a combination of using
connections, performing, and someone calling William Morris asking to book
Henson—some stroke of luck or cunning. It took a great pitch to win over Brillstein—who
was not very interested in puppets. And once Brillstein was on board, Henson
had to pitch even more, because Brillstein got him more auditions and urged him
to get more “exposure” and “media momentum.”

2)
New York
1963-1969 |
Throwing a lot of darts
in all directions, then one big pitch

New York in the 1960s was a period of experimentation for
Henson. Energized by the possibilities, he came up with wildly varied new ideas—PBS
specials, a nightclub, a short film. He was simultaneously doing commercials,
talk show appearances, film festival fare, and a documentary, and was
developing work for NBC’s “Experiment in Television.” He was going a long way
to achieve what Brillstein wanted—“media momentum”—however, in this period he
did not have a long-running series, which was not for lack of trying.

In 1964, Henson made a pilot for a puppet series
called
Tales from the Tinkerdee
.
^[18]
Containing clever wordplay, original music, and broad appeal, this is some of
the best and most timeless work that Henson, Juhl, and Jane ever did. The music
is eerily good and the wordplay funny. A foot—played by Henson—misinterprets “a
diamond-encrusted, hand-cut crystal, delicately fashioned, Italian birdbath” as
“a bird-headed, delicately dashing, bath-cut diamond, hand-encrusted Italian.”
^[19]
Falk writes, “Despite Jim’s best efforts to sell the show, it never aired.”
^[20]
Why did the show fail? Perhaps it just took time for Henson to find the right
funder. Or perhaps it was because he had too many eggs in different baskets.
This period of diffused dreaming may have been busy for Henson Associates, but it
didn’t yield a long-running show, unfortunately.

At this time, Henson was also pitching a line of
toys. When Ideal Toys made puppets of Kermit and Rowlf in 1966, Henson’s ad
pitch was aggressive, as Falk notes:

Given the great care that was later used when
marketing
Sesame Street
toys, it is amusing to see how the
Ideal Toys spot was much more like the Wilkins commercial in its use of the
hard sell. This is the only time you will hear Kermit saying, “Oh, buy, oh, buy
us, oh, buy us, we beg. And if you don’t buy us, we’ll bite you in the leg!
We’re loving and cuddly—we’re a bundle of charms. And if you don’t buy us we’ll
break both your arms.”
^[21]