Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (35 page)

At what point was Mandell sold on
The Muppet
Show
? When he called up Henson’s people trying to court him? When
Brillstein arrived? When Brillstein had the tape in hand already? When he
watched the pilot? This deal may seem like a gift from on high—and surely it
was—and yet the pitch was ongoing, like a fish on the line that could still be
lost at any moment. It is likely that Mandell saw many things that day that his
basement flooded—Henson’s eagerness to work with ITC, Henson’s vision for the
show, and how easy he would be to work with.

Even though it was Mandell making the “overtures,”
^[37]
in Falk’s words, Henson
still
had to pitch to get
The Muppet Show
.

4)
London
1975-1979 |
The work itself can be a
pitch

When Henson had finally got his dream—a national nighttime series
for the Muppets, he was funded for only a single season. In effect, that made
the success of the first season the pitch for next year’s renewal. As we’ve
seen, the quality of the series was directly related to its expense—with each show’s
profits being pumped back into the next show. Each season was a pitch for an
even bigger season, and then for the next step in Henson’s career.

With a few years of
Muppet Show
success
behind him, Henson started to set his sights on the next target—Hollywood. In January1978,
he noted in his journal, “trying to sell Emmet Otter.”
^[38]
A made-for-TV-movie,
Emmet
Otter
was a classic work of art, but it was also itself a pitch—a pilot
showing that he could sustain an entire movie with puppets. Nearly two years
later, he noted, “Bernie calls—sold Emmet Otter to ABC for next year!”
^[39]
This entry shows that even though Bernie was doing much of the legwork, having
an agent didn’t free Henson from the emotional effects of pitching. Here, it
was Henson who created the pitch
material
, and it was Henson who surely
held his breath whenever the phone rang. We can picture the miracle of “Bernie
calls” as pure joy but more realistically as the cessation of pain. In fact,
with the pitch out of your hands, the process can often be even
more
emotionally taxing, because there is nothing you can do.

Yet, because
The
Muppet Show
and
Emmet
Otter
were, in effect, pitches for renewal and a movie deal, there is
little mention of pitching in this period of Henson’s journal. Perhaps it is
because he was relatively happy: he had achieved fame in 105 countries, as well
as the satisfaction of knowing he was right—that puppets could work for adults.
But more likely he was
busy
with an intense show-a-week schedule on
The
Muppet Show
in London for months out of the year, the yearly few weeks he
put into
Sesame Street
in New York, and then
Emmet Otter
, a movie
made in Toronto. Things were about to get even busier. Dave Goelz once said, “I
always think of TV as calisthenics and movies as craftsmanship. You get in shape
with TV, because you do so much material so fast.…Then you go shoot a
film, and you get the luxury of doing it right.”
^[40]
The shift to movies required more time and more money, but a little less
pitching.

5)
Hollywood
1979-1982 |
The work that is not a
pitch

Luckily, Henson didn’t have to look far to find his funding
for
The Muppet Movie
. 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.”
^[41]

During Henson’s boom years, pitching seemed easy. And for as
long as he was on top, it was.

The Muppet Movie
did very well at the box
office. It was the seventh-highest grossing film of 1979, and the most
successful Muppet movie until 2011. Henson had been dreaming of something even
grander—an entirely new world made out of puppetry. A puppeteer’s love song to
Hollywood. But that seemed to require even
more
distribution than Lew
Grade’s ITC alone could handle. In 1979, he noted, “Fly to NY to pitch Dark
Crystal,”
^[42]
and pitched the film to Paramount, although Universal ended up being the
distributor. Lew Grade’s ITC funded the movie, which eventually cost $15
million. Everything Henson had done thus far in movies and television seemed,
in a way, to be a pitch for this one great film.

In the meantime, Henson made
The Great Muppet
Caper
, and it is arguably the loveliest of the Muppet movies, because
Henson himself directed it, composing painstaking artistic shots.
The Dark Crystal
was even more artisanal. It really didn’t seem to be a pitch for anything—it
is the thing itself, everything Henson wanted it to be.

Perhaps this is why
The Dark Crystal
’s
poor reception was such a blow to Henson. It wasn’t a failed pitch that he could
dust off and try again. The movie took five years to make, and it was made
exactly the way Henson wanted. It must have been
confusing
. In some
interviews, he refused to call it a failure: “Some people like it very much;
those with good taste. Some didn’t care for it at all or missed the point.”
^[43]

Frank Oz spoke about the moment when movie
executives previewed the movie: “The lights went on, and they stood up and they
walked out. And Jim was so depressed from that, and he was depressed from some
of the reviews.”
^[44]

What does depression for Henson look like? Well,
Brian Henson recalled a similar depression five years later:

When
Labyrinth
was not a commercial success,
that, I think, that was quite a blow to him.…It was the first time I ever
saw him not want to work was during that period. There was a few months there
that he didn’t want to work. He wanted to travel, and stop, and think, and
reflect a little.
^[45]

If we apply this kind of stop-and-think moment to 1982, when
Henson’s masterpiece was not universally applauded, we can see Henson—the
pitcher—at a crossroads.

6)
Producerman
1982-1989 |
Pitching more to get
away from pitching so much

While Henson was making
The Dark Crystal
,
he was also letting his core creative team from
The Muppet Show
develop
the kind of show they’d like to do next, which became
Fraggle Rock
. We
can imagine an alternative eighties in which
The Dark Crystal
had been a
box office smash, and in that universe, perhaps Henson would have made two more
five-year fantasy films and had two long-running series,
Fraggle Rock
and
Sesame Street
. He could have been intimately involved in every
second of shooting for all these projects.

Yet the perceived failure of
The Dark Crystal
seemed to cause Henson to reevaluate his strategy. Since masterpiece movies did
not return the investment,
^[46]
Henson took a step back and began to throw more darts at the board again. In
his journal, we see a big spike in pitches in the eighties. Henson probably
didn’t record half the pitches he made in these years. It would be as
unnecessary as writing “I drink water.”

Around 1984, Henson started telling
interviewers, “I think my own strengths are in television production.”
^[47]
He pitched a great many TV shows in this period—
Fraggle Rock
,
Puppetman
,
Starboppers
,
The Ghost of Faffner Hall
,
A Muppet Family
Christmas
,
Muppet Babies
,
Little Muppet Monsters
,
The
Storyteller
, and more. There is “pitch material” for an unrealized
Muppet
Institute of Technology
collaboration with
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxy
writer Douglas Adams.
^[48]
Henson had varying degrees of involvement in these shows, but in general, he was
not very involved in the day-to-day production of them. It is almost as though Henson
the auteur filmmaker had been burned by putting all of his eggs into one basket
and here shifted to coming up with great ideas, getting the ball rolling, and
letting others take the helm of a fleet of Henson-produced television projects.

As the granddaddy to these projects, Henson
seemed to take on more of the business side of his company than ever, leaving
much creative direction up to others. Frank Oz was given the role of director for
the movie
The Muppets Take Manhattan
.
Fraggle Rock
was largely
left up to writers Jocelyn Stephenson and Jerry Juhl, producer Duncan
Kenworthy, and the veteran performers Richard Hunt and Jerry Nelson. According
to Whitmire:

He was not there very much.…It was kind of left
in our hands to be the authorities about what we do on a daily basis on all
sides of this, performing and writing and everything, you know [the
Fraggle-building] workshop was similar, he wasn’t overseeing things as he had
been in the past. He left it up to us, and we sort of had to rise to the
challenge for that.
^[49]

Jerry Nelson said, “It was the first production I had ever
been involved in at Jim Henson’s company where he was not directly involved all
the way through.”
^[50]
Yet he told an interviewer, “[Henson] didn’t leave until he had worked with
enough directors with correct focus to make the show work in a seamless way.
And of course, he came back from time to time to join in the fun.”
^[51]

In the 1980s, producerman Henson launched many
ships with others at the helm, and let them take their own course. Few were
long-sailing—
Fraggle Rock
being perhaps the most successful. And it is
telling when Nelson says he would come back to “join the fun” “from time to
time,” because this implies that most of his life was spent not joining the
fun. Henson was no longer a puppetman like the eponymous character in that
short-lived sitcom he pitched. As producerman, his life took on more tasks, as his
1988 journal entries describe: “At Warners—Show piece of film to get more money”
^[52]
and “In LA—selling the Witches to Lorimar.”
^[53]

Duncan Kenworthy recalled pitching
Fraggle
Rock
to HBO:

The evening before I was supposed to go in and pitch
it to whoever it was, the top brass of HBO, we had a little celebration at
Henson’s as somebody was leaving, and the next day I somehow didn’t quite feel
up to it, and Jim rather bad-temperedly said, “Okay well I’ll do it then,” so
he went off and did the pitch and of course did brilliantly and HBO bought it.
^[54]

When his producer was hungover, Henson, who had been at the
same party, made the pitch to HBO. At this stage of his career, one would think
Henson would developed and proven his business. Wouldn’t his work ever be
funded without having to pitch?

Sadly, no. At the age of fifty-one, Henson
still
had to pitch. And his bad-temperedness suggests he was starting to tire of it.
The lifestyle of a producerman may have seemed at the start of the eighties like
the best way for Henson to keep making art, but at the end of the decade, it
seemed like another thing to work
away from
. Though he pitched more
furiously than ever then, it seemed to be in order to escape pitching.

In the
Sesame Street
period, Henson
pitched kiddie shows in order to escape kiddie shows. Similarly, in the eighties,
Henson pitched an empire’s worth of shows so that he could once again become a
hired performer. As we will see, Henson’s long-view gamble was that by
saturating the media, he would become an attractive purchase for Disney.

It has been said that Henson was a man of a
million ideas—he was always thinking towards the
next
project. This
could explain his life of constant pitching, and yet I don’t think Henson was
happy to merely hand off his ideas to others.
The Dark Crystal
resembled
the
Sam and Friends
days, because Henson got to
do
everything. A
movie director may have more people helping him than a puppet show creator has,
but they both get to create an entire world from scratch, and, with both
projects, the artistic control rested with Henson. For an artist like Henson,
this artistic work was “the fun” to be joined in. The stories of Henson working
through the night with Oz, or cracking up singing with Nelson and Hunt—they
convince me that Henson really wanted to get back to “work.” To
art
work.

In this view, Henson’s furious pitches in the eighties
may have been an attempt to get away from the whole endeavor of pitching altogether.

7) Disney 1989-1990 |
Appearing hot in order to
cool down

If Disney were to buy Henson’s Muppet business, they would
become his new angel funder—promising to green-light any expensive project he
wanted, because he would work exclusively for them. For an artist, that’s a
very attractive proposition—it would mean Henson could spend less time pitching
and more time
creating
.

In 1990, Henson finally made the sale he’d really
been pitching—himself to Disney.

According to Brillstein, there had been talk
since the early eighties of a Henson/Disney “pairing”:

I called Eisner and pitched him on the idea. He was
interested. A couple weeks later, David Lazer, Katzenberg, Eisner, and I met in
the private dining room at Chasin’s restaurant. The Disney team … told us
what we already knew … the Muppets weren’t exactly hot. The Muppet Show was
over and except for the movies, not much was happening. Even the Muppets
merchandise wasn’t selling well.
Sesame Street
merchandise did, but
Sesame
Street
was untouchable … Disney passed and Jim went back to work.
^[55]