Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (36 page)

In the early eighties, the Muppets “weren’t exactly hot” in
Eisner’s acquisitive eyes, but by 1988, Henson had Muppets on all of the five
major networks—ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and HBO. It could not have been a coincidence.
All that producerman pitching in the eighties starts to seem like a deliberate
strategy to attract Disney’s interest. In 1989 Brillstein writes, “By 1989 The
Henson Company was in better shape. They had more cash and exploitable
material, so Eisner’s interest didn’t surprise me.”
^[56]

Though the 1990s that Henson imagined—a ten-year
contract with Disney to fund expensive projects like 3-D movies and theme park
rides—would never materialize due to his untimely death, we can see his motives
for the Disney sale clearly. As Brillstein wrote, Henson wanted to “get out
from under the organizational albatross that drained his creative energy.…
With Disney’s money and machinery, Jim could be fully creative.”
^[57]
As a funded artist at Disney, Henson could stop being a producerman, and he
might not even have to be a pitchman.

The noteworthy part of this period, to me, is
that if Brillstein’s version of history is correct, Henson was
sick
and
tired
of pitching. If he had been a natural salesman—born to love pitching—I
don’t think he would have traded his licensing to Disney for promised funding. If
he wanted to make a big project like a 3-D movie, he could’ve pitched it to
enough companies to get it funded. He may not have loved to pitch, but it was
always a necessary part of the job.

My view of Henson is that, from the start, he
cultivated the skill of the pitch in order to achieve
artistic
aims. And
if a shy creator like Henson could do it, anyone can.

FAIL, FAIL, FAIL
PITCHING IS THE EASY PART

If we try to cultivate our own ability to pitch—to
preach
—we
might start by getting wrapped up in the
good
things in others’ work, then
really working to appreciate and revel in the
good
things in our work, until
we finally get obsessed with convincing others of what
could
be. Henson
was a teenager in an optimistic period of American history—the postwar fifties.
It likely made him a very positive person. Yet, with pitching, failure is
inevitable. To become pitchmen, we are going to have to find a way to deal with
failure. Expressing enthusiasm for your work is, in fact, the easy part of
pitching. The hard part is all the failure.

One consolation for this is the adrenaline rush
of
selling
a project. Henson uses exclamation marks in his
Red Book
journal when a movie sells. It’s the same kind of jubilation when he writes “New
Central Park Zoo opens!”
^[58]
Pitching and selling gives you an innocent, childlike high, such that when one
is suitably addicted, it offsets the pain of failure.

When I was a student, I used to watch struggling
artists fail, and I’d think,
How can I avoid becoming like that?
I
thought people who failed must’ve made some mistake that I should avoid making.
Successful people like Jim Henson tend to keep their biographies positive—all
sales and no fails—because it is good PR, but when you dig deeper, you see that
everyone successful fails in monstrous proportions matching their success. It’s
just that they promote the success louder than the failure. Now that I’m older,
I watch struggling artists fail, and I think,
How can I become more like
that?
How can I summon the courage to fail like that? How can I learn to
survive failure
for a living
?

Ironically, the road to Henson’s success is a
string of failures, and this was as true for Henson as it is for anyone else.
As we look at Henson’s three biggest failures, take heart knowing that you are
fully capable of failing
this much
, brushing yourself off, and trying
again.

JOHNNY CARSON AND THE
MUPPET MACHINE
NEVER MADE

For my research, I’ve tried to watch every project Henson
ever made. Wandering the Henson exhibit at New York’s Museum of the Moving
Image, I was excited to see a promotion for a special with the Muppets and
Johnny Carson. From the drawings—pen and ink in Henson’s own hand—it looked so
imaginative, like a Rube Goldberg mousetrap. The style is gorgeously intricate,
yet free-wheeling—a comic strip with swirling borders presents a story of
mayhem: monsters in chef’s hats, a box with a note that says “RUN!”
^[59]
The machine explodes in the next doodle, and Johnny Carson is spit out of a
theater onto the street. A janitor with a wry smile cleans it all up.

I went home all ready to watch what might have
been my new favorite Henson project. But there was no Carson special to watch,
no Muppet machine, no trippy new gags or allusions to Henson’s business. The
Carson pitch was great—but it was rejected. In polite industry terms it “wasn’t
picked up,” but in an artist’s estimation, it was
wasted
. Those lovely
drawings made—for nothing.

Can you imagine spending a day drawing the specs
and being rejected? You should, because as an artist of the gift economy, your
faith in art—despite its risk—is what can turn a commodity into a gift. Picture
yourself spending a day in wasted art, because that is what the labor of a
successful artist looks like.

If you go to The Henson Company’s
Red Book
blog, you’ll see that Henson’s doodles from this pitch were adapted as
wingdings—a search box, a footer, and bookends for a navigation tool. It seems
that somebody wanted this art to be
seen
. Karen Falk, the Henson archivist,
presents projects like this from Henson’s files, precisely because so much of
Henson’s work, like the iceberg’s underwater majority, remains unseen.

CYCLIA
NEVER MADE

It’s fun to imagine what the world would have been like if
Jim Henson had become a nightclub owner—going out dancing today might include
more rustling leaves and the sound of flowing streams. Jim Henson’s planned
nightclub, “Cyclia,” would have given the late sixties a truly fantastic
experience of rotating polarized disks, imagist film “poetry” timed to the
music and projected onto all the furniture and people in a geodesic dome.
^[60]
Falk writes:

In the descriptions of his nightclub
project Cyclia, Jim hoped to match quieter music with filmed depictions of
nature—light coming through trees, reflected off water, and changing over time.
His 1974 pitch for a television special called
Reflections
suggested, “… an hour of visual poetry. It is an affirmation of our sense of wonder.”
^[61]

Henson scouted locations in New York and Los Angeles.

As his vision expanded to giant geodesic domes, Jim
made inquiries about a vacant lot on Second Avenue that now houses the base of
the Roosevelt Island Tram. In an empty space like that, there were practically
no design limitations. By 1970, however, the Cyclia Corporation was dissolved,
and Jim’s energies went into
Sesame Street
and his quest for a
Muppet series.
^[62]

The idea was dropped. So was the
Reflections
TV
special. Henson had already shot test footage. The good news is that the
planning of this nightclub likely honed Henson’s directorial skills that he
would later use in
The Dark Crystal
,
Labyrinth
, and
The
Storyteller
. Yet, with the exception of the Henson Archives Blog, there is
nowhere you can go to see this Henson project. You have to imagine it. Henson’s
Cyclia club was never made.

As Falk said, Henson’s “energies” went into
other things—he gave up on these particular projects and moved on. But there
was one idea that Henson refused to truly forget.

B’WAY
THE DESTINY OF GREAT PUPPETRY,
BUT NOT FOR HENSON

It is not surprising that Henson refers to Broadway in his
Red
Book
as “B’way.” Nicknames are for friends—and Henson’s fondness of theater
is clear. If he saw a show, he carefully marked if it was “Off B’way.”
^[63]
The abbreviation was deeply ingrained, so he even wrote, “Museum of B’casting.”
^[64]
Broadway is, of course, the highest echelon of live theater. Puppetry, as old
as any brand of live performance, seemed like a natural fit for that hallowed
venue.

And while
Warhorse
or
The Lion King
have fore-grounded puppetry in the world of high theater, Henson never made it.
Part of the problem was that Americans looked down on puppetry. Henson
explained:

I saw that puppetry was truly an art form in Europe.
It was something that could be done artistically, with creativity. Back home,
there weren’t all that many puppeteers, but in Europe they are everywhere and
everybody goes to puppet shows. It’s an integral part of their lives.
^[65]

Broadway may have occupied a place in Henson’s
mind as the site where critical success and respect would finally be afforded
to his work, even if it was only a lowly puppet show. If a puppet show made it
to Lincoln Center, maybe then the “slight condescension towards puppets” he
noted would cease to follow him.
^[66]

When asked about his work with Nancy Sinatra in
Vegas, Henson said, “I have in mind doing a stage show, a full Broadway show
with puppets.”
^[67]
The way he says “a full Broadway show with puppets” he might as well be saying
“a legitimate puppet theater.” So Henson began pitching the show, and by the
end of 1971, he was “in discussions with Lincoln Center.” Falk describes what
might have been:

An ambitious piece was meant to give a capsule
history of religion, falling into chaos and ending with a lone flower. A flock
of birds in the trees provided a comic moment, and the joyous ending featured
all the puppeteers taking off their costumes and puppets, singing “We are all
just people underneath.”
^[68]

Two years later, Henson signed with two producers, Manny
Azenberg and Eugene Wolsk. Four years on, Falk writes, “Azenberg and Wolsk were
still selling the show.…By then, however, Jim was getting real interest
for
The Muppet Show
and began appearing on
Saturday Night
Live
. The Broadway Show project was set aside.”
^[69]

Whether it was “set aside” or “fell through” is
unclear. His writer, Larry Gelbart, left the business to make
M*A*S*H
.
^[70]
Henson noted, “Gelbart out of B’way.” Falk writes:

After Jim’s deal to create a live show at Lincoln
Center featuring an array of specially designed puppets fell through, he
continued to pitch his idea. He had developed a script with Marshall Brickman
called
The Muppets Get It Together
and a related script for a
companion television special called
An Evening with The Muppets
,
and Jim was eager to try again. While the records are thin, it is apparent from
Jim’s journal that he gave this idea another chance by auditioning for the
Shuberts, the renowned Broadway producers.
^[71]

It may be true that if Henson had not been so busy working
on TV projects—
The Muppet Show
pitch,
SNL
, and
Sesame Street
—he
might have made it to Broadway. Or maybe the world was simply not ready. But as
it was, the closest Henson ever came to Lincoln Center was as a museum exhibit,
not a Broadway show. In 1979, he noted: “Lincoln Center Library—Party exhibit
of The Art of the Muppets (runs thru Aug.).”
^[72]
And in 1982 his film masterpiece
The
Dark Crystal
followed: “D.C.
Exhibit opens Lincoln Center Library.”
^[73]
At Lincoln Center, fans could marvel at “all the spectacular craftsmanship”
^[74]
of the movie, including costumes, jewelry, musical instruments, and cooking
utensils. The Muppets may have made it to Lincoln Center, but they never really
made it to B’way.

But there was something about B’way that made it
different from Cyclia or the Carson special—it was an elusive goal that
lingered. So, after he made his essentially prime-time series and his Hollywood
films, Henson returned to the Broadway failure in the eighties, hoping to turn
it into a success. How did Henson deal with failure here? He refused to call it
quits.

Henson’s tenacity with Broadway starts to
resemble Kermit’s indefatigable scheming to get to Broadway in
The Muppets
Take Manhattan.
Falk writes of this failure’s long history:

Jim had started on a project for the stage written by
Hugh Wheeler called Bodo featuring medieval characters, some designed
by Brian Froud. The day before his talk with Gelbart, he noted in his journal
“Drop Bodo.” Clearly, he was not giving up on the Broadway Show idea, but
wanted to do something different and thought Gelbart might be a good
collaborator. In July, he and Gelbart met with Brian and Wendy Froud and
started discussions about a new project for the stage that would also feature
medieval characters. Over the next year, a writing deal was negotiated with
Gelbart for what was then being referred to as the Medieval Show, but by
1983, Jim was looking into other writers, including Neil Simon.

Nothing came of the Medieval idea, but in 1985, Jim
began developing a different idea for a Broadway Show, this time in a more
contemporary world. With a working title of “The Puppet Show,” it was to be an
array of performances with a variety of music loosely strung together with a
behind-the-scenes storyline focusing on the puppeteers and their personalities
and relationships.
^[75]