Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (41 page)

As almost every writer has said, the unique thing
about this show was when you wrote a script, at the end of the show it was
still your script. Nobody had taken it away, rewritten it, and pounded it into
something that you hadn’t written. The words were your words. [Jerry Juhl] helped
you shape it, but he never took it away and rewrote it, which is so often done.
^[100]

Similarly, each puppeteer performed the same character for
all four years, and that produced both job satisfaction and a realism that was
particularly lifelike.

At both the London Creature Shop and Toronto’s
Fraggle
Rock
, Henson set up workspaces that were “Muppetty” in nature—they did not
function as business-as-usual, but instead employed his uncommon management
style. Anthony Minghella described the Creature Shop as “a barely controlled
chaos,”
^[101]
and pictures show a staggering number of workspaces filled with self-directed
projects.
Fraggle Rock
producer Larry Mirkin said of its work
environment:

What you would hope it would be like to do this show—because
of what was on-screen—was really and truly what it was like to do this show. It
was a lot of fun for all of us the entire time.
^[102]

RADICAL KINDNESS
NEVER MAD

We have seen that—unlike the bad boss in
The Muppet
Musicians of Bremen
—Henson held himself back from being angry or critical
of others, but even that is an understatement.
Sesame Street Unpaved
describes an event that might have made Henson upset, or at least flummoxed: 

“A bullfrog did ‘what bullfrogs do, right on Jim,” said
Bob [McGrath of
Sesame Street
]. Bob didn’t think that Jim would be able
to keep his composure, but he did. They continued the scene as if nothing had
ever happened and finished the bit.
^[103]

Alex Rockwell said Henson “would never lose his
temper,” and, for balance, followed that with a qualifier—“once, a very mild
angry moment.”
^[104]
Rollie Krewson said:

I remember
one
time during The Muppet Show
when he got mad, and all he did was flip the pages of a book really quickly,
and that was it. That’s the only way that you knew that he was upset. He was
always really calm about everything.
^[105]

When asked if he ever got angry, Henson said
another show’s director had exasperated him. “Doing guest spots can be very
difficult,” he said.
^[106]
Using a word like “difficult” displays a radical self-reserve on Henson’s part,
a desire to give the world only the good parts of himself, only what is
positive and generous. Henson
held back
, which is one of the hardest
things for a boss to do.

A very funny 1973
Sesame Street
skit
illustrates why. Bert feels cold. He asks Ernie if there is a draft, and before
Bert can say anything else, Ernie snaps into action.

“Wouldn’t want you feeling cold. I’ll just get
you something so that you won’t feel cold any longer. Just a moment. Wait right
there,” he says.

He puts a shawl around Bert. And though Bert
says, “The shawl is enough,” Ernie comes back with a hat and coat. By this time
Bert is getting mad, but he can’t talk because Ernie’s wrapped a muffler over
his mouth.

“How do you feel now, Bert? I can’t hear you,
Bert!”

When he pulls it down, Bert says, “I feel hot, I
feel
broiling
hot!”

“Oh, you do, well just a second, Bert, wait
right there. I have just what you need!”

Instead of taking off the coats, Ernie brings an ice bag,
opens a window, and turns on an electric fan.

“Okay, Bert? How’s that, Bert? Feel better now, Bert?”

“Leave me alone!”

Bert is totally exasperated by Ernie’s help. When we
micromanage the creative work of others, we tend to do more harm than good.
Bert is perfectly capable of regulating his own temperature. But a bad boss who
doesn’t listen is incapable of helping someone do good work. By disregarding
Bert’s own agency, Ernie winds up making Ptolemaic short-term fixes that will
never get Bert back to the natural state he was in at the start of the sketch.
A good boss would have left Bert alone.

It is likely the talk-show director who made
Henson angry was one of these micromanagers who did not listen. From
frustrating experiences like this, Henson could understand the
director-performer relationship from both sides of the camera lens. With this
knowledge, Henson
held back
a good deal in order to, at the very least,
do
no harm
. Still, though Henson never seemed to get angry, human beings
do
.
So where does that anger
go
?

Dave Goelz said, “Jim’s characters … were all
part of him, but none more so than Kermit, who occupied the exact same
relationship to the
Muppet Show
characters as Jim did to his employees.”
^[107]
On
The Muppet Show
, we often see Kermit’s temper snap out of
exasperation—it is one of the funniest parts of every show, because every other
scene seems to test his patience so. Henson once said Kermit was “
more playful, less hesitant than I am,” and that
Kermit “can say things I hold back.”
^[108]
It seemed that Henson channeled his frustration into an outlet that ultimately
helped
his employees rather than stifling them—through successful comedy.

A few recent books have argued for the virtues
of introversion,
^[109]
but few of us picture introverts being
best
suited to managing a
company. Clearly, there is a link between masterpiece puppeteering and shyness,
because, as Morley Safer noted of the Muppeteers:

All are extremely shy men, almost tongue-tied without
the Muppets close at hand. They find it easier to speak through the pig or Gonzo
or the others than through the faces God gave them.
^[110]

Richard Hunt told
The Washington Post
,
“Puppeteers are not always comfortable in social situations. They like
anonymity.”
^[111]

For years, Frank Oz was afraid to speak on
camera, even in character.
^[112]
According to Oz, “I didn’t do voices for four years, I was so scared. I had no
confidence whatsoever.”
^[113]
Yet Henson patiently waited for him to get comfortable, which paid off.
Ultimately, Oz would be his best performer. It also took some time for Dave
Goelz to work up the confidence to transition from a builder to a puppeteer of
lead characters, and he too would become one of the best. Henson said:

You get a talented performer, like a Dave or a Frank,
and then any character they do just starts to bloom and blossom because of all
that they put into it.
^[114]

There is likely something about timidity that leads
to masterpiece puppeteering—perhaps because overcoming such reservations takes
a heroic leap of courage, and that coupled with critical taste can overcome
anything. But shyness can also lead to effective leadership, because an
introverted person is one with a massive amount of self-control.

It comes down to a simple rule of human nature:
it is hard to root for someone who has hurt you with callousness. There is a
great passage in Adam Grant’s
Give and Take
about the differences in the
level of success attained by “givers” and “takers” at work. Grant writes that while
givers can often occupy the bottom rungs of companies, as we might expect,
Grant says, they also occupy the very top:

Givers, takers, and matchers all can—and do—achieve
success. But there’s something distinctive that happens when givers succeed: it
spreads and cascades. When takers win, there’s usually someone else who loses.
Research shows that people tend to envy successful takers and look for ways to
knock them down a notch. In contrast, when [givers] win, people are rooting for
them and supporting them, rather than gunning for them. Givers succeed in a way
that creates a ripple effect, enhancing the success of people around them.
^[115]

Instead of asking people to work harder, Henson
showed them how. Instead of criticizing his employees, Henson criticized no
one. Instead of taking credit, he gave it to others. And instead of controlling
his employees, Jim Henson controlled himself—his temper. For most of us, anger
is the hardest emotion to tame. So how did Henson do it?

He meditated:

I spend a few minutes in meditation and prayer each
morning. I find this really helps me to start the day with a good frame of
reference. As part of my prayers, I thank whoever is helping me—I’m sure
somebody or something is—I express gratitude for all my blessings and I try to
forgive the people that I’m feeling negative toward. I try hard not to judge
anyone, and I try to bless everyone who is a part of my life, particularly
anyone with whom I am having any problems.
^[116]

With meditation setting the tone of each day, Henson’s
attitude seems less like self-
control
and more like self-
guiding
,
or leading
himself
by example. He started out with an attitude of
compassion and let that inspire the rest of his day.

Moreover, when Henson performed, the camera
system that he set up became a kind of feedback loop that was inherently meditative,
in that it showed Henson parts of himself as though they were someone else. He
described the performance as close to an out-of-body feeling:

Working the way we do, watching a monitor, you become
rather separated from that personality. It’s a nice thing in that you watch the
screen and the screen becomes a living creature. I mean Kermit to me is alive
on the screen there. And very often you have fun, you just play with it, you
try things, you experiment a little bit.
^[117]

This separation or distance from one’s emotions is almost
Buddhist in the awareness it brings. The camera makes the separation between
the reactive self and the perceiving self quite explicit. Henson was literally
watching himself lose his temper as Kermit. This must’ve led to some wisdom in
terms of his relationship to anger. Instead of getting mad that he was getting
mad—as most of us do—and compounding the problem, Henson simply let that emotion
come and go, appreciating it on the level of comedy. With meditation, more than
restricting
or
controlling
himself, Henson was able to
coach
or
guide
himself to grow better without stigmatizing his present
failings.

By engineering the start of his day with
meditation and working in a manner that promoted self-acceptance, Henson seems
to have totally avoided outbursts of real,
damaging
anger. And as a
result, people were “rooting” for him, rather than “gunning” for him, to use
Grant’s words. Perhaps it’s because he was a “giver” boss that, to this day,
Henson still has such a cult following.

Mel Brooks once said of the Muppets, “Their
comedy and what they mean stand for one thing—the meek shall inherit the
Earth.”
^[118]
Henson’s success shows us that this is sometimes true.

LET PEOPLE SURPRISE YOU
GET OUT OF THE WAY

According to Jamie Courtier, a designer at Henson’s Creature
Shop, “There is no formula for design. You just do what you have to do to make
it work.”
^[119]
So, for example, on
Fraggle Rock
, of all the various crystalline Doozer
constructions appearing in four years of the show, there was never a note given
to the prop builders on how to build one. Each one was designed according to
the specifications of its builder.

Henson once explained the benefits of improv:
“Frank can ad-lib scenes funnier than he would have thought about if you asked
him beforehand.”
^[120]
Part of the effect of characters being performed by
two
people was to
push more improvisation. Gorgs, for instance, were a symbiosis of a mime and a
radio-puppeteered head remotely controlled by a second performer. Sprocket’s upper
and lower halves were performed by two puppeteers. The relationship between the
two performers is symbiotic and unspoken. Karen Prell, who performed the right
hand of Henson’s Convincing John, explained:

You’d just jump into it and explore and discover with
him and, the same way, if you were just kinda open to the energy and went with
it, you would surprise yourself.
^[121]

This is the ultimate goal of artists—to surprise
oneself by one’s own performance—because only by doing this can we surprise our
audience. As a boss, when you
want
your employees to surprise you, it is
counterintuitive to tell them exactly what to do. Henson, like Lorne Michaels
and unlike Walt Disney, wanted to be surprised, and perhaps this is why both
the Muppets and
SNL
have such an
aliveness
to them, even in
reruns.

It takes a good deal of self-directedness to
surprise your boss. “My experience
with Jim,” said Jocelyn Stevenson, “was that if you knew what you wanted to do,
he would do everything to help you. What he didn’t like were people that sort
of said, I don’t know what I want to do—I don’t like what I’m doing but I don’t
know what I want to do. He sort of had no time for that.”
^[122]
Because Stevenson had
her own vision, Henson supported her move from publishing to television. Even
though she’d never written for TV, when she asked Henson, “Could I try writing
for the show?” Henson said, “Yeah, great. And if it doesn’t work out, you can
go back to the books.”
^[123]
Henson was happy to be
surprised by his writers. As a boss, he wanted
you
to explore
your
vision.