Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (42 page)

David Bowie said he was not micromanaged when he
wrote the songs for Henson’s
Labyrinth
:

I must say that Jim gave me a completely free hand
with it.
^[124]

Another composer, Paul Williams, said:

Working with Jim Henson was probably the easiest
collaboration of my life—he lacked the diva gene. He had a sweetness about him
and I don’t think he ever got emotionally pulled off course. But I’ve also
never worked with anybody that spent less time over my shoulder. I mean, I’ve
worked on projects that were very successful, where a lot of the time, this was
going on. [Looks over shoulder and says, “Yeah, yeah.”] It’s hard to work when
the phone’s ringing every two hours.
^[125]

As Williams implied, micromanagement can drain artists of
their creativity. Head of the puppet workshop, Caroly Wilcox said Henson “trusted
us to invent. That’s what’s so much fun in puppets is creating, and to be given
the chance to create was something Jim did for all of us.”
^[126]
Bacon writes that even though Henson had started development on the Roald Dahl
project
The Witches
, when Nicolas Roeg came on to direct it, Henson
“took a back seat, remaining as executive producer, and let Roeg’s creative
vision shape the film.”
^[127]
Someone with “the diva gene” would have a hard time taking “a back seat,” and
yet to do so creates the most surprising results.

One scene in
The Great Muppet Caper
was a
complete surprise. Trying to get out of committing to Kermit’s dangerous plan,
the gang devolves into excuses. Kermit silences everyone with the word,
“Quiet!” In the space created, we hear the puppet Janice:

So I said, “Listen, mother, it’s my life, and if I
want to live on a beach and walk around naked …”
^[128]

The perfect
non sequitur
like this comes from giving
artists enough rope—as they say—to hang themselves. Such surprises are often
the most memorable moments in a film, because they make us feel alive with
possibility. But in an anarchic group of artists like Henson’s, if
everyone
follows his own vision, how do you get them all to go together?

SYNTHESIS
SYMPHONY OF CREATIVES

Henson’s goal as a leader was, as Steve Whitmire said, “seeing
to it that this person does what they need to do well.”
^[129]
But in addition to everyone doing their best, they also needed to know what
exactly they were working
towards
.
Fraggle Rock
producer Larry
Mirkin often said, “we were all working in service of the best idea.”
^[130]
Karen Prell noted this was different than many “ego-driven” productions.
^[131]
But if Henson didn’t criticize or control or even know what the “best” was
supposed to look like, how did he elicit the “best” from his people?

Sculptor Wendy Midener designed the heads of the
gelflings in
The Dark Crystal
by first using Brian Froud’s sketches for
inspiration and then using a process of trial and error, with Henson
appreciating the results:

I started by sculpting tiny heads in plasticine, and
I work very quickly, so I would just keep sculpting them, turning them out. And
Jim and Brian would come by and say, yes, well, I like that, but change the
eyes, change the mouth.
^[132]

I like
that
, Henson would say, but what
if we
try
—and then he would ask for another take. Just as when he
performed, he noticed what was good about the take and then tried it one more
time, without criticism. This is a familiar trick for teachers—saying it’s
still not quite there yet.
You can do better than this
. Since this
trial-and-error process is how many artists already work, as Midener did, it
seems like the natural way to coax the best from people.

And while Henson outwardly spoke of his artist’s
strengths
, he clearly had to manage their
weaknesses
silently,
behind the scenes. Jane Henson said, “There’s a lot of ad-libbing on set,”
^[133]
but Jerry Nelson told a fan interviewer that it was
Brian
Henson who
finally let him improvise. “With Jim and Frank,” he said, “you had to stay
exactly where the script was.”
^[134]
It might be surprising, but Henson did not let
everyone
follow their
vision.

Frank Oz and Dave Goelz, on the other hand, were
encouraged to improvise. Juhl said, “Some performers are stronger at the
ad-libbing than the others, that’s Frank’s strong suit. It’s very rare where
we’ll have to write anything for him, he goes in a lot and just does his
thing.”
^[135]
Finch wrote, “Oz’s humor is a sudden release of energy, a surge of comic
inventiveness that is in direct proportion to his habitual seriousness.”
^[136]
Likewise, Gonzo’s character was found when a chicken extra wasn’t cooperating.
He explains that he ad-libbed:

“Nice legs though!”

Jim cracked up. That weird attraction to chickens just made [Gonzo]
so strange, and it was something Jim liked a lot. So Gonzo soon got a chicken
girlfriend, Camilla.
^[137]

If you were good at improv, Henson would let you do it. But
Nelson’s strength was not his humor, it was his voice. Oz and Goelz, it could
be said, didn’t have Nelson’s rhythm or pitch control.

In a documentary called
Down at Fraggle Rock
,
Henson indeed makes sure to mention everyone’s strengths:

One of the great things about Jerry is his voice. He
has a remarkable control, and his voice has sort of a cutting edge that records
very well.

Kathy succeeds in bringing a tenderness to Mokey that is
very special.

Karen has taken and enriched the personality of Red Fraggle
with wonderful energy and fun.

Dave is quite a funny fellow. He has a very offbeat sense of
humor.

Steve … has become one of our leading and very funniest
performers.

We’re excited about some of the new challenges Richard has
taken on, like directing.
^[138]

Henson appreciated everyone for what they did well. But in
order to get everyone doing their best, each artist had to ultimately cede to
the
best idea
, and Henson did not allow
every
idea to enter his creations.
Rob Mills was the mime who performed Junior Gorg on
Fraggle Rock
and
started learning to puppeteer. He recalled being thrilled when Henson, guest-directing,
asked who was doing the red creature in the back. Mills proudly said, “I am,”
and Henson said, “Yeah, don’t do that.”
^[139]
It seems that his inexperienced “upstaging” didn’t help. It threw off the shot,
because everyone else was swaying collectively. It was somewhat direct for
Henson, but it wasn’t so different from what he usually said:
I like that,
but what if we try this?

Henson understood that best way to talk about
weaknesses is to turn them into strengths. In an abstract sense, all puppeteers
create a strength out of their weakness. Richard Hunt suggested on
60
Minutes
that puppeteers are often shy because when they really let loose,
they are thought to be crazy:

People walk in here and they look at us and we show
them around the shop, and they see all these puppets, and you go and put one on
and do a different weird voice and they look at you like, that’s magical, but
the guy’s
nuts
!
^[140]

In casting puppeteers, Henson was looking for that rare
person who came most alive through a puppet. Interestingly, two Muppet
performers, Spinney
^[141]
and Angus,
^[142]
have cerebral palsy. Two performers, Hunt and Clash, are identified as
homosexual. In the not-so-distant past, these differences from the norm might
have been seen as something “wrong” with you, and they may have led to shyness or
being discriminated against. But in Henson’s repertory company of performers,
difference could be a powerful advantage.

Ultimately, difference is a positive thing for a
symphony of creatives. All of Disney’s princesses would never be able to
coexist in one film. On the other hand, groups of Muppets can sometimes get together,
numbering in the hundreds with no two quite the same. The strength of using “odd”
characters such as Fozzie or Janice is that they tend to all find a
space
in the symphony. While there is room for only four or so flutes, there can be
instruments of all timbres because each one can fill in a gap another has left.

NO BIG BOSSMAN
HAVE BEER IN A FRIDGE IN YOUR
OFFICE

Business
structure
, corporate
ladder
: is
anything in life really that simple? Certainly not at Henson Associates. Martin
Baker was a producer for Henson. He recently reminisced:

People say to me “what was it like working for Jim
Henson” and I always correct them and say “you don’t work for Jim Henson,
you work with Jim Henson”—and it was that subtle difference which
made him who he was. He was one of those people, unique in many ways, yes he
was clearly the boss and you were the employee, but he never made you feel that
way. I say working with Jim was a lot like going to work with your best friend
every day.
^[143]

You don’t work
for
Henson, you work
with
him.
Are these just pretty elegiac words, or is there something practical and
actionable we can take away from them?

It is commonly accepted that wolf packs are
hierarchical, ruled by an alpha male. Yet in the scientific community this assumption
was challenged in 1999 by L. David Mech, who noted this was only observed in
packs that were artificially confined.
^[144]
In natural self-chosen groups, the pack instead had the structure of a family,
with the “leaders” being naturally the “parents.” Acts of “dominance” in a
family look more like protection, affection, grooming, feeding, or teaching. In
cages, wolves fight for rank. Aggression is their weapon and hierarchy rules
their days.

But most of the time, wolves behave this way because
we make them. And so do human societies when they are effectually “trapped” in
unnatural groups like ship sailors, prison inmates, or corporate desk-mates. It
is entirely possible to have a management structure with no “top dog.”

Jerry Juhl said:

When it comes to characters, it’s all a collaborative
effort with writers and performers. We all have a family quality that picks
itself up in the writing what with all the time we spend together.
^[145]

Mark Saltzman, a
Sesame Street
writer, said the
Muppets had “a very fuzzy, Grateful Dead kind of sensibility.”
^[146]
A Muppets Family Christmas
brought together many of Henson’s performers
to literally resemble a family. And while some of the younger performers
certainly saw him as a “father figure,”
^[147]
two of his best puppeteers—Spinney and Nelson—were a few years older than
Henson. For many collaborators, Henson was more like a brother.

When working for Henson, your role seemed to
matter more than your rank—contractors, business partners, producers,
benefactors, and managers all seemed like part of the puzzle, interconnected,
but no one
above
another. “Peoples,” said Pete in
The Great Muppet
Caper
, “is peoples.” Utopias like these have failed for countries like the
USSR or in 24-hour situations like the California communes of the sixties, but
it seemed to work for the Henson Company, where people weren’t “trapped” but
chose to be there because they liked the work. In a small start-up where workers
could leave and go home, a hierarchy-less system worked. The Muppets’
affectionate anarchy might just be the best management model an artist can have.

From early on in Henson’s career, he managed to
find himself almost entirely bossless. Of
Sam and Friends
, he said:

I was convinced no one else
at the station ever watched the show because there was never a complaint or any
attempt at censorship of any kind.
^[148]

Producer Lew Grade gave Henson “a promise of creative
independence”
^[149]
on
The Muppet Show
and his first two movies.”
^[150]
Of
The Dark Crystal
, Henson said:

There was no pressure from anyone but ourselves
because we were the ones doing this from the beginning. Lew Grade, who financed
the film, never put any pressure on us.
^[151]

Finch wrote, “Lord Grade’s hands-off policy has been vital
to the success of the enterprise.”
^[152]
Likewise, about
Fraggle Rock
, which had two funders in CBC and HBO,
Mirkin said, “In the four years that we did the show, we never had a script
note from either network.”
^[153]

Having no boss was something that must’ve had a
profoundly freeing psychological effect on Henson. He knew the value of it. With
no boss over
him
, it likely seemed natural to step back and share the
freedom he felt with others. I have no doubt that he
sought out
hands-off
investors like Grade and HBO; it was no coincidence that he continued to find
himself bossless. The first step toward being an uncommon boss is to find a way
to have
no
boss.

In the
Fraggle Rock
episode “The Gorg Who
Would Be King,” the Fraggles teach Junior Gorg that it’s possible to have no
boss. Junior, being a prince, is steeped in the hierarchy of his father the
king, so he has a hard time understanding how the Fraggles operate.