Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (44 page)

The real key to
making money as an artist is copyright—owning it, investing in it, and
licensing it—as noted in a 1999
Kidscreen
article:

Looking
back, Brian Henson believes the first milestone for the Henson brand was his
father’s decision at age 20 to retain ownership and control of his characters. “I
think that is really the root of why he was so successful,” says Henson. “He
really had a gut instinct for business.”
^[1]

It
should be obvious by now how copyright made Henson rich—to put it crudely,
Fisher-Price and other toy manufacturers paid Henson a good deal to license his
characters, and in addition, videos, record albums, and books made up another
infinite profit stream, since these things can be made once and duplicated
cheaply. All of this relies on copyright—owned by Henson and licensed to
others.

But
copyright isn’t just important “for business,” it’s also important for art.
Owning one’s work firstly means being able to protect it from being changed or
exploited by others. And secondly, it allows the artist to recycle one’s
previous works in an organic cycle of growth. When an artist can freely build
on his previous successes and failures, he can keep doing what works and use
what doesn’t for scrap parts.

“Jim
never wasted an idea,”
^[2]
according to the Henson archivist Karen Falk, who ought to know best, because
she has catalogued all of those ideas since the eighties. “Monster Eats
Machine” became the Munchos Monster, who became Cookie Monster. Plans for a
Broadway show became
Muppet Show
skits and then fed into
The
Muppets
Take Manhattan
. As we saw, Henson’s reaction to failure was not to feel
shame, but simply to appreciate what was good about it and to try to make the
next take better. You should never waste an idea, even if it’s terrible.
There’s likely something in there that
could
work.

A
fertile creative mind can turn failure into the next success, but to do so, it
needs to own everything it does. If the Munchos Monster had not been Henson’s
intellectual property, then there would never have been a Cookie Monster. Many
artists today allow others to own copyrights for their work. Henson worked for
only those companies—Frito Lay, in the Munchos Monster scenario—that would
allow him to own the copyright. Brillstein would counsel him to take jobs for
the money, but he’d pass:

“Not this
one,” he’d say, “because they want to
own
the character.” Jim’s rule was
simple: Don’t sell anything.
^[3]

You
should always fight to
own your own
work
. Copyright allows
artists to build upon what they’ve done. Not only does your art grow
organically, but as an artist–entrepreneur,
so does your career—it grows like a tree. A tree grows out of the
ground, and it can build only on what came before. Once a trunk or a limb is
made, you are stuck with it. You can grow in a new direction, but you can’t
start over on new roots. You’re stuck in place. Since your career thus far is
what
you
have to work with, it is imperative you have the rights to
build off it.

STAY PRIVATE
THINK TWICE ABOUT GOING
PUBLIC

Henson never wanted to talk about money with reporters.
Time
wrote, “He is secretive as a nesting hen when asked to talk figures.”
^[4]
The Saturday Evening Post
wrote, “But exactly how many millions [the
Henson empire is worth] the company refuses to disclose as detrimental to the
Muppets’ overall image.”
^[5]
We can understand
why—with reporters, it’s easy for your message to go
off
-message. On the
second season of
The Muppet Show,
Kermit is visited by a reporter from
“The Daily Scandal,” who tries to tease out gossipy features no matter what
Kermit does:

“Listen, I’m sorry, but we don’t allow any reporters
backstage during the show.”

“What a headline!
Muppets ban press. Reporter thrown out
by frog
.”

“Wait. On the other hand, can I offer you a cup of coffee?”

“What a headline.
Frog bribes reporter. Muppets desperate
for publicity
.”

“Uh, this isn’t gonna be easy.”

“Say, is it true you’re dropping a lot of stuff from the
show this year?”

“No, no, not particularly.”

“Oh.
Muppets reliant on same old tired junk
.”

“Wait, on the other hand, we have a lot of brand new
innovative stuff!”

“Oh,
Muppets changing format
.
Desperate to sustain
show
.”

“I never knew the press could be so depressing.”
^[6]

But the reason Henson could avoid talking money
when he wanted to talk art was that legally, he was not required to disclose
any of that information—his company wasn’t public. From the very beginning, Jim
Henson’s company has been a private, family-owned company. Henson never sold
shares, and there is very good reason for that.

A fellow artist–entrepreneur, Walt Disney, was
vocally
against
issuing public stock. During the golden age of
Snow
White
, Disney bragged:

We don’t have to make profits for any stockholders.
New York investors can’t tell us what kind of picture they want us to make or
hold back.
^[7]

Yet Disney did eventually cave due to pressure from Roy, and
in 1940, Disney issued stock to the public.
^[8]
Another entertainment
mogul, George Lucas, said he turned down the chairmanship of Disney in the
eighties. “I don’t want to run a public company,” Lucas said.
^[9]
For artists, a public company means having many bosses, and less artistic
freedom.

Pixar had a public offering in 1995, scheduled
by primary investor Steve Jobs to reap the benefits of
Toy Story
’s success.
But ultimately this model was unsustainable, and they decided
not
to
remain an independent public company, but instead to operate as a wing of
Disney, to trade market volatility for Disney’s protection. Writer Karen Paik
explained why being a publicly-traded company was so risky:

Once Pixar went public, it had been protected by its
track record of perfection at the box office, which … earned it the
latitude from its shareholders to make decisions as it saw fit. But in the
expensive and often fickle movie business, it’s dangerous to be in a place
where you have to rely on perfection to keep your head above water.
^[10]

As Paik speculates, “a spell of bad luck” could
leave Pixar at the mercy of its shareholders, that is, told what to do
artistically
by the business side. As long as Pixar artists maintained a perfect track
record, shareholders would leave them alone, but how long could they stay
perfect? Part of their reason for merging with Disney was to avoid the
fickleness of public investors. Of course, even before going public, Pixar had
to answer to Steve Jobs, and Disney had to answer to Bank of America, but
clearly, answering to a faceless mob—by turns impulsively bullish and bearish—seemed
more worrisome to these artists than answering to a single, human lender with
whom they had already established a relationship and could reason with.

While Henson was alive, the shares of his
company were owned by only two people, Jim and Jane Henson. Though he would
have to seek funding at times from producer Lew Grade and networks for
expensive projects, for the most part, his enterprise was funded by its own
products—commercial work and merchandise. To never have to deal with
stockholders’ desires—which can often be shortsighted, greedy, or fearful—was
certainly a blessing for Henson. It allowed him to control the destiny of his
own company, answering only to his own artistic standards of excellence.
Building a reputation takes patience, investing even when the profits take a
dip. While stockholders tend to make a fuss about this year’s merchandizing
sales, Larry Mirkin said of Henson, “He took a longer view about it.”
^[11]

OWN EVERYTHING YOU DO
PAY UP TO BUY YOURSELF BACK

Owning your work has clear financial benefits, but it can be
incredibly costly. One instance in which the risk paid off was in the case of
Henson’s early commercials. In 1957, Henson made an ad for Wilkins Coffee that
became the “number one, most popular commercial”
^[12]
in the Washington area. Because these ads played only in local markets, Henson
was able to repackage them and sell them to other coffee companies in other
regions. Henson explained that many paychecks grew out of the ads for Wilkins
Coffee:

They got a lot of talk, and so then the advertising
agency started syndicating them and they would sell them to a coffee company in
Boston, another coffee company in New York.… [S]o for a while there—I
bought my contract from that agency and then I was producing them—the same
things around the country. And so we had up to about a dozen or so clients
going at the same time. At the point, I was making a lot of money.
^[13]

It’s funny to think someone could make more money on
local
TV, but it was actually a blessing to have a small market with these
commercials. Falk explains: “Jim could make the same ads for the new client
easily by just changing the name in the script and the packaging during the
shoot.”
^[14]
This became even more
lucrative when he bought his contract from the middle-man ad agency. Henson
made a lot of money this way, firstly by owning the copyright, rather than
letting the coffee company keep it, and secondly by buying his contract back
from the ad agency. It paid off. However, the cost of buying himself back would
be even greater in the case of
The Dark Crystal
.

Henson said in 1982 of the film, “Of all
projects that I’ve ever worked on, it’s the one I’m most proud of.”
^[15]
The film had a high budget from Grade, whose “hands-off policy [had] been vital
to the success of the enterprise,”
^[16]
but just before the film
was scheduled to release, Henson’s angel funder was forced to sell his company
to Robert Holmes à Court, a British businessman with a very different idea
about the relationship between art and profits. Writer David Odell recalls
Henson’s worry that the new producers, fearful that they had spent too much,
would “try to cut their losses by skimping on publicity and promotion.”
^[17]

Brillstein
recalls:

He called
me and announced he wanted to buy back the movie.

“You’re
out of your mind,” I said. “What are you going to do with it?”

“I’ll
control its destiny,” he said. “I love it.”

“But
Sir Robert will want fifteen million.”

“I
don’t care.”

“Tell
you what. I’ll come to your office right now with a Gucci bag filled with
fifteen million in cash. Take a look at it. Say good-bye to it.”

“Bernie,”
he said patiently. “Remember ten years ago in your kitchen you said I’d be free
to do what I want? Artistic freedom? I’m calling it in.”
^[18]

Odell continues:

Holmes à Court said “Sold!” and Jim was the proud
owner of
The Dark Crystal
. Jim had broken the one rule they warn you
about in Hollywood: Never put your own money in your movie.
^[19]

The film was only a moderate success. Brillstein said, “It
was costly in the short term, but eventually we made back all but a million.
Jim didn’t mind. He just wanted to own his own stuff. End of subject.”
^[20]
If Brillstein is correct, then the movie
made them $14 million by 1999, and for all their hard work, Henson Associates
lost
a million. However, Henson saw beyond the world as it was—a place of fuzzy TVs
and VHS cassettes. In the early eighties, he said of high-resolution cable
television, “Certainly, that will come.” Continuing, he said:

Hopefully … we’re gonna have some widescreen
images at home, it’ll be wonderful, and when we do that, and then I’m gonna
release
Dark Crystal
to television.
^[21]

Sure enough, the
new millennium saw the popularization of DVDs—lossless, crisp-imaged Digital
Video Disks—and affordable widescreen televisions. According to Odell in 2012,
The
Dark Crystal
had “become a classic and a terrific seller on DVD, largely to
people in their thirties who fell in love with it when they were kids.”
^[22]
Sony even asked the Henson Company if they could produce a fantasy film in the
same vein hoping to attract a similar cult following, resulting in Neil
Gaiman’s 2005 film
MirrorMask
.
^[23]
In the long view,
Henson’s decision to buy back the film paid off. And yet, in the short term, it
was thought a foolish choice by many, and at the very least, it was a
risky
choice.

While most of us can’t write a check for $15
million, we quite often have the ability to negotiate for the ownership of our
work to, as Henson said, “control its destiny.” Yet a phrase like this is
almost too mythic to be understood. In practical terms, what does it mean to
control a work’s destiny? It’s not just who gets the profits, or how the film
will be marketed and released.

Pixar presents a good example of a company that
could not control the destiny of their movie, because their distributor and
funder, The Walt Disney Company, owned the rights to 1995’s
Toy Story
along with its characters.
^[24]
This, along with other
contractual headaches, put Pixar in a terrible situation—one in which they had
to choose between going independent (and losing
Toy Story
) or joining
Disney (which at that time was run by management they distrusted). John
Lasseter explained: