Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (45 page)

Steve Jobs stayed at the negotiating table with
Disney about two to three years longer because of me. Because I wanted our
characters. These characters are like our children, and it just killed me to
think of the people who forced
Cinderella II
into existence making
sequels to our films, running our characters into the ground.
^[25]

Because of the deal they’d made with Disney, Pixar couldn’t
control the destiny of
Toy Story
—Disney could churn out low-quality,
direct-to-video products for the hungry stay-at-home market with little care
for narrative continuity or cinematic magnificence. Disney had already
attempted to make a direct-to-video sequel to
Toy Story
, but because
they were artists, Pixar went to great effort to make
Toy Story 2
and
3
themselves, without skimping on quality. One can imagine that if Henson had
not
bought back
The Dark Crystal
, we might have seen any number
of gelfling spin-offs made to conform to whatever the top-grossing video of the
day demanded: crime-fighting ninja gelflings, babytalk sing-a-long gelflings,
or preteen pop starlet gelflings.

When Henson bought his contract from the Chicago
ad agency, he was clearly buying himself back, because what he purchased was
his right to control his future work. When he bought
The Dark Crystal
,
the work had already been made, yet it was such a personal film for Henson that
it likely
felt
like a part of himself. When John Lasseter says that Buzz
and Woody are “like our children,” this should not be a surprise to artists.
Like children, artworks can be separated from the artist, and yet a parent can
never truly “let go.” And in business—when we arrange our fiscal contracts—it
makes sense to set up a scenario that conforms to this feeling. As an artist,
you very likely will return to the characters again, if not as a sequel, then
in some way, shape, or form. It will be a part of you that you will have a real
problem with
someone else
owning.

Yet, with all we know about Henson—owning
everything he did—how could he ever decide, as he did in 1990, to enter into
negotiations with Michael Eisner to sell his characters to Disney?         

THE DISNEY SALE
HIS MOTIVES AND THEIRS

Disney in 1990 was acquiring
many
properties. In
The
Disney Touch,
Ron Grover explains why the 1980s was such a time of
change—and growth—for Disney. After Walt’s death, the company was failing, and
in 1984, Roy E. Disney—Walt’s nephew—staged a shareholder coup and got rid of
the old management led by Walt’s son-in-law Ron Miller and in his place
installed a new, experienced corporate leadership: CEO Michael Eisner (the
former vice president of ABC), Chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg (the former
president of production at Paramount), and President Frank Wells (the former
president of Warner Brothers). According to one Disney-produced documentary, it
was a time of “optimistic growth and aggressive investment”
^[26]
into new sectors, with the company acquiring sports teams, cruise ships, TV
networks, record labels, other studios, and publishing companies.
^[27]
But Disney was strategic; as often as not, it decided
not
to buy a
company, as was the case with SeaWorld. Grover, drawing from extensive interviews
with Eisner and Disney insiders, explains:

Disney’s decision to reject the Harcourt deal had
boiled down to one fundamental question: Were the Sea World properties so
unique that Disney could not create something similar or better, and at a lower
price?
^[28]

Because Disney could undercut SeaWorld with its own aquatic
park, it didn’t bother buying it. On the other hand, they agreed to buy
Henson’s Company. Grover explains why:

In many ways, the Muppet deal was a classic Disney
acquisition. The Muppets were irreplaceable assets, characters that had been
created by Henson’s genius and elevated to their current popularity through
years of nurturing. They were not the kinds of assets that could be created by
forming a new division of Disney or giving an assignment to existing creative
personnel.
^[29]

Henson’s art was not something Disney could make copies of
cheaply. So Eisner arranged to buy the Muppet feature films and television
series, and the trademarks and copyrights associated with them.
^[30]
Going forward, any profits made by exploiting Kermit would go to Disney, and
Eisner was counting on Kermit being “what industry executives call
‘evergreen,’”
^[31]
defined in
The New
York Times
as:

Properties that can be introduced to a new generation
of children every few years. Such characters can be recycled not just on films
and television, but on books, lunch boxes, T-shirts and other products.
^[32]

Eisner was on the lookout for “evergreens,”
which he seemed to be collecting. According to the
Wall Street Journal
:

“Disney needs new characters because there’s always a
risk with Disney of overexposing the characters they do have,” says one
analyst, adding that the Roger Rabbit characters aren’t enough to supply fresh
characters.”
^[33]

Another likely motivation of Disney’s—though hidden—was that
Henson was Disney’s competition. Buying him would silence his ability to take
profits away
from Disney. Though this motive was not announced by
Disney, it was clearly a factor, because they
did
try to limit Henson’s
other characters. According to
Forbes
:

[The
Sesame Street
Muppets] are controlled by
Children’s Television Workshop—[but] Disney wanted to limit their use,
presumably to enhance the value of the Muppets it was buying.
^[34]

And it was also reported in
The
Washington Post
that
Sesame Street
characters would no longer be able to use the name
“Muppets” if the deal closed.
^[35]
If Disney was to corner
the market in family entertainment—which it has done in the 2000s, acquiring
Marvel Comics, Pixar Studios, and Lucasfilm—it had to have the Muppets in its
collection. But why would
Henson
want to sell? The reason would have to
be pretty compelling to make a man who cared so much for creative control to
give up his copyrights.

Grover
writes that Disney agreed to pay Henson “nearly $150 million in Disney
stock for the rights to Kermit, Miss Piggy, and the rest of the Muppet
characters.… Henson himself had agreed to a 10-year contract to
work—exclusively—with Disney on TV shows and films.”
^[36]
The number is large, although Disney stock is not the same as money, it’s more
like power—over Disney. Yet for Henson, the motive was more about the ten years
than the $150 million.

To Henson, Disney must’ve looked like the ideal
angel funder, willing to write a check for his expensive projects. Joan Ganz
Cooney explained in
Street Gang
, “Disney was promising to back any movie
project Jim wanted to do. That was huge.”
^[37]
The promise to fund
any
project was paramount to the barrier-breaking Henson, who was eager to
experiment with 3-D movies and theme park rides, which were too costly to
produce on his own. And in Eisner’s overtures, he clearly saw echoes of Lew
Grade’s hands-off policy. Over lunch with Cooney in 1989, Henson said, “I want
the kind of creative freedom that I’ll have there [at Disney] without the
burden of fund-raising.”
^[38]
Clearly, business had
taken its toll on Henson. At age fifty, he was still having to pitch his ideas
to networks and often being disappointed, as when NBC cancelled
The Jim
Henson Hour
after only five episodes. Cooney continues:

Jim was fine with turning over the classic Muppets to
Disney because he was tired of running the company, tired of having to raise
money for every project.
^[39]

He told his agent, Bernie Brillstein, the same
thing:

His overhead was enormous, and it was tough on him.
Even though he had expert assistance from guys like David Lazer, Jim needed to
get out from under the organizational albatross that drained his creative
energy. You can have the top people in the world, but the buck stops at the
boss. People would go to Jim directly about everything and he hardly had the
time. He was an artist first and foremost, and he needed to concentrate on his
work and come up with magnificent ideas like he always had. With Disney’s money
and machinery, Jim could be fully creative.
^[40]

In his mind, the Disney deal would allow Henson to make more
art and have to do less business. Because in fact, he didn’t sell his
entire
company to Disney, just the branch that made the money—“the licensing and
publishing businesses of Henson Associates, Inc.,”
^[41]
according to
The
Los Angeles Times
. Michael Davis writes:

The deal did not include Henson’s production company
and the core creative talent who worked in the United States and in the London
offices of the Henson Creature Shop.
^[42]

Henson was keeping his creative team, his
production company, and his Creature Shop and jettisoning the licensing and
publishing—the business—departments. According to
The Washington Post
,

With the sale still on the boards, Henson cut his
staff of about 120 in half to trim away business operations that were not part
of the production entity. Most of those laid off were not members of the
creative staff and were absorbed by Disney to minister to the properties after
they are acquired.
^[43]

Henson was keeping his artists and tech people,
and landing them a lucrative distribution deal with an entertainment legend. It
seemed like a deal made in heaven. What Disney wanted most was the licensing
business, and that was what Henson wanted
least
. They were willing to
give him what he wanted
most
, a ten-year contract with an angel funder
to make great art.

So, to make the deal, Henson bought out his
wife’s thirty-five shares in the company in July 1987 by agreeing to pay her
any proceeds made from them in the merger.
^[44]
He also gave Brillstein
“a check for $7 million” to compensate for their agreement coming to an end.
^[45]
At this point, Henson was the sole owner and stakeholder in his business. He
was in the perfect position for an artist.

Yet Henson was about to give up an artist’s
greatest asset—copyright—because he was weary of business and believed he could
start over.

OUR POOR BOY THE SOLDIER
PRODUCERMAN AND THE HEARTLESS GIANT

Jim Henson chose to direct two episodes of his extravagant
1988 folktale series
The Storyteller
—“The Heartless Giant” and “The
Soldier and Death.”
The New York Times
wrote that the stories were made
of “scary, beguiling, contradictory ideas.”
^[46]
Henson said of these
fairy tales, “the stories have a lot of substance—they work for the present
day.”
^[47]

Indeed, the episodes Henson directed seem to
have a strange resonance with this period in his life. Falk summarizes their
themes:

“The Soldier and Death,” based on a Russian story
about a soldier who cheats death and “The Heartless Giant,” the story about a
Giant and a prince grappling with friendship and betrayal.”
^[48]

Like “The Shoemaker and the Elves,” “The Soldier
and Death” is an allegory about the life of an artist. By becoming an artist—singing
and dancing—the wandering soldier cheats death and lives forever. On his way
home from the war, the soldier meets a beggar and learns to whistle a “ruby
whistle” along with the beggar’s fiddle, and though they are both terrible
musicians, he enjoys himself so much he gives the man one of his last three
biscuits. A few beggars later, the soldier can not only fiddle but dance too,
play cards, and call animals into a magic sack that compels them to obey. With
his pack of magic cards, he beats the devils at their card game and becomes a
king. One of them gives him the ability to see death—a puppet
The New York
Times
called “at once a hooded fetus and ethereal crone.”
^[49]
On his deathbed, the soldier cleverly calls death into his sack. He becomes
immortal.

It is a dark tale, but remember that Henson
himself earned a kind of immortality through his art. He was a self-taught
artist who collaborated with others like himself, just as the soldier danced
and played with the beggar. “The one couldn’t fiddle, the other couldn’t
whistle. And quite happy they both were.”
^[50]
Henson’s generosity
towards his collaborators, like the soldier’s biscuit, earned him friendship
and loyalty, and the pack of cards can be seen as the ability to negotiate in
business—something artists notoriously lack. With the magic cards, the soldier
could
beat
the devils. The sack represents copyright—the ability to turn
what naturally flies free—ideas—into property. The soldier called birds,
beasts, devils, and death into the sack. Henson called movie scripts, VHS
tapes, Big Bird, and Piggy in.

Yet the soldier’s story does not end happily.
The people in his kingdom
want
to die because the world has become
meaningless without death. So, eventually, the soldier sets death free, but he
himself is doomed to wander the earth forever:

He was condemned to watch while others aged and died,
but death would not come for him. No, the soldier, old chip and dried beef,
lived on and on and on …
^[51]