Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (46 page)

Anthony Minghella’s beautiful script stops short of calling
the soldier a poor soul, but the Storyteller’s dog judges the tale rightly when
he says, “So sad.”
^[52]

“The Soldier and Death” tells the tale of a man
who becomes immortal—by using art, business, and copyright. In the late 1980s,
Jim Henson also seemed weary of his responsibilities—“playing cards” with
networks and keeping his licensing business going with characters that never
grew old.

In the Producerman phase of Henson’s career, he
and Jane split up. While many of his collaborators were marrying one
another—Brian Froud and Wendy Midener, Michael Frith and Kathryn Mullen—Henson
legally separated from Jane in July 1987.
^[53]
He lived in a luxury
Central Park bachelor-pad apartment at the Sherry-Netherland hotel, which he
spent much time in 1983 and 1984 renovating. He drove a BMW in New York and a
Mercedes convertible in Hollywood.
^[54]
He filmed
A Muppet
Family Christmas
in 1987, ironically coming together with all his employees
precisely when his own family was no longer all together.

As a producer, he excelled at bringing groups
together, but he was only marginally a
part
of them. He guest-starred on
Fraggle Rock
and guest-directed two episodes of
The Storyteller.
Perhaps
it is a romantic notion to compare Henson to Citizen Kane in the Big Table
Years—where the wealthier one gets, the more
distance
one finds between
himself and his fellow man. Yet it is hard not to see the “poor old boy”
overtones of “The Soldier and Death” in Henson’s endless wanderings. Falk
writes, “May 1988 was a typically hectic month for Jim,” with trips to New
York, London, Scotland, Plymouth, Stockholm, Detroit, New York again, and
Yugoslavia.
^[55]

His assistant at the time was Alex Rockwell, who
noted that in the late eighties, “even Jim had not been able to make a
successful Muppet movie for some time.”
^[56]
This was disappointing.
Frank Oz once said, “Jim didn’t think of it in hit terms.”
^[57]
And yet, when the movies
didn’t do well, he was forced to care, because it meant it would be harder to
get his next project made. While he may not have wanted to think about hits
versus flops, he had to. He noted hits and non-hits in his
Red Book
:

5/20/1980—Empire Strikes Back opens in London—YODA
big hit.

3/19/1982—First preview Dark Crystal in Washington DC—not
great.

7/12/1982—Preview Dark Crystal in Detroit—a bit better.

12/16/1987—Muppet Family Christmas airs. Great Reviews—great
rating. I go over for UK Party.
^[58]

In his own words, he sounds wearied of business:

Eliminating the dealmaking, administrative aspect of
what I did was attractive. I was spending a lot more time on business than
production.
^[59]

But like the soldier, Henson didn’t really
get
to stop. And the lesson I take from this is that you
can’t
really sell
your company and keep control of your art. Henson thought he was getting
artistic
freedom
, like he did when he licensed
Sesame Street
products, or
like when Lew Grade funded the Muppet Show, and even
more
than that
even, because Disney was better at toys than he was and better at marketing
than Lew Grade, and with Disney, he would have just
one
funder to worry
about—one that he trusted, and one with enough money to make the magical
projects he had in mind.

However, in hindsight, Henson seems to have
misjudged. The Disney Company—at least the Disney under Eisner, Wells, and
Katzenberg. Cooney said that “Henson went into the initial discussions thinking
‘Eisner would be a male Joan Cooney.’”
^[60]
But despite Henson’s
long relationship with Eisner dating back to the mid sixties,
^[61]
Disney’s lawyers were overly aggressive. According to
Newsweek
:

Henson staffers say they felt uncomfortable working
with the hard-driving Disney people. A few months after the deal was announced,
according to Henson employees, Jim Henson and about 25 staffers were flown to
Florida for a get-acquainted meeting. Jeffrey Katzenberg, chairman of Walt
Disney Studios, asked Henson how things were going. Henson said he was happy
except that he found Disney’s negotiators “offensive.” He reportedly went on to
say, “All I really want out of this is a fair deal.” Katzenberg supposedly
responded: “Fair deal! Get out of the ’60s, pal. You’re in Hollywood now.”
^[62]

This betrayal at the hands of a friend calls to mind the
story of “The Heartless Giant.” The tale begins with the warning:

On the whole, there is absolutely no reason to be
afraid of giants. Giants are gentle, perfectly harmless, very affectionate.
Unless of course, the giant has no heart in his body.
^[63]

The
heartless
giant, we learn, is unpleasant because
he’s hidden his heart, which “gave him too much trouble—all those giant
feelings. In its place was a wasp’s nest, ready to swarm.”
^[64]
The good prince Leo doesn’t believe this warning and befriends the giant, even
sets him free. Finally Leo goes to find the giant. When he discovers that the
giant has turned Leo’s brothers to stone, he still doesn’t try to slay the
heartless giant. Innocent Leo thinks he can
reform
the giant—by putting
his heart back.

The tale would be predictive of the next year of
Henson’s life, 1989. At the time, The Disney Company was a giant entertainment
conglomerate, and one whose heart—Walt Disney—was no longer around. On the
whole, there is nothing wrong with a large corporation, as long as it has a
“heart.” Walt had been the heart—
he
who makes
art
. He was the
creator who started the corporation in the first place, for human reasons. But
Walt Disney died in 1966, and his son-in-law was replaced by seasoned
entertainment executives. In the 1980s, the giant was being driven not by a
heart but by a swarm of wasps—acquisitive capitalists who were not themselves
artists. 

Like Leo’s brothers turned to stone, many of the
best children’s characters were eventually turned into toys by Disney. By
acquiring the copyright to Winnie the Pooh and Pinocchio, they were frozen in
time, and they became the property of the giant. Still, even seeing what the
giant had done to his brothers, Leo believed he could save both his brothers
and
the giant.

Henson always liked Disney, and he liked Michael
Eisner. The
Los Angeles Daily News
reported:

Eisner was an old friend. While a junior programming
executive at ABC in the mid-1960s, Eisner worked with Henson to develop a
television series pilot. In the late 1960s, Eisner again tried to develop a
Muppet television show with Henson. Neither project ever made it on the air,
but a mutual professional respect was established.
“I wouldn’t have made this deal with anyone else,” [Henson]
said.
^[65]

Henson, by joining Disney, could have filled the lacuna
where Walt Disney once sat. With the heart of the Disney corporation replaced,
there would be nothing wrong with the giant. He would be “perfectly harmless,
very affectionate.”

In “The Heartless Giant,” Leo lives with the
giant, becoming his servant. He cleans the house, looking for the giant’s
heart, but the giant tricks him, not wanting to reveal its location. Just as
the giant tried to trick Leo by telling him his heart was under the stair when
it wasn’t, Disney would not give Henson a simple “fair deal.” Run by a triad of
Roys, rather than a partnership between a Roy and a Walt, it was interested in
profit above all. This triad had been installed for one purpose—to save Disney
by turning the company around,
financially
. What they really wanted from
Henson was not what he had hoped for. Those ten years started to feel like a
lifetime of servitude. Cooney explained Henson’s misgivings:

What really caused him immense grief, and I think
contributed to his lack of physical resistance was the contract provision
dealing with his personal services. Jim would have been exclusively theirs for
the rest of his life. He would be permitted to work on
Sesame Street
for
two weeks a year, but that was it. Jim wanted to sign only a five-year deal for
his personal services, not fifteen, and Disney said no. In fairness, Disney was
about to pay him $150 million, and for what? But Jim was feeling like a caged
bird, physically and personally trapped. He just wanted to fly away. You want
to say that’s what killed him.
^[66]

Medically, it makes no sense to say that Henson’s rare strep
infection was a result of his problems with the Disney deal. Yet Henson was
clearly under stress because of the way the deal was turning out. Of the nine
episodes of
The Storyteller
, only two have tragic endings, and those are
the two Henson chose to direct. In the end of “The Heartless Giant,” Leo tells
his grandchildren that he did give the giant his heart back, and he did reform.
“Because you see,” said the storyteller, “despite all that took place, a little
boy once met a giant, and they became friends.” But Leo told the story he wished
had been true. In reality, the giant died, because Leo could not stop his
brothers’ revengeful hearts.

Let’s go back in time for a moment and imagine
the Disney story
did
go differently. Brillstein’s memoir offers us a
window into what could have been:

In the early ’80s, knowing Disney was vulnerable, Jim
wanted to make a run at taking over the company, which was still under its old
management team of Ron Miller and Roy Disney. It was just idle talk that never
went anywhere, and then Michael Eisner, Frank Wells, and Jeff Katzenberg took
over.
^[67]

It’s almost possible to imagine a world where Jim Henson ran
the Disney Company, a gentle giant. Had he gotten to the company before the
greed-is-good eighties had taken their course, the Disney Company would have a
very different culture today.

But it would have meant Henson would be running
a much bigger company, and that seemed to be something he was quite resistant
to do.

BECOMING DISNEY
SMALL COMPANY, BIG COMPANY

For an artist–entrepreneur, it makes a lot of sense to keep
your business small. The bigger you get, the more time you have to spend on
business and the more businesspeople you need to hire. In 2012, the Disney
Company employed 156,000 people.
^[68]
To put this in context,
consider the Henson Company’s 300 and Pixar’s 850.
^[69]
One of the reasons Pixar did not want to be independent was that it would have
had to expand. Ed Catmull explained:

All of a sudden there would be another two to three
hundred businesspeople in the company, and that would be a risk to the culture.
^[70]

Henson also preferred to keep the business
small. In the article “Jim Henson Content with His Kingdom,” he is quoted as
saying:

I’ve never particularly wanted to have a large organization.
The trick is to try to stay small enough to be creative but still be able to do
all the projects we want to do—and not get so big where you spend all your time
just managing people and trying to keep everybody working together.
^[71]

At that time, 1987, the company employed “more than 100
people in three cities.”
^[72]
Disney, when he was
making his first movie was already well over 1,000. A 1973 article said The
Disney Company had 20,000 employees.
^[73]

Still, when Henson made his first movie in 1979,
The New York Times
wrote, “the externals of his business are beginning
to take on a Disneylike aspect.”
^[74]
Henson disagreed:

“I’m slightly uncomfortable with all the people who
want to say things like that about me,” Henson responded to the comparison, “’cause
I like Disney but I don’t ever particularly want to do what he did. He built
this great, huge empire. I’m not particularly inclined to do that. You get that
large a thing going and I’m not sure that the quality of the work can be
maintained.” He smiled sheepishly. “It seems that I’m bigger now than I thought
I would be.”
^[75]

If a company’s profits depend on quality—as an
artist–entrepreneur’s do—then a small company is ideal for maintaining quality
control.

The animated
Muppet Babies
series is a
good case in point. Henson’s company was growing bigger in the eighties, and as
The
New York Times
said in “Mr. Muppet’s Empire Is Thriving,” he
was on five networks at once—NBC, ABC, CBS, HBO, and PBS.
^[76]

Muppet Babies
was very loosely based on
the original characters and was directed at children under seven years old. The
animation was outsourced overseas and new voice actors and songwriters were
brought in to reinterpret the characters. Brillstein explained that it was his
idea, a business idea:

I convinced him to okay the animated series
Muppet
Babies
.… Not everyone on [Henson’s] informal council—Frank Oz, Jerry
Juhl, Diana Bergenfield, David Lazer, Jim’s wife, Jane, and I—wanted to. But
the Henson Company had nothing on the air. I believed
Muppet Babies
would give Jim a presence and merchandising income while he pursued other
interests. I was right.
^[77]

In effect, Henson’s business manager,
Brillstein, was advising him to spread himself thin—to produce more shows than
he could effectively quality control—to become a bigger company than an artist
can sustain.