Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (5 page)

On
The Muppet Show,
the young and annoyingly earnest Scooter gets to have his way—because his uncle owns the theater. Kermit, in order to put on his show, must keep him happy. Scooter suggests a number with a dancing poodle.

Kermit says, “It sounds, said the frog, displaying his artistic judgment, sappy.”

Scooter mentions his uncle.

Kermit adapts: “It sounds, said the frog, displaying his will to survive, wonderful.”

In a sense, Kermit is lying, but more accurately, he is transparently expressing the truth of his situation—to the show’s viewers. In order to have his show, he needs a theater. This seems a natural problem of selling one’s work on the open market. The market can start to shape the work. Yet,
some
contact with the market will not entirely destroy a work.

The romantic image of the artist we have been given coyly ignores the fact that all artists are affected by the market—even Emily Dickinson, writing in her family’s attic, might have used fewer long dashes had she been renting a basement apartment.
The Muppet Show
was an art that made clear compromises to conform to the market—having animal characters and, in its first season, employing traditional sitcom joke writers and using canned laughter. Yet, with all its compromises,
The Muppet Show
also raised the bar for what was possible on TV, by bringing more art to it than the medium required.

THERE ARE BAD TOYS
WHICH MEANS THERE MUST ALSO BE
GOOD
TOYS

Henson’s great genius lay in his ability to see the humor, the beauty, the
art,
in everything. His son said, “The same image that would depress somebody else was an image he could delight in. The same circumstance that would frustrate somebody would tickle him.”
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Henson’s character Cantus seemed to believe there could be a song in
anything
, and Henson likewise seemed to be able to make art out of anything, even the crassest commodities. When Henson told Houle to make his toys beautiful, he was serious. He was asking Houle to make toys in the same way he made toys for his own children. Falk describes his work for the
Sesame Street
“Number 8” counting film:

Elaborate sets were built, and Jim hand-painted the large castle with windows that opened to reveal the eight Princesses. He was building doll houses for his daughters at that time so his miniature abode-building skills were sharp.
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But, of course, to mass-produce toys this good, this “artsy-craftsy,” would be impossible. As we know, the economic model of the toy
works,
because the toys can be mass-produced cheaply using a copyright that was very expensive to make. Toys are big profit because the original character can be a gift—a product of gift labor—and the commodity resembles that gift. To make each toy itself a work of art—such as a handmade doll house—would be totally unprofitable. On the other hand, to conform to the industry standard—to let Fisher-Price design his toys—would yield the
maximum
profits for Henson. Henson aimed for somewhere in between, to achieve a quality his fine taste would approve of. This extra overhead, of course, cut into his profits, but it was in this sense that the toys themselves could be
part
gift.

A downside to handling the licensing himself was that Henson had to add a new business arm to his company. When Pixar was faced with this proposition many years later, they instead negotiated a merger with Disney to let them handle it. Ed Catmull, Pixar’s current president, who at the time was the company’s Chief Technical Officer, explained the danger of having to build a business arm quickly:

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.
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It was crucial that Henson’s business arm respected the artistic process. Henson lawyer Al Gottesman explained how the company had to grow
carefully
:

Jim was very concerned about quality control.… [A]nd he’d veto anything that he didn’t like. When we went to license the Muppet Show characters, he wanted to approve everything himself, and that got crazy. We’d have a courier on the plane to London almost every day with a bag full of prototypes for him to look at. It wasn’t that Jim couldn’t delegate responsibility. I think it was just that he’d been used to running a very small company.… He would have to hire more business people and lawyers to take care of the expansion, but he would not fall into the trap of creating a company that broke down into two parts—the creative personnel on one side and the business people on the other. To avoid that schism, he tried to hire business people who would fit comfortably into the creative family that was already in place.
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When you add new participants to the Ouija Board game, the pointer starts to go in a new direction, and so Henson was most selective. Henson had famously waited for Frank Oz to finish high school so that he could hire this irreplaceable puppeteering prodigy, and with this same cautious precision, he hired businesspeople he had already worked with and knew he could trust. Houle had been working at Fisher-Price, Michael Frith, an illustrator, at Random House. The licensing and publishing division of Henson’s company grew in this way.

Henson had to make sure that every new person could “fit in comfortably to the creative family.” Frith, who had worked with Dr. Seuss, fit in nicely. He explained that his first project as an official Henson employee was a day-and-night labor of love:

Sesame Street licensing was just beginning to heat up, so there was a ton to vet and correct: much of the pile turned out to be artwork for a Sesame encyclopedia that was being produced in Japan. It was WAY past due—Jim hadn’t been too concerned about their deadlines—and it was just … terrible. And it came with an extra dividend. Every morning when I arrived (and I was EARLY), there would be sitting in our little reception area a smiling Japanese man with a briefcase on his lap. Every night when I went home (and I was working LATE) he was still there. He never said a word. As far as I know, he never opened the briefcase. I labored on, sheet after sheet after sheet of reconceptions and corrections. Every now and then, usually late at night, our producer, David Lazer, would wander in, peer over my shoulder and murmur, “It’ll always be a sow’s ear.”
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Frith was also responsible for
Miss Piggy’s Treasury of Art Masterpieces from the Kermitage Collection
. Out of print, it now sells for about $35. It features full-page photographs of Miss Piggy as Whistler’s mother, the Mona Lisa, a Rembrandt, a Vermeer. Frith described the idea’s genesis:

I began, in the rare spare moments the photo studio had, devising absurdly elaborate—and not inexpensive—recreations of iconic works of art starring our (by now) much loved Muppet repertory company. I was determined to accomplish a couple of things, but most importantly to capture both the light and the composition of the originals (not easy when you’re putting a short, dumpy pig in the place of a long, lissome Botticelli Venus), and to do it ALL in the camera—no tricks, no retouching. This, my dears, was pre-Photoshop. We had integrity then. And we were a little bit mad. Maybe more than a little.
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Here, “a little bit mad” seems to mean “willing to make art.” Frith, with Henson’s direction, took what might otherwise be a pure commodity and turned it into art—something that’s more trouble than it’s worth, but that one does anyway, in service of the gift. The saying goes that “You can’t turn a sow’s ear into a purse,” but by hiring the right people to create his toys, Henson turned a commodity into something we might call “pop art.”

In 1969, Henson published a
Woman’s Day
spread with patterns that mothers could sew for their children’s puppet shows. It seems like Henson hoped the whole world could be, in Brillstein’s words, “artsy-craftsy.” But what he found is that people want what they want, and as Brillstein said, “You can’t not give it to them.”
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Postwar Americans don’t make their own puppets; they drive to a toy store and buy them. Henson loved the handmade item—he filled his home with crafts while he sold their opposite, the mass-manufactured lunchbox. Yet, in a world filled with crass, cheap, gross merchandise, Henson’s products often retained a glimmer of that “artsy-craftsy” feeling that made them, because he put more work into them than he had to. Though they may rightly be called commodities, they reminded us of something else.

PART OF THE PROBLEM
TO BE PART OF THE SOLUTION

The TV special
The Great Santa Claus Switch
aired in 1970. As this was right around the time Henson decided to merchandize, it is unsurprising that the theme of his merchandizing dilemma appears so clearly on the surface of the narrative. In the figure of Santa, it seems that Henson was debating the decision to use toys and, by extension, Christmas—the gift season—for monetary gain. Like the Grinch, toy manufacturers and network TV are
masters
at co-opting holiday generosity. And in 1970, Henson found himself right in the middle of the deception.

In the special, an evil magician named Cosmo Scam tries to profit off Christmas by kidnapping Santa and taking his sleigh. A small elf named Fred—Jim Henson’s stand-in—works for Santa and tries to protect him, but unwittingly aids Scam. He promises Santa: “I wanna help help help, I wanna serve serve serve, I wanna do my duty faithfully and never ever swerve! I wanna do my best, I wanna serve with zest, I wanna help, I wanna help, I wanna help!” But unfortunately, Fred is so wrapped up in his pledge that he forgets to protect Santa. Henson’s own zeal for art, like Fred’s passion, led him into the exploitative world of merchandizing.

In Cosmo Scam, we see an extreme capitalist whose only aim is money. His song explains: “I use my money to fulfill my plan … to make about a million bucks!” Scam is quite self-aware when he tells Santa: “I tell you something, the easy part about bein’ a burglar is stealin’ things, but the hard part is getting into people’s houses … for stealin’. People just don’t like burglars in their houses! On the other hand … no one minds if Santa Claus comes into his house on Christmas Eve, follow me?” He continues, “So I gotta do just what … everybody would think that Santa Claus would do!”

In the puppet play, the evil wizard imitates Santa, and in the real world, the toy manufacturers imitate that famously benevolent, magnanimous toy manufacturer—Santa. They try to manufacture whatever everyone thinks Santa would make, not to give joy, but to “make about a million bucks.” Scam tried to use Christmas to “get into the peoples’ houses” through the chimney. The toy manufacturers get in through the television set. More precisely, they get into peoples’ wallets through the eyes of the little tykes sitting in front of the
tube
, a conduit for gifts and thieves. As Scam sings, “Oh, there’s a
bundle
to be made every Christmas time!”

None of this is news to us, but what strikes me is Fred’s complicit role in the deception, and how he breaks free to redeem himself. Fred may have been guilty of letting himself be carried away while Santa gets kidnapped, but he was also a victim who was kidnapped himself. In the end, Fred
does
help Santa—using his creativity to free himself. After getting back to the workshop, Fred stows away on the sleigh and cuts the reins so Scam can’t take off. We might call this strategy “changing the system from the inside.”

In the end of the special, Santa’s benevolence even turns the baddies off stealin’ by giving Scam a gift. With Fred’s help, Christmas is saved and the greedy wizard is converted. The world is
better
for what transpired. In real life, Henson used his merchandizing profits to make twenty more years of art—art that tried to teach a worldwide audience to live together in peace. He used it to employ hundreds of artists and to inspire millions more. One could argue the world is a little better—
because
he sold out. If he hadn’t, I don’t know that we would be talking about him here today.

HOW TO
ENACT YOUR SELLOUT

We should never sell out to the extent that it would ruin our art or change our gift into an empty commodity. But artists today can learn from Henson’s relationship with toys. By viewing them as “creative freedom,” and then putting his effort into making them “beautiful,” Henson seemed to sell out in a way that made us love the art no less, and possibly more.

All this is not to say that we should
all
sell toys. It’s true that toys are lucrative, and you
could
try to copy his road map exactly—create copyrightable characters, promote them through a philanthropic teaching endeavor, and then merchandize—but such a plot would be soulless, and I doubt it would work, even if copied step-for-step. In fact, this is usually how
bad
toys are made. For one thing, such calculation tends to crowd into your ability to do things for “the right reasons.” For another, Henson didn’t calculate this path himself. It happened organically, because he liked the idea for
Sesame Street
and was in a place where he could afford to do something simply because it was a good idea. As we’ll see in later chapters, his view of copyright wasn’t about profit; it was about protecting the work.

You are not Jim Henson, and unless you are a puppeteer in show business, your career is unlikely to look much like his. Yet there are some universal lessons here. Your art may not involve characters or anything merchandisable, but there may yet be some way in which mass production or mass media can benefit you. This is the difference between selling a painting and selling a license to use the image of the painting, the difference between performing a live show and broadcasting a show. Copyright creates a nice loophole for artists in the law that says they must starve. If you can make a work once and profit infinitely—proportional to the amount of times the art is given—then you can beat the system. What are the options for mass production in your own art? How might you make a masterpiece once and sell it many times? Not just for profit—for the chance to make the thing great?