Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (6 page)

Regardless of what your art
is
, in the larger sense, there may be an option for revenue that you have closed off for moral reasons that, when seen through the right lens, could be the key to your artistic freedom. The trick is to be open to the possibilities. According to Frank Oz, “Jim always flowed with the river. He never fought very hard against it.”
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Yet, paradoxically, because of this strategy, Henson was able to blaze his own path. What would you
never
do for money? How could you convince yourself to do it—for art? Could you turn it into art itself? Know that making the choice
will
eat up more of your time, because as an artist, you will care about more than the business standard. However you choose to address the grossness of the problem will resemble the rest of your art—if you are an educator, you will turn the cash cow into a teaching tool; a scientist, into science; a philosopher, into philosophy.

Reconsider selling out as quite possibly buying you time later to be more pure. Know that in order to sell out, you might need a handle for the masses to grasp your idea, but once you have it, your audience will follow you into any strange and darkened corner of your imagination—into places you never thought possible. Because when you hit upon something as profitable as Kermit was, going with the market’s demand can give you the artistic freedom to make your
Dark Crystal
, something the market doesn’t know it wants until two generations in—when the children you taught to love it teach it to their kids.

Of course, if you do “cash in” on a big wave, it is “necessary,” in Hyde’s words, to funnel the profits back into the art. Readers who are artists, of course, will. There is always something bigger and better you want to make but just don’t have the money for. What if you visualize your financial success as the funding for this massive undertaking?

If you’ve already dealt with selling out to some degree, how has it affected your career? Was it the easy money it promised to be, or did you work harder afterwards? Did more money bring creative independence, more problems, or both? Would you do it again if it bought you more time to work? How did you come to the decision to do it? Do you have any regrets?

For myself, the switch from fiction to nonfiction is my sellout, but I came to it organically, at age thirty, out of personal necessity. I was spending hundreds of hours crafting my fiction, but the only place I managed to publish it was a very small press that didn’t pay or have many readers. My masters degree qualified me to tutor online for $11 an hour, and if I’d had a PhD, I would have earned $12. Burnt out and confused, in the Christmas of 2010, I felt I
needed
the Muppets, and I began to watch them obsessively—for the reassuring feeling they gave me.

Since I am a writer by nature, I recognized this as “research.” I wanted the kind of work Henson had—fun, difficult, rewarding, worthwhile. I started to study his business methods, because more than any other artist—the indie rock dreamboats, the provocateur cartoonists—Henson’s legacy is clearly one of benevolence, art, and giving, and it is
lasting
. If he could negotiate art and business, there was no reason why I couldn’t too.

For me, writing a prescriptive book is a “handle” to get my ideas across. I used to think my novel would do that, but when an article I wrote about the Muppets struck a nerve online in 2011, I realized I needed to flow with the river, and to a greater extent, let the
readers
tell me what’s working. Now, I have published my first book, and that is a dream come true. The fact is, I could not have learned so much about business from anyone else besides Jim Henson.

I would love it if you would add your thoughts to my blog at
ElizabethHydeStevens.com
. The questions in this book are not rhetorical—they are starting points for discussion and self-reflection. If you have ten minutes to think about the shape of your career, answer them. Tell us your story.

Truly, there is no one alive today who knows the way for
you
to become a successful artist. To find it, you’ll need to imagine it. Lesson 1, Selling out—the way Henson did—may be something to reconsider.

What would
you
do with artistic freedom?

It was the
Sesame Street
licensing bonanza that made Jim Henson rich, but that stroke of luck didn’t appear overnight. Twenty years earlier, Kermit was “born” in 1955 when college freshman Jim Henson cut up his mother’s coat and attached two halves of a Ping-Pong ball to it. The story goes back further still—in order for Henson to become the artist he was at age nineteen took nineteen years of evolution. And so to get Kermit to the point in 1976 when he was incredibly marketable, it took forty years—an entire
lifetime
of work.

We sometimes picture artists as people with leisure time, avoiding the hard work of the factory and cubicle, but art is
work
. And if you’re wondering why, as the song goes, you haven’t made it yet, perhaps you just haven’t earned it yet. It’s not the answer we
want
to hear. As artists, we desire nothing more than the freedom to work long hours on our art. Yet, if you have not already done so, you need to shift that freedom into its opposite form—total self-sacrifice and servitude. If art is a gift, then the way to create it is to sacrifice your life to it. You must give many hours to the work—hours that you do not
want
to give, but feel you
must
give.

The work of art that affected me most powerfully in my life was a blank canvas by Tom Friedman called
1000 Hours of Staring
. I stood in the Museum of Modern Art on a field trip thinking,
He didn’t
really
stare at this for five years, did he? If he did, it left no mark, so what’s the point? Aside from insanity, why would anyone do that?
The idea of that sacrifice stuck with me over the years, and I think it serves nicely as an image of what art is—a sacrifice of one’s time, one’s
lifetime
, to make others feel something. Every great work of art is, in some way, the equivalent of
1000 Hours of Staring
. A sacrifice, a gift, an object upon which people think in wonder,
Did he really give up his life for this?

The amount of work Henson did to earn his success would probably be unthinkable to you right now. But working long hours, often without sleep, was a self-imposed sentence. And paradoxically, such an
insane
amount of work gave him time to experiment—to
play
. And herein lies the paradox. It is a special kind of work that artists must do, and it is a kind of work that sometimes looks nothing like work at all. Henson was always working, and because he was always working, he was always playing.

In many ways, Henson was a
slave
to his artistic gift—but to no one else. This is the ideal state for an artist. As we look at the many years Henson labored in service of his gift, labor that often came to nothing, try to picture yourself becoming more like this—like Sisyphus pushing a rock up a hill only to see it fall back down, knowing you will do this for eternity. Learn to work without hope of reward. That is, learn to push for the sake of pushing.

START WITH ANY ROCK AND PUSH
DO SOMETHING REPETITIVELY

As the story goes, Henson’s career started with luck: When he was seventeen, producers from a local CBS channel, WTOP, approached his high school puppetry club looking for puppeteers for a children’s show.
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Henson built a few puppets, auditioned with a friend, and got the job. As the club’s set designer, had never actually puppeteered before, so he taught himself.
The Junior Morning Show
was Henson’s start in television. Producers from another network saw his work and hired him. In time, they gave him his own show, and years later, he would be remembered as the premier creator of TV puppetry.

But the legend fast-forwards through the boring parts. If we take a closer look, we find that the real secret to Henson’s success was
hard work
.

Firstly, Henson was already quite involved in the arts at his Hyattsville, Maryland, high school. He illustrated school publications, designed sets for plays, and attended a puppetry club though he didn’t puppeteer.
^[2]
And what can often go unsaid is that
The
Junior Morning Show
wasn’t a dream job—he got to be on TV, but he had to perform for kids and housewives.
The
Junior Morning Show
was daytime filler. Moreover, it was cancelled almost as soon as it started, due to child labor law violations.

Yet, by working, Henson got valuable exposure. It was lucky that a director from WRC-TV, a local NBC affiliate, happened to be on set to scout his talent, but he had to work a kiddie show to earn that luck. And the next jobs he got were still intended for young audiences, with names like
Circle 4 Ranch
and
Footlight Theater
and
Afternoon with Inga
. When you think of “crap jobs” we are forced to take, you might picture the clown hired to perform for kids’ birthday parties, or, as in the movie
Scrooged
, on TV. Performing cowboy skits for the lunchbox crowd sitting cross-legged in the footlights doesn’t exactly fit the definition of a “lucky break,” but it was a start. If you’ve ever wondered why you’ve never seen any footage of
Afternoon
, it’s because Henson didn’t want you to. It’s not the kind of work an artist is proud of. By admission he “refused to let the kinescopes out.”
^[3]
In a 1982 interview, he explained:

Back in those days in television, most local stations had a midday show for housewives that had a series of things.… So we did a few little entertainment pieces on that show.… Basically, the work I did in those days is not stuff that I’m creatively very proud of.… That stuff was really experimenting and it was just stuff that I did as a lark. I was going to college and so I was doing this and it was a way of working my way through school.
^[4]

But the job was more than money. As he had learned, work was
exposure
. And in the summer of 1955, about a year into his TV career, the network offered him his own show. Archivist Karen Falk wrote, “Clearly he made an immediate impression—a May 15, 1955 article about the show quoted the producer Carl Degen saying of Jim, ‘The kid is positively a genius. He’s absolutely amazing.’”
^[5]
We can think of this promotion as a result of paying his dues, but not in the traditional work-your-way-up-the-ladder sense. Henson was eighteen, just starting college. He didn’t wait to advance, but rather created characters and bits as though he already had his own show.
Afternoon
became a stepping stone, a venue to give the
Sam and Friends
prototypes an audience.

Now, as the creator of
Sam and Friends
, Henson had artistic control of the whole show, five minutes of skits that aired twice daily on Washington, DC’s local NBC affiliate, WRC-TV. Because it lasted for an impressive six years, it was here that Henson really got to serve his craft the way Sisyphus did. With a nightly show comes the kind of ball-and-chain the artist needs to evolve. Working every night is both the artist’s dream and nightmare. Being locked in like this forced Henson to continually innovate, but he surely grew weary of it. He later said he wanted to quit after the fourth year, but the station convinced him not to.
^[6]

There were many benefits to pushing this rock, but money wasn’t one. Henson said “there wasn’t much money in TV at the time.”
^[7]

He told an interviewer:

When I first started working, it was $5 a show; it was probably a little higher by the time I got to my own show, but I remember that they put me under contract at $100 a week, which to me was really an astronomical price.

Judy Harris:
But didn’t you have to create all the sets and the puppets and your props out of that money?

Henson:
Yeah, sure.
^[8]

With inflation, that’s like getting $40 a day for your first job. It’s not much, but then when he eventually got the raise, he was making the 1960 equivalent of $750 a week. Henson lived with his parents at the time. And if the shows were only five minutes long, that’s akin to making $1,200 an hour, right?

Unfortunately not. Henson wasn’t getting paid to work for the length of the five-minute show—
Sam and Friends
may have lasted only five minutes, but Henson worked all day. As he said, he had to make all the sets, puppets, and props out of that money. A hundred dollars a day is cheap when you consider the nature of an artist’s work. It wasn’t just writing the scripts; designing and building the props, sets, and puppets; and recruiting performers. It wasn’t just the daily pressure to come up with new ideas. It was also the years of nurturing his imagination. How many hours a day does an artist work on his art?
All of them
.

But money wasn’t what Henson was after, anyway. As Falk notes, having his own show was a technological training ground:

It was his experience at WRC-TV that provided his professional training.… His time spent behind the scenes at the station gave him access to all the latest technology and a chance to watch the directors, editors and cameramen at work.
^[9]

Jane Henson said:

In his spare time, he’d be in the control room trying to understand what was going on. And the technicians loved teaching him because he really learned his lessons well. He couldn’t wait to try out the things he was learning on
Sam and Friends
. He would tell the technicians he would like to try this or that, and it would become a team thing.
^[10]

How else could Henson innovate in TV except by having the freedom to experiment with it on a regular basis? We might pause for a moment to picture this vision of Henson, holed up in the control room with the editors and tech guys, just learning, asking questions, throwing out what-ifs. It seems that he really wanted to know how television
works
. Henson’s photo album from this time shows a montage of cameras, two men discussing a script, and a view of the audience from behind the scenes.
^[11]
It was like the view from behind the scenes of
The Muppet Show
, except instead of a theater full of seats, you’d see cameras, booms, microphones, directors, and scripts—a crew of technicians.

This learning experience is what allowed Henson to develop his own system for performing with puppets on TV—an unnamed invention that was essentially a monitor feedback loop. Innovating the technology to suit the art was a key ingredient in the successes of Disney, Henson, and Pixar, as we will see in Chapter 5. Henson’s innovative monitor system produced humanlike eye-lines and subtle expressions at the slightest tilt of the hand. And all of this stemmed from using his time on local TV to
experiment
.

Another benefit to the
Sam and Friends
grind was that it allowed Henson to see how his work played with an audience. According to Jerry Seinfeld, the only way to learn is on stage. “Audiences will teach you what’s funny about you,”
^[12]
he told aspiring comedians, and this is true for any creative person, whether you want to be funny, poignant, or shocking. Though great art can surely be tainted by the marketplace, we must not go so far as to shut our work off from an
audience
. It is crucial for an artist’s work to develop alongside viewers. Does this mean the artist must conform to what people want? Not at all. But it means that his style grows alongside their reactions to it, either to become recalcitrant and stubborn or to yield and give in—depending on the importance of the point and the human alchemy involved. Without
any
audience reaction, it seems impossible for one’s work
not
to grow stale.

Sam and Friends
was clearly a step up in Henson’s career, and it was one he had been consciously working towards. Its timeslot was significant, because it was
not
daytime. The show aired at 6:25 p.m. and again at 11:25 p.m.
^[13]
This meant he could catch the
whole
family. It preceded
The
Huntley-Brinkley Report
and
The Tonight Show
.
Men
watched it. It won an Emmy for Best Local Entertainment of 1958.
^[14]
Now Henson was experimenting in front of the
right
people—adults, his intended audience.

And yet, he said, it often felt like no one was watching. Fortunately for Henson, the network didn’t ask him to rein in his weird ideas—they let him find the limit himself. Henson said, “We’d try some way-out things.… 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.”
^[15]
His wife and performing partner Jane said, “We had very sophisticated adult audiences right from the beginning, and I think it was very adventurous of the station to be willing to program our puppets at that time. They were—we were, you know, really pretty amateur, but always good. Jim’s work was always good, even if it was a little rough.”
^[16]
When Jane Henson calls their audience “sophisticated,” it brings to mind the viewers of
Saturday Night Live
, who can handle a few duds because of the payoff when the spontaneity really works.

Sam and Friends
was often hilarious—two cowboys who can’t get down from their horses, a spoken-word piece about late-night eating. But by today’s standards, it was more than a little rough. Henson had no business manager. He was, in many ways, a college student trying things out. If he’d had his agent, Bernie, back then, he might’ve thought of doing different material. More commercial stuff like fairy tales and animals. But because it was not about maintaining a large business or maximizing profits, this was Henson’s time to practice his art.

Over the six years of
Sam and Friends
, Henson got to see what worked and what didn’t. For example, some characters were built with hard “dummy” heads, such as the ravenous Yorick. Though he embodied a specific kind of creeping terror, he had only one expression. Poor Yorick would disappear after the sixties. On the other hand, Kermit was a soft-headed puppet, and this allowed close-ups to show great subtlety of the hand underneath. As Falk puts it, “It’s no surprise that Kermit, and a similarly constructed character Harry the Hipster, became the most visible puppets on the show and had the honor of starring in the final episode.”
^[17]
This is a very physical example of what it is to make a piece of cloth look
alive
. What it really takes, though, is six years of trying out every manner of subtle hand gestures you can come up with and seeing what they do. Through the monitor-loop, Henson could instantly see the result of a tiny tilt in three dimensions, and could internalize it as part of his character’s lexicon for expression. Ultimately, this sacrifice—years of giving his life away—is what makes Henson’s characters seem
human
. No textbook or set of steps could explain this. It had to be learned through experience, through experimentation. By
doing
. For many years.