Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (22 page)

Many of Jim Henson’s early
Ed Sullivan Show
sketches demonstrate us what happens when someone comes along who thinks
differently
. So it is fitting that Jim Henson, his predecessor Walt Disney, and our modern day visionary—Pixar—each pioneered an emerging technology to make art. These artists—or in Pixar’s case, a group of artists and engineers—did the impossible: they all turned their fringe art into a bona fide, full-length Oscar-worthy Hollywood hit. As technology companies know, innovation is not possible without R&D—research and development—and if we rewind the story to before
Toy Story
,
The Muppet Movie
, and
Snow White
, we see that all of these innovators gave themselves ample time to
play
with the “new media” of their day. For Disney, it was film; for Henson, television; and for Pixar, computers. When you compare the three, it almost feels like the same timeline has been transposed three times over the years 1937, 1979, and 1995.

In the 1937 full-length
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
, Walt Disney convinced the world that hand-drawn animation could
feel
just as real as live action. The emerging technology of Disney’s day was film, and the first narrative films appeared around 1901, the same year Disney was born. When Disney was nineteen, he began working on them—producing short animated reels for theaters. We could say the technology emerged when he did, and it was ripe for experimentation in its late teenage years, which were Disney’s teenage years as well. After years of playing with film, at the age of thirty-six, Disney made his first feature film. We would never forget it.

About forty years after
Snow White
, Jim Henson showed the world puppets could sustain a full-length Hollywood movie with 1979’s
The Muppet Movie
. But the real emerging technology in Henson’s career was television. Television was where Henson developed his art, and even in his movies, he would work with a closed-circuit television monitor at his feet, showing him what the camera sees. Similar to Disney, Jim Henson was two years old when cathode ray tube TVs became available to the public. He was twelve in 1948 when commercial network programming began. CNN noted in its profile of Henson:

The television age was new [when Henson was a boy]. In 1946, right after World War II, there were 7,000 television sets in the United States. One year later, the television audience had grown to 1 million. Jimmy desperately wanted his family to get a TV, and in 1950 [when he was fourteen], they finally did.
Jane Henson:
“It was the new media and the new, the new and exciting media on the scene.”
^[1]

Four years later, Henson was
on
TV. And he was still only eighteen. The medium of television was ripe for innovation, since it was about sixteen years old, and Henson was at a good age to do it. The television “tricks” Henson learned at local TV studios would lead to a mastery of the medium, and at the age of forty-three, Henson brought his Muppets to Hollywood, to the delight of critics and families across the world.

Sixteen years after
The Muppet Movie
, our modern-day source of magic, Pixar, proved that computer animation could make us
feel
with its full-length
Toy Story
in 1995. Pixar’s success can be traced back to the invention of computers. In a familiar narrative, Pixar’s chief technical officer, Ed Catmull, was born in 1945, a few years after the first program-controlled computer appeared. By the time the first mouse appeared, he had graduated college and started working on computers, around age twenty-two. Catmull’s dream at Pixar was to make movies, and with the addition of chief creative officer John Lasseter and investor Steve Jobs, that dream came true. By age fifty, Catmull saw his company make it to the silver screen. It is striking that Disney, Henson, and Catmull each used a technology that emerged around the time of his birth and matured at the same time he did—around twenty—when he began toying with it. It seems like a pretty good formula for artistic and financial success.

We call men like these “innovators.” Yet it is not enough to simply
use
technology. Each of us uses a personal computer and, for the most part, our days are wasted by checking Facebook and e-mail. Buying an iPhone or using Twitter isn’t going to turn you into an innovator. We have plenty of new tech today, and people can look pretty silly flashing hashtags trying to keep up. New technology isn’t
always
innovative. It’s how you
use
the tech.

As Myspace users used to say, it’s complicated. For one thing, quality is relative, and when you create something new, it has no competition. If something has never been done before, there is no measuring stick for it. How do you know if your innovation is
good
?

QUALITY IS NOT PERFECTION

The Muppets are undoubtedly remembered for their quality. When you think of puppetry, Henson’s name is the first one we remember, because truly, he did it best. In comparison, most other puppets on TV look cheap. This is because Jim Henson was demanding, but surprisingly, he was not a perfectionist.

Walt Disney
was
a perfectionist. In the making of
Snow White
, he would micromanage his animators, saying “[The dwarf’s] fanny in the last half of scene is too high,” or “Have hummingbird make four pick-ups instead of six.”
^[2]
And in order to get greater realism in his cartoons, Disney started driving his animators to art classes and picking them up at night, to show them, in Gabler’s words, “the effect of gravity on mass, and how flesh and muscle move.”
^[3]
This attention to verisimilitude reminds us of Pixar’s realism—art that sometimes feels scanned or photographic. Both contrast sharply with Henson’s work, which while
lifelike
, was not
realistic
. It sought to represent, to suggest reality, but not to copy it.

In
Snow White
, Walt Disney used the modern-day equivalent of motion-capture—animators drew the fair princess by tracing photographs of a real actress. Similarly, in
Toy Story 3
, Pixar recreated an incredibly believable scene above the ceiling panels in a daycare, replete with wiring and appropriate lighting. The details are immaculate, but they are often ordinary—even dull. We can contrast this with
The Dark Crystal
, in which Henson created the
feeling
of reality by creating from scratch a
new
reality, one more fantastic than the one we live in. Henson explained:

There’s a wonderful texture and depth of this world and if you went to photograph it … in the background there would be all these sort of edges of things, parts of life, that you don’t know about, but it indicates a depth that’s there, so in creating the world, we had to create all that depth from the beginning. And so we went into a great deal more work than we probably needed to, to have thought out the history of all the people and the buildings and the plants.
^[4]

For
The Dark Crystal
, Henson’s artists created new languages, new species, a new map, new plants, new cultures with their own new folk art traditions. In short: a new reality. While Disney and Pixar seemed to be trying to escape being cartoonish, meticulously recreating a woman’s dimensions or the space above a ceiling panel, Henson’s work always seemed to delight in how unreal objects—the dime-store doll eyes of the Muppets or the impossible flora–fauna hybrids of
The Dark Crystal
—could
suggest
reality.

One effect of Walt Disney’s perfectionism was that in order to get exactly the image he envisioned, he unfortunately suppressed the creativity of the artists he worked with. One writer remembered:

God help you if you took his idea and ran with it in the wrong direction.… If you did, one eyebrow would rise and the other would descend, and he’d say, “You don’t seem to get it at all.”
^[5]

Wilfred Jackson said, “It is my opinion that if Walt had started in some different place at the same time with a different bunch of guys, the result would have been more or less along the same lines.”
^[6]
Snow White
, it seems, would have looked the same no matter who worked for Walt Disney. His artists were not there to make
their
art. They were there to make
his
art.

Henson was not a perfectionist in this sense, because his version of “quality” required not just his own creativity, but the creativity of those around him. Steve Whitmire explained what was most important to Henson: “seeing to it that this person does what they need to do well.”
^[7]
Henson’s conception of “quality” was such that it allowed for others to co-create his worlds, which meant that he did not know in advance what those worlds would look like. If Henson had started with a different bunch of guys,
The Muppet Movie
would look completely different.

Henson cared a great deal for
quality
, but that was defined as the best each person could do, and when the voices came together in harmony, in an organic—but not random—creation, the outcomes of his projects must have been a constant surprise to him. This is no typical perfectionism, because it is
accepting
while still being
demanding
. Dave Goelz said:

He on one hand was intent on refining every take, every subsequent take, but at the same time, he enjoyed every one for what was good about it.
^[8]

Henson knew that allowing others to truly create—not to blindly recreate his ideas but to add to them and imagine their own—would make his projects better than anything he could have imagined alone.

Wendy Midener remembered that she was not told exactly what the Gelflings in
The Dark Crystal
would look like in three dimensions—she had to find it herself, by creating them:

I would just keep sculpting them, turning them out. And Jim and Brian [Froud] would come by and say, yes well I like that, but change the eyes, change the mouth. And we went through a whole series of developments … and finally it seems like after years of this, I did get two heads and Jim and Frank and Brian came to look at them and finally said, yes I think that’s it. I think that will be the gelflings.
^[9]

Henson was truly
demanding
, as when one drum roll shot in
Emmet Otter
took 233 takes.
^[10]
He had a long patience, and this inspired those around him to also have a long patience—for quality. According to Jerry Nelson:

If he could see it happening in his mind’s eye and knew that it would work, he would dog it until it worked.… We always wanted to give Jim exactly what he was looking for. We didn’t always know what that was, but we were willing to try until we found it.
^[11]

Yet, as frustrating as it must have been to get the shot right, if you watch the outtake reel, Nelson and Oz, the performers in the scene, seem incredibly good-natured about it, extending Henson the time to achieve his vision, perhaps because he would have done the same for them.

Henson was
like
a perfectionist at times, because he took the time to get something right. He said of
The Dark Crystal
that they “went into a great deal more work than we probably needed to.” Similarly, the rig that made the Muppets ride bicycles in circles for
The Great Muppet Caper
was more trouble than most people would go to:

Part of the challenge, he explained, was that, “… the puppet’s feet on the pedals had to turn in time with the beat of the music and both to be in time with each other and travel at realistic speed.” He went on, describing that there were three different types of platforms rigged to the crane. When Miss Piggy and Kermit rode side by side and then turned in two circles, the marionettists worked on two circular platforms. As the bicycles went into their circles, the crane stopped moving and the momentum was carried on by the puppeteers who worked around the outside of the platforms. Once the puppeteers got back to their start position, the crane started up and the bicycles continued on a straight path. Several additional paragraphs detailed the use of radio control for the heads, and the use of a tow rope from a large tricycle and variously sized trolleys for the group shots.
^[12]

It seems crazy to go to such lengths, as Rowlf sings in
Muppets Take Manhattan
, “There’ll be plenty of people saying forget all about it, it ain’t worth the trouble, all the trouble that you’re going to.”
^[13]
Why would anyone go to such lengths? When asked why Henson made movies, Frank Oz once said:

Jim didn’t think of it in hit terms. He got to have control and play. And create whatever he wanted; and that was a joy, and he loved it. He always pushed the envelope. He just loved breaking barriers. He just loved breaking barriers.
^[14]

Oz repeated it twice for emphasis. Henson just
loved
breaking barriers. It wasn’t about creating the most perfect example of a thing—because there is no surprise in that. For Henson, it seemed to be about
the
surprise
. Doing something truly
new
.

It is this innovator’s temperament that made Henson change the beloved intro on
The Muppet Show
—from Scooter in the star’s dressing room to Pops at the door. What worked well for four seasons would have been fine for most people, but for the last season, why not try something new? Nelson explained the reason Henson changed a proven formula:

Jim liked to change things around on the show to keep it new. And he liked to change the look of the show, slightly.
^[15]

In fact, Jim Henson was continually changing small things as well as the overarching style of his work. Many times, he changed the look of his characters by bringing in new designers. For
Fraggle Rock
, Henson asked Michael Frith to create sketches for the characters and their world. Previously, Frith had been a writer–illustrator with Dr. Seuss, and his design gave the show a particular Seuss-like quality. For
The Dark Crystal
, Henson asked Brian Froud to create the sketches, and he gave it a kind of Celtic, Tolkeinesque look. Bonnie Erickson is responsible for the look of the mask-like faces in
The Muppet Musicians of Bremen
. Henson seemed to love seeing what other people could come up with—to surprise him.