Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (11 page)

[H]e made this “audition” feel relaxed and low-key
and that we were collaborators already. We chatted for a few minutes, there
were some scripts, I tried on a few puppets and miraculously came up with some
characters. The three of us went off script and I remember that we laughed a
lot.
^[26]

Of course, that became an increasingly tall
order the more “crazies” the group had. Perhaps that is why, ten years later,
Henson charged his most theatrical puppeteer, Richard Hunt, with making first
contact with the junior puppeteers for
Fraggle Rock
in Toronto. Terry
Angus, a high school senior at the time, remembered the audition:

[W]e were just sitting out in the hallway waiting to
go in when this lady comes out. She was shaking her head and in complete shock.
She came out saying “This guy’s crazy! He’s just … just … just …
Crazy! I don’t believe this!’ So my mother turns to me and says, “Look, if they
want crazy, you give ’em crazy.” So I said, “Okay.”

…

So I go in there and Richard Hunt barks off all these
commands. ‘HEY, MY NAME’S RICHARD HUNT. HOW ARE YOU DOING? HEY, SIT DOWN THERE.
OH YOU’RE FROM NOVA SCOTIA. OH THAT’S GREAT!’ He was drilling them right off.
And ‘OH, WE GOT TO GET A PICTURE OF YOU. JUST STAND OVER HERE AND LOOK INTO THE
CAMERA AND SAY SMILE. WELL MAYBE NOT SMILE ANYWAY HERE’S THE PICTURE.’ He just
keeps going on like that and sits me down, then goes, ‘OKAY, SO LET’S SEE WHAT
YOU CAN DO.’

…

I brought out Kermit for Richard somewhere in there
and he got a kick out of that and was playing off it. He was very mean to the
frog. I said in my best Kermit, ‘Ah, excuse me, Mr. Hunt, I *really* don’t
think you should be treating people like this.’ ‘OH YEAH? WHAT ARE YOU GONNA
DO, FROG?’ ‘Uh, err, *ahem* nothing.’
^[27]

Working together is a crucial skill, because as Dave Goelz
said, “Almost nothing in the Muppets is ever done in isolation. No one ever
does anything really by themselves.”
^[28]
Puppeteers attended script meetings, and writers watched the tapings. A
songwriter and lyricist played off one another, and off the script, which
sometimes took its visual cues out of the song lyrics. As Goelz said, Henson’s
organization was “interdependent,”
^[29]
just like the
Rock
itself.

Henson hired three mimes to perform the Gorg
bodies in
Fraggle Rock
—Gord Robertson, Trish Leeper, and Rob Mills—who
had already worked together for some time but who were, by their own admission,
“kind of amateur.”
^[30]
Their audition was wild and a little alarming: they “smack[ed] the cane on
[Henson’s] table” and shouted “If you hire us, we’ll make you money!”
^[31]
Even though they were up against more well-respected mimes, Henson selected
them. Robertson explained:

The big advantage was, because they were auditioning
in threes, all the other people who went in, they didn’t know each other, so
they were all trying to shine individually. And we went in—we’re working
together—we’re working as one unit. And they were really looking for that. They
were looking for a family unit already.
^[32]

These auditions may seem unbusinesslike, but
Henson knew that his business wasn’t like others. He knew what collaboration required,
and he made sure to find it. In an episode of
Fraggle Rock
, Mokey
auditions to join the “Royal Order of Poobahs,” a secret organization that is
so exalted, no one even knows who’s a member. To become a member, Mokey must
endure trials like hopping on one foot, speaking “Oobidad,” and juggling okra
soup. When she finally laughs and calls them silly, it is Richard Hunt’s theatrical
character who says:

Mokey Fraggle! You have told us … what you should
tell us! We
are
kidding you. Yes, the High Holy Order of Poobahs isn’t a
serious group. It’s a silly group. And now you’re a member!

LAUGHTER
TENSION’S SWEETER SISTER

Christopher Finch—a writer granted an insider’s look
at
The Muppet Show
—described it as “a company with a built-in outlet for frustration.”
^[33]
What this means is that while workplace tension is unavoidable and potentially
destructive, puppets can hit each other, yell, and blow up, and the puppeteers’
tension disappears. You can see it in the auditions. The moment when aggression
is alchemized into a shared laugh is the moment when Henson knew he could work
with someone.

In
The Great Muppet Caper
, Kermit and
Piggy break character during a fight scene to get into a real fight. “Piggy!
You’re overacting!” Kermit chides her. Seamlessly, they transition back into
the fight “scene” and nail it. This scene isn’t funny just because it is metafiction
or breaks the fourth wall—it’s funny because it describes the real process of
puppeteering. It was an extra bit of honesty given to the audience about the
process the performers were engaged in.

With a silliness audition, the release of
tension in the form of laugher actually
rewards
crazy, neurotic,
negative emotions. It converts them into comedy. But the raw fuel required to
make this comedy is tension. Steve Whitmire describes a tense moment in his audition
for Jim Henson when he had to work with a puppet that wasn’t his own:

So Jim’s character said, “I notice that your head’s
flopping up and down a little. You might want to tone that down a little,” and my
puppet said, “Yeah, the inside of my head’s not stuffed very well,” and Jim’s
character said, “Don’t talk back, kid. You’re talkin’ to the master.” Which was
a joke … I hoped!
^[34]

Henson was joking—through the character’s
performance. Yet he really
was
the master, and Whitmire really
was
a kid. In some sense, the emotions were real, but they were also clearly
fiction, converted into comedy for the sake of the scene. We see the same kind
of channeling when Jerry Nelson auditioned for another legend of TV puppetry, Bil
Baird:

He said, “Okay, get familiar with it. I’ve got
something to do. Call me when you feel comfortable and I’ll come have a look.” …” I got familiar with the character, and eventually I guess he got tired of waiting
for me to call, so he came over and sat on some steps and said, “Well, are you
ready?” I didn’t miss a beat.… I just pointed the gun at him with this
character and said, “Listen here, Baird.… The mob thinks this kid Nelson’s
all right. They wants you should give him a job, okay? Think about it very
carefully.”
^[35]

Auditions are tense. There’s a lot riding on
them. No one would pull a gun on a potential employer, but many of us feel that
desperate going in. But with puppetry—and many other arts—the more expansive
honesty you put into the performance, the better it becomes.

Nelson would work as a puppeteer for both Bil
Baird and Jim Henson. Neither one was territorial about it. Nelson said Baird
“liked Jim a lot and respected his work.”
^[36]
The friendliness of the Puppeteers of America is similar to other guilds, but
it seems to go one further. When Henson moved to New York, Burr Tillstrom set
Henson up in an apartment in his building, let his builder be hired by Henson
full-time, and even begged his own agent to take Henson on. Puppeteering, it
seems, is a special kind of business.

In the 1980s, Henson let Steven Spielberg take a
tour of his Creature Shop while they were making
The Dark Crystal
and
E.T.
,
respectively. Kenworthy said:

I was a bit panicked, because we were all concerned
about people seeing our techniques. Jim was much less worried. He thought that
everyone should share these new developments.
^[37]

Henson never seemed to worry about competition. That’s
because competition makes for great puppet scenes, when it’s called
“upstaging.” In the play-ful atmosphere of puppetry, the aggressive part of
competition seems to fade, and the funny part of it remains, a gift to the
audience—a hearty laugh.

Henson said in a 1982 interview with Judy
Harris:

There’s not much competition between puppeteers in
general because everybody’s working their own style. I’ve never felt any sense
of competition with anybody, and we’re all friends; we’re all good friends.
^[38]

In play, there is room for everyone, because
there are infinite roles to play—you can change the game to make room. The conversion
of competitive tendencies into play is truly the essence of Henson’s work. Henson’s
relationships with fellow puppeteers is a model to follow in artistic fields
where (1) tension can be channeled to serve to work, and (2) everyone’s work is
in its own style.

A HANDSHAKE MAN
NO HR PROFESSIONAL

Jim Henson was a handshake man. This would become evident in
1990, when he worked on a Disney World attraction without a contract. Henson
worked on a handshake with Eisner because, as a Henson lawyer said, he “didn’t
give a damn about legalities.”
^[39]
This was also quite evident in “the hiring process” as we call it today.

When Henson hired you, you probably felt like
you were talking to a Muppet. Dave Goelz said, “He sounded like Ernie!”
^[40]
Assistant Alex Rockwell recalled, “I picked up the phone and [someone who] sounded
like Kermit the Frog was on the other end of the phone.”
^[41]
But, at the same time, you might not know you’d been hired. Henson tended to
discuss creative matters—not business—with creative performers. This could be
so extreme that it caused confusion.

Carroll Spinney recalled that it took two
meetings with Henson to realize he had been hired:

[Jim] said, “Why don’t you come down to
New York and we can talk about the Muppets?”

I said that would be nice.… I had
mistakenly assumed that he just wanted to chat. When I got to know him better,
I learned that Jim Henson never wanted to chat. He almost always wanted to work.
… Now, in Utah, he wanted to talk to me again. I had a sense that this time
I had better find out what he wanted to talk about. I quickly stashed my show
safely away and rushed to the lounge.

“I saw your show,” he said. “I liked what you
were
trying
to do.”

…

He recounted some of his own disasters, including driving a
hundred miles to do a show and finding he’d left the all-important audiotape
back in the workshop.

Then he said, “Why don’t you come down to New
York and talk about the Muppets?”

This time, amazed at this déjà vu moment, I
asked him to clarify. “What do you mean by ‘talk about the Muppets’?”

“I mean, would you like to work for me?” he
replied.
^[42]

Terry Angus had the same experience. After his audition,
Angus explained, Henson

brought out this book and started signing it and I
thought, well, I’m being told very nicely with a little present “Thank you for
coming, we don’t need you” sort of thing. Or I got the job. I don’t know what
made me ask it right out, but I asked him, “Well, does that mean I get the job?”
And he said, “Oh yeah, sure.”
^[43]

Joseph Bailey had already worked on
Sesame Street
when he was asked to audition as a writer for
The Muppet Show
. He wrote
a spec script, and was called in to meet with Henson:

In his low key way, Jim told me he liked my material
and we discussed the show for a while. When the conversation came to a close,
he said to me, “Well what are you going to do now?”

I told him that my wife and I were leaving soon
for a two-week vacation on the Caribbean Island of Antigua. He said he hoped
we’d have a good time and the meeting ended with no further discussion.
^[44]

Bailey didn’t know he had a job to come back to until an urgent
telephone message came in at his hotel: “Call Jim Henson immediately.”

“Where are you?” [Henson] asked. “We’re
having a writers’ meeting for the opening show of the new season. Why aren’t
you here?”

“Well, Jim, you see, nobody hired me.”

“Oh. (Pause) Well, how soon can you get here?”
^[45]

Henson’s indirectness is extreme, and yet I would hesitate
to call it a fault. If we try to imagine things Henson
could
have said
to prevent these misunderstandings—“You’ve passed the audition,” “You’re
hired,” “Report to work at seven a.m.”—he would be veering into the province of
HR, into the realm of business and money. As we will see in Lesson 7, separating
business and creative conversations is important; it creates a sense of play
that is independent from economics. There is a time and place to discuss money
matters, and in Henson’s company, it was not when artists were discussing a
possible collaboration.

For artists, money is often an afterthought, because
the primary goal is making something good. Bailey recalled he had agreed to
move to London before asking about pay:

Jerry and I were standing at the elevators and Jim
was striding quickly on his long legs toward the door on the other side of the
lobby when suddenly I had a realization.

“Hey, Jim!” I shouted across the lobby, “Who do
I talk to about money!?”

“Al Gottesman!” Jim yelled back before
disappearing out the door.
^[46]

Earlier, when Bailey was hired for
Sesame Street
, Jon
Stone had followed the same procedure:

[Jon] dove in and started telling me exactly how he
wanted the four pieces rewritten, which was his way of letting me know I was
hired. He then directed me to “the sharks down the hall” in the Business
Affairs Department to see about salary and contracts.
^[47]