Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (30 page)

Both Disney and Henson valued being kept separate from the
money, as would Pixar’s Lasseter and Catmull with their unlikely angel funder,
Steve Jobs, taking on the lion’s share of the fierce negotiations with Michael
Eisner at Disney. Going back to Hyde’s theory, these moneymen intermediaries
serve to do something very necessary for successful artists, to “mark the
boundary between their art and the market.”
^[36]
They are a permeable barrier through which the artist can both enter business
and then retreat into the “protected gift-sphere in which the work is created.”
^[37]
While Hyde beautifully describes the need for this barrier, Henson’s life can
be seen as a modern-day example of how such a barrier can allow an artist to
thrive
.

WHAT THE AGENT KNEW
HOW BERNIE KEPT HENSON A HIPPIE

To understand Henson’s relationship to money,
one of the key scenes we need to picture is that heated argument between the
Hensons and Brillstein in his kitchen over merchandizing
Sesame Street
. That
scene showed us that selling out gave Henson a lifetime of creative freedom. It
also cemented Henson—with his own words—as an artist and not a businessman. But
Henson wasn’t always described as so “artsy-craftsy.”

When Henson agreed to work with the Children’s
Television Workshop on
Sesame Street
, he made sure to keep control of
the copyrights and a good percentage of the merchandizing profits for himself. John
Stone,
Sesame Street
’s
original director wrote:

Ever the businessman, Jim made sure up front that his
interests would be protected and drove a hard bargain with the Workshop’s
lawyers regarding ownership of his characters.
^[38]

Could Henson have anticipated the commercial success of
toys? It almost seems that way. Davis writes that though Henson’s “compensation
request was modest by show-business standards,” he “insisted that any future
revenues generated by the licensing and merchandising of those characters would
be split between him and CTW.”
^[39]
This, according to Davis, would “fill Henson’s coffers for twenty years.”
^[40]
Stone writes that “[Friendship and respect] never got in the way of The Deal.
Jim was a killer businessman.”
^[41]
But if Henson was indeed a “killer businessman” at the table with CTW, then why
did he put up such a fight about merchandizing in Brillstein’s kitchen? How do
we reconcile Stone’s version of Henson the hard bargainer with Brillstein’s
“artsy-craftsy” puppeteer, doing everything “for the right reasons”?

Now we are told by Brillstein that Henson did
not do
Sesame Street
with the intention of making millions off toys—that
he never even thought he would “sell out,” until Brillstein convinced him. But let’s
not forget that Brillstein was a Hollywood agent who had a vested interest in
keeping Henson’s image family-friendly. When he sat down to write his
autobiography, it’s possible he played up the integrity of Henson—his most
famous client—to secure himself a place in show-business legends. Brillstein
himself wrote that representing Henson gave him “legitimacy in the family and
children’s market, the equivalent of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.”
^[42]
It leads me to wonder, could Henson have harbored a “long-term vision” of his
own involving profit splits?

We can’t know the answer to this question, but perhaps
we can try to get closer to it. Using what we know about Henson at the time,
let’s recreate that scene at the negotiating table with Henson and CTW’s lawyers.

Not too much earlier, Joan Ganz Cooney saw Henson
for the first time at a large meeting. She remembered, “this bearded, prophetic
figure in sandals walks in and sits way at the back, ram-rod straight, staring
straight ahead with no expression on his face.” Someone called him “the hippy
back there.”
^[43]
The actress who played Susan on
Sesame Street
remembered meeting Henson
in 1969:

Everything on Jim’s body was buckskin and it was
lashed together with rawhide. I mean his wife made his clothes and his sandals
were handmade and he had this long brown hair and this benign peaceful face,
and I said who in the world was that, and then he had these crazy puppeteers
with him. It was like Robin Hood and his Merry Men came out of Sherwood
Forrest. I had never seen any guys like that before in my life.
^[44]

This is the Henson that we should picture in the
scene, the Henson of 1968–69. Now Jon Stone may have marveled at Henson’s
business skills, but the first time
he
met Henson, he was told by a CBS
vice president, “Friday morning we are going to meet with Christ and his dog.”
^[45]
Though he may have underestimated Henson, this TV executive didn’t see him as a
“killer” businessman. The final piece of the puzzle comes from Stone’s
unpublished memoir, described in
Street Gang
, which gives us a vivid picture
of the negotiation for
Hey, Cinderella!
, another deal Henson made in the
late sixties:

Lean, bearded Jim Henson … listened to the pitch
Stone and Whedon had prepared.… “Jim nodded characteristically and
hmmmmmed as we talked, then gently began to explain to us why realistic animal
puppets are not nearly as easy or effective as more abstract puppets. Tom and I
glanced at each other. ‘He doesn’t like it,’ we thought. ‘We’ve lost him.’ And
then, softly, suddenly, Jim said he liked the idea. Count him in.”

“No sooner had Jim nodded than the door bust
open and an army of suits filled the room,” Stone said. Among them were Bernie
Brillstein, Henson’s agent, and Al Gottesman, the puppeteer’s business manager.
“All were suddenly at the table, machine-gunning demands of a hundred percent
of merchandizing, percentage of gross revenues, percentages of ownership,
residual control, and a hundred other demands. Tom and I watched in amazement.…”
^[46]

In this earlier deal, it was Henson who decided
whether he could do a project based on its artistic merits, and it was the
moneymen who—after bursting in the door—machine-gunned demands. This is the
version of the scene that makes the most sense, because as Brillstein said, “As
Henson’s manager, I was paid to have my own long-term vision.”
^[47]

Brillstein’s account—that Henson never intended
to cash in on
Sesame Street
toys—seems plausible. From this angle,
Henson’s obsession with owning his trademarks and copyrights is an issue of
artistic survival—he wanted to
protect
his vision, to not let anyone
else dilute his quality, and to be free to build upon anything he creates. It
seems likely, then, that while “merchandizing” rights were important, Henson took
“merchandizing” to mean records and the soon-to-come videos that would
themselves
be art—not toys. At this stage, I take Brillstein at face value that Henson participated
in the CTW deal as an artist, never thinking that he’d get rich off toys. Jon
Stone wasn’t wrong to say Henson was a “killer businessman,” but perhaps it
gives us the wrong impression. Part of Henson’s brilliance at business was in
employing people like Brillstein and Al Gottesman, whose first priority was
money, which freed Henson up to focus on
his
first priority—art.

As an artist, with few exceptions, Henson took
projects that he thought would be interesting, not projects that would make the
most money. Yet, karmically,
Sesame Street
—“a fledgling nonprofit” in
Davis’s words, made Henson rich. Brillstein wrote:

The merchandising bonanza surprised even me. After a
couple years my end of the first royalty check was nearly six hundred grand.
This went on for five years.”
^[48]

If Brillstein made the standard 15 percent agent’s cut, this
means that Henson made $4 million a year on kids’ toys. Even assuming his wife
(who technically owned half the company) received her fair share, that’s $2
million a year. Depending on the split, another couple million went to CTW.
Toys were an unexpected bonanza for Henson, but not for Brillstein. Let us look
closely at what Brillstein said—the scale of the money “surprised
even
me.” What that means is that he was expecting to earn a lot of money from toys.
Just not $3 million.

Brillstein knew what was at stake with
Sesame
Street
, even if Henson didn’t. Recreating this scene tells us a lot about
the way an agent and artist symbiotically operate through business. Like a Ouija
board, each party leads the partnership on its course. Likewise, this scene shows
another clear Hydian boundary between the spheres of art and commerce—in the
literal door that the managers “bust” through. In determining whether Henson
would
take
the project, the “army of suits” are kept outside. When it is
decided how much he will
earn
for the project, the barrier becomes
permeable and art and money are allowed to interact.

When we picture the “army of suits” invading the
room, it calls to mind the image of Buzz Lightyear in
Toy Story
landing
in Andy’s bedroom. In many ways Buzz resembles the strange new bedfellow Pixar
had encountered, Steve Jobs, who became the studio’s majority investor after
George Lucas’s divorce led him to sell it.
^[49]
Like Buzz, Jobs became part of the team, and yet was himself a ruthless crusader.
Pixar needed someone like Jobs to negotiate with Disney’s lawyers for favorable
distribution terms. Having a businessman like Steve Jobs ensured that Michael
Eisner’s Disney would not exploit Pixar’s artists and engineers.

A decade earlier, Jim Henson could’ve used
someone like Jobs when he negotiated with Michael Eisner. In 1990, Henson
himself arranged for a deal with Disney for funding, which ended in
“invective-filled” lawsuits.
^[50]
In arranging the details of the Henson–Disney deal, one Henson source called
Eisner’s lawyers “overzealous robots.”
^[51]
According to
Newsweek
, Henson said “he found Disney’s negotiators offensive.”
^[52]
Ironically, Henson didn’t have a clear barrier to protect him or negotiate for
him, because he was in a sense trying to
replace
his business side with
Disney. Brillstein couldn’t shield him from Disney’s lawyers, because Henson’s
goal was to get Disney to
take over
his business operations, to replace
his agent, his merchandizing department, and his marketing department. Henson’s
quote at the time is telling: “eliminating the dealmaking, administrative
aspect of what I did was attractive.”
^[53]

In 1990, Henson could have used someone like
Buzz Lightyear—an arrogant captain to wrestle the Eisners into a favorable deal.
Steve Jobs may have been famously hard to work with, calling Atari engineers
“moronic,”
^[54]
for instance, but he fought for Pixar in his negotiations with Disney—ensuring
the name Pixar would be featured prominently on all branding, and brokering for
years in search of a fair 50–50 split of profits. But as much as artists need someone
to fight for them, that “fighting” spirit is often detrimental “in the play
room.” In
Toy Story
, Buzz Lightyear had a hard time fitting in, and
according to Pixar’s Pamela Kerwin, it was a “relief” for Pixar when Jobs left
Pixar alone:

There was a little bit of tension in that he had more
to give Pixar than Pixar actually wanted.… So when he went back to Apple,
it was great because that could absorb his passion, and Steve could still do
the stuff that Pixar really needed Steve to do, which was managing Disney,
getting Pixar better distribution terms.
^[55]

Jobs’s true value to Pixar seemed to lie not in his famously
obsessive perfectionism, but in his ability to negotiate with Disney—to
be
the barrier that protected the artists from money. The tough guys who are good
at business, many times, need to wait outside the door to let artists do their
thing.

THE VALUE OF SEPARATION
LAWYERING THE LAWLESS

One reason to have a legal department is so that artists
don’t have to discuss money with one another. When writer Joseph Bailey was
hired for
Sesame Street
, he recalled:

[Director Jon Stone] then directed me to the “the
sharks down the hall” in the Business Affairs Department to see about salary
and contracts.… It was then I learned that ‘creative’ people don’t discuss
business with each other. We have our ‘people’ to do that.”
^[56]

What is so uncreative about money? Well, even
though money sometimes rewards innovation, it more typically rewards a sure
thing—whatever your audience currently pays for. The money side
usually
tells you to make what it knows will be profitable, such as the direct-to-video
Cinderella II
.

Then there is the issue of copyright. It is
uncreative
to sue people. Artists need to build upon the work of the past in order to make
something new. But sometimes, a copyright can act as a
barrier
to the
marketplace for an artist. It can be part of what protects the gift-sphere in
which the work is created. Copyright, for example, protected the La Choy Dragon
from being used by La Choy after Henson stopped making their commercials, and
it allowed
him
to tweak that character until it became Big Bird.
Copyright prevents the art—while in a nascent stage—from being traded freely
according to laws of supply and demand. If an artist’s work is constantly
evolving, as Henson’s was, then copyright, in a sense, kept it in a protected
sphere where it could grow according to its own demands, and be “given” to the
world and market only when it was for artistic purposes.