Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (40 page)

Ironically, it is a cowardly person who is
afraid of being seen as weak. In contrast, Henson’s crew thought of him as both
“gentle” and “fearless.” Jerry Nelson explained how Henson “led”:

We called Jim Henson “fearless leader” and there was
a reason for that. Because Jim would try all kinds of things, and he was not
afraid to try something new, and if he could see it happening in his mind’s eye
and knew that it would work, he would
dog
it until it worked.…I
think we always wanted to give Jim exactly what he was looking for.
^[72]

A leader who is fearless doesn’t need to lead by criticizing
or controlling—he can lead by example, inspiring others to try just as hard as
he does to do his best. Jim Henson inspired people to do huge amounts of work,
but he did so by giving of himself. Juhl said of him:

Year after year we watched him push himself beyond
what we could possibly imagine. You had to try to keep up with the guy—it only
seemed fair.
^[73]

Essentially, Henson didn’t need to lead by
manipulating others. He simply set the tone with his behavior, and allowed it
to radiate outwards from the center. Henson discovered this almost
anarchic
style of management in his early days working with Jerry Juhl and Jane Henson.
According to Juhl: “In the beginning, it was just Jim and Jane, and me and the
three of us did everything. We all did a lot of writing together at first.”
^[74]
An informal group like this, formed by peers and which makes its own rules,
resembles a rock group or a street gang more than a company, that is, all but
the most
garage-y
of start-ups.

Perhaps this is why Henson’s business managers
are quoted so often in a recent Henson biography criticizing Henson’s
organization method.
^[75]
David Lazer didn’t think he gave out enough “attaboys” or lavish praise.
 And when Henson called the office, he “was
not preoccupied by office organization charts, so he would call and speak to
whomever he wished,” which caused confusion, according to Al Gottesman.
^[76]
But expecting Henson Associates to look like a traditional business would be a
mistake, since it was Henson’s “collective” approach that made the business
possible in the first place.

Rank didn’t matter to Henson the way it would to
a normal businessman. And for an artist interested in collaborating, it
shouldn’t. In another strange similarity between Henson and Disney, both men
tried to express their gratitude to their employees with a bonus system—Disney
after
Snow White
,
^[77]
and Henson after he secured a lucrative deal with Disney.
^[78]
In both cases, what was meant as a gesture of generosity was met with
resentment, when employees inevitably compared their bonuses to one another and
felt unfairly slighted.
Why did he get more than me? I deserve more than
her.

Henson’s ranking of his employees is anathema to
artistic collaboration. Top-down management works well for corporations, but
for an artist-entrepreneur, a center-out approach makes the most sense. Henson
was right to talk to whoever answered the phone. Lazar may have wanted Henson
to give out more “attaboys” to his employees,
^[79]
but the kind of appreciation Henson gave was not a manipulative managerial technique.
It was genuine.

The center-out model is what we typically see in
a rock group or gang, with a charismatic center orbited by others. It takes a
certain amount of comfort with chaos to work like this. For that reason, like a
clique, Henson Associates was very careful about whom they let in.

When Henson made
Fraggle Rock
, there was
a very long audition process. Juhl recalled searching endlessly for the
songwriters:

I walked into this office for the first time, and the
desk was just
heaped
with cassettes. It was like every songwriter in
Canada who liked to work in children’s media had sent a cassette and there were
hundreds of them, so I wound up for several days, when I wasn’t at a meeting or
sleeping, I had one of these cassettes plugged in.
^[80]

But once a person was
in
, control was
relaxed, so that the artist was free to create. The songwriters chosen, Phil
Balsam and Dennis Lee, produced a total of three original songs per episode,
and according to producer Larry Mirkin, none were ever rejected.
^[81]
Balsam and Lee had already been working together before
Fraggle Rock
, as
had the three mimes who performed the bodies of the Gorgs. And here lies an
interesting distinction.

When Henson set up a special effects group
called the Creature Shop, Duncan Kenworthy joined on. Kenworthy, who came from
a business background, recalled the decision to hire a friend:

Henson suggested John Stephenson.…I had
thought about John, but he’s a good friend of mine. It would have almost been
nepotism to have offered him the job. Jim said, “We should all be so lucky as
to go though life working only with friends.”
^[82]

Even though many hires are nepotistic today, care is taken
to make them appear meritocratic, because that is theoretically the best and
fairest way to find talent. Yet if we shift the lens a bit and view things from
inside the operation, this is how a troupe of artists
works
—like a good
group of friends. To criticize a motorcycle gang or garage band of cronyism would
be nonsensical, because it’s not a government, corporation, or any kind of
compulsory power structure. It’s more like a utopia—a tiny society formed on
its own foundation. No one would call the Beatles unfair because they didn’t
extend their search for drummers beyond their familiar Liverpool circle.  Working
with friends tends to increase the amount of emotional bonds that keep
employees dedicated to the project.

Henson didn’t seem to see things through the
typical business lens. He saw the human side of the equation and the benefits
it would lend to art. And while it may seem that Henson’s business model is not
particularly “scalable” in business terms, this is only half true. Henson’s
organization could never have succeeded as a cast of thousands all working on
one thing. And as we will see in the next chapter, problems arose when the
company grew too large. But during those same years, Henson was remarkably
successful in setting up small offshoot groups, with the spirit of his original
start-up, on two different continents.

What makes Henson so special was not that he was
able to create his unique business model once, with Jane and Jerry Juhl, but
that he understood the process enough to
set up
these groups—which could
function on their own in his absence—and help them grow.

SETTING UP STREET GANGS
THE CREATURE SHOP AND
FRAGGLE
ROCK

Two good examples of satellite Hensonian groups are the
London Creature Shop and Toronto’s
Fraggle Rock
. Both these 1980s
projects came to be self-sustaining in that Henson didn’t need to be in the
studio—or even in the country—for it all to work. If we look at the
similarities between these groups, we can derive a formula for scaling the
start-up mentality that artists and innovators need to thrive: instead of
growing
bigger
, Henson’s groups grew more
numerous
.

In setting up both of these projects, Henson needed
to give the crews two things—the
time
and
space
to co-create
their worlds. Both time and space require money. For the Creature Shop, this
originally meant that the artists would be paid from the budget of the films
they were working on, yet that model had to change, because when a project
inevitably ended, many of the best collaborators left for other jobs and couldn’t
be brought back. Writer Anthony Minghella recalled packing up after a job was
over. Henson stopped him, saying it “was no good reason to leave … just
because the project was over.”
^[83]
Similarly, Bacon explains in
No Strings Attached
:

At the end of
Labyrinth
, rather than laying
everyone off, Jim wanted to start a permanent workshop, where research and
development could be continued. The idea was to increase the likelihood of
getting involved in new projects by having a new facility. Henson said, “By
keeping a group of people together, we are staying closer to what we’ve always
done with the Muppets, where we had our own builders. That way you can make it
better every time and build on your past work.”
^[84]

Time and space to create. John Stephenson explained
that was no small order:

The creature shop was really a 24-hour place—it just
never stopped and it still remains the atmosphere. [Henson would] be able to
wake up in the middle of the night and ring me up for my opinion on new ideas.
^[85]

A 24-hour place is expensive. Ultimately, to “keep
a group of people together,” Henson had to sacrifice part of his artistic
vision, having the Creature Shop do work for commercials, even though he’d
rather not, and making the “costumes” for
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
,
even though it glamorized realistic violence, something Henson had once called
“criminal.”
^[86]
But neither of these reservations was more important than keeping the Creature
Shop people
together
. Without pay, the Muppets in
Muppets Take
Manhattan
tell Kermit, “We’ve had some job offers,” and scatter around the
country.

When
The Muppet Show
ended, Jerry Juhl
recalled, “We were gonna relax. We could pack and go home at last. And then Jim
said, ‘No, before you go home, the day after the wrap party, I’m holding this
big meeting at the hotel ballroom in London so we can talk about the
next
show,’” the international children’s show project that would become
Fraggle
Rock.
^[87]
In developing
Fraggle Rock
, Henson brought together a core group of
people—Jerry Juhl, Jocelyn Stephenson, Michael Frith, and Duncan Kenworthy—and
allowed them to create the world, starting with a book of lists, for instance, “What
we know about the Fraggles.” Juhl said:

This was one of the joys that Jim gave us on this
project, because we were coming off of a successful show and Jim was willing to
let us take the time to really develop the show completely and carefully and
slowly and think about it. And that led us to a whole series of meetings that
took place on and off through the next year or so.
^[88]

They met first “in a very grand conference room in London’s
Hyde Park Hotel,”
^[89]
according to Frith—twenty-five people sitting in the ballroom,
^[90]
sketching and making notes on hotel stationery. While Henson was working on
The
Dark Crystal
, he let the Fraggle co-creators stay in his house near the
Hampstead Heath in London while he was away. There were meetings in Long Island
and other locations over the next year.
^[91]
Henson put
his own money
into the development of this project, even before
a network stepped in to fund it.

The money that would allow the
Fraggle Rock
group to
stay
together came from two networks, HBO and CBC. The Canadian
network gave them studio time, a crew, and a little money, and HBO gave them “the
cash,” in Kenworthy’s words—an amount generous enough to allow the artists to
do their best.
^[92]
The
Fraggle Rock
set was not a 24-hour place, but with one fourteen-second
Doozer pogo scene taking three hours to film, there was sometimes overtime.
^[93]
When Stevenson wrote a scene featuring a flooded Gorg basement, the whole crew
stayed until six in the morning to make it work. When she proposed the idea,
“everyone said, sure, we can do that.”
^[94]
They could do it, because there was enough money to buy them time and space.

Giving collaborators time and space is akin to
giving them Gladwell’s ten thousand hours, but Henson also gave them something
more: ownership of their work. For
The Dark Crystal
, each design team in
the Creature Shop oversaw their creature from start to finish, essentially
giving engineers the creative authority of artists. Bacon explains it was “another
unusual move in a business in which art is usually very different from
engineering. The designers would make their own clay sculpture, mould-making,
latex casting, final texturing, and painting, and even their own
costume-making,’ said Henson. ‘It makes them feel more involved, more in
control.’”
^[95]
Director Gary Kurtz said they found it “much more satisfying.”
^[96]
Giving an artist not just credit but creative control over his work makes
managerial sense. It also makes artistic sense.

When each character has been shepherded to the
film by a single builder, the character’s evolution starts to resemble the way
real creatures evolve. Henson said that the creatures in
The Dark Crystal
are “the result of sort of many generations of growth.”
^[97]
Bacon notes: “Just like living creatures,
The Dark Crystal
Skeksis,
Mystics, Garthim, and others evolved.”
^[98]
Giving each creator control of his character resulted in lifelike art.

Henson also allowed great freedom to the writers
and designers to conceptualize
Fraggle Rock
. As head writer Jerry Juhl said,
“Jim was willing to let us take the time to really develop the show completely
and carefully and slowly and think about it.”
^[99]
Juhl then gave this same respect to his staff writers. Jocelyn Stevenson
explained: