Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (7 page)

Now, as we will see in Lesson 10, this experimentation would not have been fruitful without copyright. It is crucial that characters can be copyrightable for artists to truly invest in them and make them human. There is something about a character that operates like a black hole—all the work you put into him stays with him. And because Henson owned the copyright to his characters from the very beginning, he was free to invest in them as much of his time as he could stand. It is for this reason that they went on to be worth millions—twenty years later.

Practice—it can be grueling, thankless, and unceasing—but in devoting oneself to trial and error, an artist is investing in the worth of one’s name. It is possible that even if we did not honor copyright as a society, we would value the name of an artist whose name is synonymous with quality. Of the twenty-four hours of Henson’s day, all of them went into his art in some way, eventually showing up as echoes in his characters, in an awareness of the world around him. From the outside, we often envy the artist sitting quietly in a chair dreaming about his next project, yet that artist does not experience his time as leisure. It’s work, and it’s work that’s never done.

OTHER WAYS OF WORK
YOU MUST WORK TO FIND THEM

The twenty-four-hour days of artists can seem daunting. Duncan Kenworthy recalled Henson’s Creature Shop as a “24-hour place.” He said Henson would “wake up in the middle of the night and ring me up for my opinion on new ideas.”
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Likewise, Walt Disney’s wife recalled, “Even in bed … he would usually toss and turn, thinking of studio problems, then rise early and declare, ‘I think I’ve got it licked.’”
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When you eat, sleep, and breathe your art, you never get a vacation, yet Henson and Disney chose it—willingly.

A good book is transformative, and the thing that has changed me the most from
The Gift
is Hyde’s interpretation of “The Shoemaker and the Elves” as “a parable for artists.”
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In the old tale, the shoemaker is struggling—his business is failing, and he is tired. Though he knows he can’t possibly make the shoes that night to save his business, he still cuts out enough leather and leaves the unsewn pieces on the bench. Magically, while he sleeps, little elves come and sew the shoes together far more masterfully than he ever could. When he wakes the next day, the shoemaker is overjoyed. He sells the shoes, buys more leather, and cuts out more pieces. This cycle continues until he makes a good deal of money. One night, he and his wife decide to stay up and see who is making the shoes. They hide in the corner and watch as the little elves—naked—work the night through. Grateful to the elves, the shoemaker and his wife make them clothing—including sets of tiny shoes. It is the first time he
himself
has sewn together the pieces, and that night the shoemaker leaves the clothes instead of the leather. The elves take the clothes and never return, but from that day forward, the shoemaker has learned to make the fine shoes himself. He runs a successful business from then on, cobbling beautifully with his own two hands.

Why is this a good parable for artists? For one thing, there are two types of work in the story. The shoemaker’s work resembles a factory job—there is no art in such robotic tasks—tracing patterns, cutting them out. What the elves do, on the other hand, is more like magic. They are the artists. They sew in such a unique and gifted way as to produce quality—and not
everyone
can do it.

But in order for the shoemaker to get to a place where he could create art himself, he first had to cut a lot of leather. When artists speak of “practicing your craft” or “serving your gift,” we might picture this kind of endless robotic toil. Yet the fully mature artist, the shoemaker at the end of the tale—
gets
to create art. For artists, there is nothing we’d rather do than this.

In
The Gift
, Hyde distinguishes the wage-earner’s “work” from the artist’s “labor.” “Work is what we do by the hour,” Hyde says, “it ends at a specific time.”
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You can clock in and out easily. On the other hand, “Labor has its own schedule. Things get done, but we often have the odd sense that we didn’t do them.”
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With labor, it seems as though little elves came in the night and hijacked your hands. I have heard many similar stories by artists that their best work feels that it was done by someone else—that the power flowed
through
them. Henson himself said, “[W]hen I’m working well ideas just appear.… It’s just a matter of our figuring out how to receive the ideas.”
^[23]
This does not require a supernatural explanation. To me, “The Shoemaker and the Elves” is the story of an artist and his subconscious mind, or perhaps, put a better way, his body.

So, Hyde says:

Washing dishes, computing taxes, walking the rounds in a psychiatric ward, picking asparagus—these are work.… “Getting the program” in AA is labor. Writing a poem, raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms—these are labors.
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“And labor,” Hyde notes, “because it sets its own pace, is usually accompanied by idleness, leisure, even sleep.”
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Jim Henson’s business was built on labor, not work. While the industrial revolution turned labor into a mechanical process, Henson’s post-industrial, post-efficiency enterprise thrived on the principle that art does not happen by time clock. A labor, Hyde says, is “something that is often urgent but that nevertheless has its own interior rhythm, something more bound up with feeling, more interior, than work.” It is ready when it is right. It takes as long as it takes. And unlike much work, it feels like a worthy use of one’s time. Work tends to be paid by the hour, while labor is impossible to assign a fair wage to.

But when we dream of our masterpieces, we rarely picture the hard part. Elves do not come to a shoemaker who has not first cut out the leather. To get the elves to come, we must picture ourselves doing the work—purchasing the leather, tracing the patterns from books, cutting carefully day after day—a slave to these elves. It was only after years of service that the shoemaker was set free. This is the part of the story that changed my life. I realized that if I ever wanted to make magic, I would have to cut out many pieces of leather.

Hyde quotes the critic Erik Erikson, who noted the self-sacrifice of artists:

Potentially creative men like [playwright George Bernard] Shaw build the personal fundament of their work during a self-decreed moratorium, during which they often starve themselves, socially, erotically, and last but not least, nutritionally, in order to let the grosser weeds die out, and make way for the growth of their inner garden.
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Jim Henson was rail-thin. In 1979, a reporter described a conversation he’d had with Henson:

“I don’t drink
diet
cola,” [Henson] informs [his secretary] with a smile. “Don’t you have anything for skinny people?” …

Skinny? This fellow Henson is so thin he has to rent a shadow. He could be an advance man for a famine. If he were to drink tomato juice, he would surely look like a thermometer.

“I am 6 feet 1 and I weigh 145 pounds, soaking wet.”
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One would guess Henson worked too hard to eat much, and when he did, we know he drank soda—nondiet—and ate rich fruitcake—probably because he needed those calories to keep his body running. For an artist, there is nothing more fulfilling than making good art. Henson said, “The feeling of accomplishment is more real and satisfying than finishing a good meal or looking at one’s accumulated wealth.”
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Yet, the thing that saves the shoemaker from a life of toil is that he learns to make art himself, by clothing his elves. What does this mean for an artist? Essentially, observing the elves is the same as understanding the artistic process, even including the parts done by the subconscious. If you can practice your art enough to observe what your body does, you can learn to do it at will—with your conscious mind. “To put clothes on a thing is a kind of acknowledgement,” Hyde writes, “like giving it a name.”
^[29]
The part of us that creates is often something we’re ashamed of. Consciously, we ignore it. Society encourages this. Playing with puppets, for example, is
embarrassing
for a grown man.

The naked elves—our inner talents—are vulnerable. When the shoemaker makes the clothes, in effect, he protects his other self—the vulnerable or naked side of himself that truly creates—and validates it. He says it is a real, justified, valid thing. He sticks up for it. This means he can finally become that other part of himself—integrate it into his waking consciousness. There
are
other ways to work. Most of us do not think them valid, because they look too Fragglish.

In the ecosystem of
Fraggle Rock
, there are three main kinds of creature: Fraggles, Doozers, and Gorgs. The Doozers and Gorgs do a kind of work that is familiar to us. The Doozers are architects and construction workers. They are orderly, productive, and mechanistic. The Gorgs’ job involves ruling the universe, farming, and various matrimonial duties. Doozers and Gorgs resemble familiar jobs of employees and bosses. They respectively toil and manage. As a society, we all respect their work.

On the other hand, the Fraggles dance their cares away. The ruling philosophy of their culture is,
When’s lunch
?
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They each have jobs to do for their thirty-minute workweek, but their work involves singing, dancing, swimming, and making the siren sound for the fire brigade. Our industrialized society tends to look down upon this kind of “work,” and yet all three kinds of work—the Doozers’, Gorgs’, and Fraggles’—make the rock go round.

All three groups are interconnected, and it is likely that all three are necessary work for every working artist—cutting the leather, selling the shoes, and working the magic. That’s a lot of work. Perhaps that is why it seems Henson never slept.

WORKAHOLIC
NEVERBORED

Tales of Jim Henson’s workaholism have a John Henry quality to them.

Dave Goelz:

He once had surgery during his lunch hour and continued to shoot until eight p.m.
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Fran Brill:

I remember once on the set I saw Jim’s back was wounded. I said, “Jim, you’re bleeding from the back,” and he said, “It’s no big deal.”
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Frank Oz:

I remember Jim—he had walking pneumonia, and we were shooting a commercial outside in a gas station 30 years ago, and it was five degrees, and he should have gone to the hospital, and he was still working.
^[33]

David Bowie:

I just can’t believe his capacity for work. For instance, he would finish shooting for the week on
Labyrinth
in London, catch an airplane to New York, work on a new production, TV series, or whatever over the weekend, then catch a plane back to London Sunday night, and be at the studios early Monday morning to resume filming.
^[34]

Caroll Spinney:

He could get by on an hour or two [of sleep]. Once in London we left a party with him at 2:00 a.m. I was concerned about a nine o’clock call time that morning. Jim said that he’d be ready for it because he had a 5:00 a.m. meeting with Robert Altman first.
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Henson asked Spinney when he hired him:

When I work with Frank Oz, we’ll get into a project and work all day, all night, all the next day, and sometimes the next night two. Do you like to work like that?
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During his years with Henson, Frank Oz described himself as “a worker,” “a drone”:

Going to work at 9 a.m. and getting back home at 9:30 at night, with time to eat, do some laundry and go to sleep.
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On Henson’s lunch breaks from
The Muppet Show
, he would eat, conduct a writers’ meeting, and field business calls.
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When he took a cruise on the
QE2
with his wife, he took the whole company with him to work in London.
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On his twenty-ninth birthday, he wrote a script for “Alexander the Grape,” an unpaid project.
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The work was his cake and streamers. The work was his gift to himself. Henson turned forty on a plane trip
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and spent his fiftieth on a “vacation cruise” with his agent.
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Jerry Juhl said, “Year after year, we watched him push himself beyond what we could possibly imagine. You had to try to keep up.”
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Henson himself denied being a workaholic. “I work a great deal,” he said, “but I enjoy it.”
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Frank Oz has said, “It’s hard for people to understand the reason Jim worked so hard is [that] he loved it.”
^[45]
This seems like a genuine sentiment, but what does it
mean
? What do you call someone who works all the time but is
not
a workaholic? And how would you ever distinguish one
from
a workaholic?

Henson said, “Perhaps one thing that has helped me in achieving my goals is that I sincerely believe in what I do, and get pleasure from it. I feel very fortunate because I can do what I love to do.”
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Now, that sounds very nice to most people. Most of us want
that
. But not at the cost of what workaholism really entails. Do you really want to work nonstop for the rest of your life?

For one thing, it takes a toll on family life. During Jane Henson’s eulogy for her husband, she let slip a glimpse from the perspective of the famous man’s family:

Mostly, I just think now that it’s only us, his family. These are only his kids, I’m only his wife. They had messy rooms, I burned the dinner. He didn’t come home. The dog died. Whatever … all this stuff. It’s only us.”
^[47]

As Michael Davis wrote in
Street Gang
, “Jane was left abandoned in the suburbs while Jim Henson circumnavigated the globe.”
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In the boom period of 1980,
The
Saturday Evening Post
reported, “Their marriage is one of show business’[s] more solid unions despite Jim Henson’s absence from their Bedford Hills, New York, home for up to six months a year.”
^[49]
The Hensons officially separated in 1987.