Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

He was hip and slightly dark. He had cute little creations—and he liked to blow them up.

“When you try to sell anyone on puppets, it’s the old problem,” he told the New York Post. “They automatically say, ‘Puppets are for kids.’ ”

But he initially resisted Stone’s and Cooney’s entreaties to join the CTW creative team, largely because after spending the last decade expanding into film, animation, documentaries, and experimental television, he didn’t want to be thought of mainly as a puppeteer again.

he would be slapped with the dreaded label children’s puppeteer. “There was a huge ambivalence there,” said Jerry Juhl, “because one of the things that he would say most often and most strongly about the puppet work … was that this was adult puppetry.”

These short pieces were to be inserted like advertisements—and, in fact, would always be referred to as “inserts”—at regular intervals throughout each show, repeated two, sometimes even three times per hour. This was just the sort of thing Jim could get excited about.

“Jim got involved right away because he loved making short films so much,”

For Jim, it had been about protecting his work; clearly, neither Jim nor anyone else could have foreseen the merchandising juggernaut they were creating. In

“This was an educational children’s show,”

“The thought was ‘thirteen weeks, and it’ll be over.’ ”

For Jim and his team, Sesame Street was, for the moment, just another assignment to add to the already lengthy list of projects Jim was either working on or had in development.

And I learned a lesson then: he had such respect for his children.… They asked him a question, and he took the time to answer it.”

Jim was continuing to feel boxed in by being thought of primarily as a children’s performer, and reminded readers in one interview after another that he considered his success on Sesame Street “odd, because we’re really not kid oriented. About 95 percent of all the things I’ve ever done [have] been for adults.”

The final films were exciting and vibrant, with deliciously dark undercurrents … and ultimately deemed inappropriate for young audiences due to the presence of cannons in one film and wine in the other. “Yanked by the suits at CTW,” Jon Stone told Jim wistfully.

“Jim was an extraordinarily serious, yet silly man,” said Brill. “He would encourage you to be as crazy as possible, because when you’re inhibited as a performer, you can’t be creative. Because he would be silly, everyone else would be silly.”

and was seen by seven million American children each day.

it was also the final impetus toward Jim pulling the plug on commercials altogether. “When Sesame Street came on … we were too busy to do commercials,” said Jim. And, he had to admit, “it was a pleasure to get out of that world.… It’s a world of compromise.”

“You can’t take advantage of the love the kids have for these characters,” Jim would say time and time again.

But] once that show was established, he suddenly found himself being called Mr. Children’s Television. He was perfectly happy to accept that—but he really wanted to do something else.”

“His means of expression were always more than just one thing,”

“There is a tendency to think of children’s entertainment versus adult entertainment. It’s possible to have an identical level for both.”

“They turn off at the idea, but that’s because puppets are generally not well done.”

“I don’t particularly like people to think that is all we do,” he told one reporter somewhat impatiently. “We have always worked in the realm of adults. Maybe that’s why we are here [in Vegas].”

Still, Jim refused to approach puppetry too intellectually. “When I hear the art of puppetry discussed, I often feel frustrated in that it’s one of those pure things that somehow becomes much less interesting when it is overdiscussed or analyzed,” he said later. “I feel it does what it does and even is a bit weakened if you know what it is doing. At its best, it is talking to a deeper part of you, and if you know that it’s doing that, or you become aware of it, you lessen the ability to go straight in.”

adult audiences—at least in the United States—had never had the chance to see what good puppetry was capable of. The Broadway show Jim envisioned would finally give adult audiences that opportunity;

I think of puppetry as expressing one’s self through charades.”

“The show is aimed at the adult or young-adult audience—but it is a show for the whole family,” he wrote. “The humor and writing will be adult, but children always enjoy the puppets, and the show will present nothing in bad taste to offend kids.”

“We made this special to appeal to all ages, because a lot of people just think of us as a company that does shows for children because of all the Sesame Street shows,” Jim told The Hollywood Reporter patiently. “We want to maintain a separate image. Not all of our shows are for children.”

In mid-December, Jim spent six days taping his second pilot—which he was now cheekily calling The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence in an almost cathartic defiance of his kids’ stuff reputation—bringing in ten puppeteers, including Jane and several designers from the workshop, to perform more than seventy Muppets.

“Puppets

are by their very nature symbolic, so any time you use them, you’re doing something symbolically,”

But this is not a ‘messagey’ show,” he added quickly, ...

Indeed, with its smoking craters, booze-guzzling Muppets, and explicit references to drugs and sex, there was a distinctive whiff of pot influencing the Gortch skits—and even though Jim and his team had little or nothing to do with the writing of their segment, viewers were nevertheless convinced that Jim, and the Muppet performers, had to be on drugs.

If Jim’s experiment with drugs had been a failure, one thing was clear: Jim didn’t need chemicals to take his mind to new worlds; his mind was already there.

With twenty-four episodes per season, that gave Jim $125,000 to spend per episode, making it one of the most expensive half-hour series produced for syndicated television at that time.

The only condition Grade had imposed on the deal was that Jim had to tape his show at Grade’s ATV Studios in London.

designed as the perfect all-family vehicle,”

Within a year, Jim and the Muppets would be the biggest act in England; in less than two years they would take the United States by storm. And before the decade was over, The Muppet Show would be the most popular show in the world.

In fact, his offer to produce The Muppet Show had both fiscal and artistic benefits. ATV’s Elstree studios were sitting largely empty and unused in London, a red mark on ATV’s books. So with Jim committed to producing twenty-four episodes at Elstree—and with five CBS stations in the United States already obligated to pick up the series—The Muppet Show would ensure the lights stayed on at Elstree.

Mandell had insisted was that Jim hire an experienced television variety show writer as his lead writer. It was a slight that Jim knew would bruise Juhl’s feelings, and Jim—always

they finally settled on a “show-within-a-show” format, in which the Muppets would be working each week to put on a vaudeville show in an old theater, with action taking place both onstage and backstage. It was a format, said Juhl, that “[none] of us were convinced … was gonna work.”

the first two episodes were Jim’s chance to spot-check his new format, get a feel for several new characters—namely Fozzie Bear, Gonzo, and Scooter—and show his new partners at ATV what he could do.

One of the first real challenges, however, was finding guest stars.

each show was filmed in less than a week—and on February 14, Jim returned to the United States to screen the two pilots with Abe Mandell and ITC executives in New

“They hated them.”

“It’s not the end of the world,” Jim reassuringly told Lazer between sips, and resolved to go back and re-edit the show, and even refilm several Muppet sequences. Jim “was hurt … his guts are on the screen,” said Lazer.

Jim had taken a risk in building The Muppet Show around an entirely new cast of Muppet characters.

Such a schedule meant that on almost any given day, the Muppet team could be working on at least three shows at one time—filming the current episode, doing editing and postproduction on the previous week’s show, and writing and building sets for upcoming episodes.

long used to watching Jim and Oz “talk around” a Sesame Street script, actively encouraged ad-libbing among the Muppet performers, as he thought such spontaneity gave him additional insights into the characters that made them that much more interesting to write. “Let’s leave that in,” Juhl would say excitedly as he scratched out the old line in his script and replaced it with the ad-lib.

thought Kermit was already one of Hollywood’s great straight men—“funny not because of what he does,” wrote one reviewer, “but because of what others do around him, and because of the aplomb with which he bears their doings.”

he was the sun around which the entire Muppet solar system revolved.