Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

Filming on The Great Muppet Caper lasted twenty weeks, spanning through the fall of 1980 and into early winter of 1981. While

“He worked so hard to try to make other people happy … to keep people feeling like they were a part of it. But that was hard to do, because there were a lot of people in New York who did not understand Dark Crystal, did not care about Dark Crystal.… And it was so essential to him to complete it and get it released.” Producer David Lazer understood Jim’s obsession with his vision. “He had it in his head, and no one else saw it,” said Lazer. “It was that strong.”

The set up for Woozle World was reminiscent of Jim’s 1964 pilot The Land of Tinkerdee, with a live-action “old codger” and his Muppet dog living in a cluttered room containing a hidden

door that led to the Woozles’ underground world. But at the heart of Jim’s proposal was the complex relationship between three different Muppet species—which, at the moment, Jim and the creative team were calling Wizzles, Woozles, and Giant Wozles—and how the three species might live in harmony, even if they didn’t always mean to. “What the show is really about is people getting along with other people,” wrote Jim, “and understanding the delicate balances of the natural world.… We will make the point that everything affects everything else, and that there is a beauty and harmony of life to be appreciated.”

This is where Jim wanted to make a point.

an enormous ringed binder labeled Things We Know About the Fraggles, the team polished and expanded on the parameters Jim had laid down in the Woozle World treatment, transforming the “old codger” and his cluttered room into the kindly tinker Doc (modeled, Juhl admitted, on Muppet technowizard Faz Fazakas) and his workshop, adding a sentient trash heap, and renaming and refining the other species with whom the Fraggles interacted, from the gigantic and dim-witted Gorgs to the tiny, hardworking Doozers. “We sat around and talked about the fact that we wanted to try to create a childhood fantasy world that had the sense of richness that we all felt in the [L. Frank Baum] Oz stories from our own childhoods,” said Juhl. “Worlds like that are incredibly rich.”

I’d always wanted to do something really big and bold in a children’s show.…

film he had been aching to make since 1978,

“He loved the idea of trying for a different reality.”

“I guess I’ve always been most intrigued by what can be done with the visual image,”

“I feel that is what is strongest about the work I do, even today—just working with the image, the visual image.”

“We are working with primary images that appear in many stories of folk-lore and mythology,”

film. “I like fairy tales very much. I like what they are and what they do.”

it was clear the film was a rousing success.

For critic Rex Reed, the film was gloriously sentimental, full of “humanity, tenderness and intelligence” and “a musical in the best tradition”—exactly as Jim had intended.

It was the Pogo formula all over again, an approach that Jim’s fellow Pogo fans Frith and Juhl said was intentional.

“In that process the hardest thing to do was trying to enter the mind of Jim and think of the things he wanted for his film.”

“He knew how great the score would be,” said Jones, “he just wanted me to discover it for myself.”

“Fraggle Rock is the first show that I personally didn’t have to be involved with every day,” Jim said later. “A group split off to do that, and it’s worked out very nicely.” “He just let it be what it was,” said Steve Whitmire.

Apart from its noble theme of global community, what truly aimed Fraggle Rock directly at the international market was its framing sequence, or the “home base,” as Jim called it—the real-world workshop occupied by Doc and his dog, Sprocket, with the small door that opened onto the Fraggles’ world.

a foreign market no one ever expected: the Soviet Union.

at Jim’s urging, the Soviet Union’s governing television body Gosteleradio televised an episode of Fraggle Rock and was stunned when it drew “unprecedented” ratings and more than three thousand fan letters.

… But he believed that the story would unfold and be clear through the actions and the personalities of the characters.”

He had made “a big miscalculation that you could understand a story with just visual language,” said Lisa Henson. “[He thought] you could watch it like an opera … and you would be able to understand the story even if you only understood snippets of dialogue and language.

After watching clips of Skeksis and Mystics and Gelflings, reporters were baffled. “What happened to the Muppets in your new movie?” was the typical question, and rather than talking about the film, Jim found himself instead trying to manage expectations. “They’re not there,” he explained patiently, “and that is one of the reasons I’m doing some PR on this movie … so that people won’t go expecting one thing and see something else.… There are two totally different dimensions going on here.” Still, when Jim could finally turn the conversation to the film, his excitement was palpable. He loved when interviewers were dazzled by the creatures they saw and demanded to know how Jim had done it. “We’re not telling!” Jim grinned. “This is a very exciting time to be making movies,” he

I think we can create just about anything on film that the imagination can conceive. So I hope I’ll be able to continue working in this area, because I’m having a great time.”

was. In France, Dark Crystal was awarded the best film at the Avoriaz Fantastic Film Festival, while the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films presented Jim with its prestigious Saturn Award for Best Fantasy Film—not bad for a year in which it was competing with heavy hitters like E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial and Blade Runner.

For all his involvement with Fraggle, its day-to-day operation was left largely in the hands of producers Diana Birkenfield and Larry Mirkin.

What Jim really wanted to do was his other project—another sprawling, ambitious collaboration with Brian Froud, based on an idea the two of them had cooked up in a limo as they left a lackluster showing of The Dark Crystal in San Francisco.

“What is the philosophy of [the] film?” Jim asked them. He was interested in exploring deeper themes of “attitudes toward God, religion, and women,” and wanted audiences constantly

questioning their perceptions of size, shape, and reality.

most important, and most difficult, part of any Muppet project. “There’s a sense of our characters caring for each other and having respect for each other,” agreed Jim. “A positive feeling. A positive view of life. That’s a key to everything we do.… Sometimes we’re too heavy in terms of ourselves and trying to carry an idea, and telling kids what life is about. I often have to tell myself that, too.”

Reporters left more confused than ever, and Jim loved every moment of it. “The argument will continue on, hopefully into … I don’t know what.” He grinned. “We’ll wait and see.”

Where Fraggle’s overarching theme was one of harmony and understanding, Muppet Babies “can be used to develop creativity,” Jim told his writers. “I think we can try to do something rather important with this show. There is almost no ‘teaching’ of creativity that I know of.… We can … show the Muppet Babies using their individual creativity in how each one can do the same thing differently. There is no right or wrong to it.”

Though never overly political—in fact, he rarely voted—Jim’s own leanings were firmly Democrat, and the issues with which he chose to involve himself—and the Muppets—were markedly left of center.

New York was “more oriented to the Muppets,” explained Jim, while the Creature Shop was “more high tech … more into realistic detail, and so forth.”

“We would have no company today if he hadn’t done that,” said Lisa Henson twenty years later, “and he wouldn’t have had that much of a company, either. How many people take that gamble? [How many] invest in their own interests?”

It was] about the world,” said Jones, “and about people who are more interested in manipulating the world than actually baring themselves at all.”

Despite his intentionally arm’s-length engagement with the show, Fraggle Rock had been something special for Jim—a higher calling for television as well as an embodiment of his own views of what was right

about the world. “Jim wanted to make a difference,” said Jerry Juhl later. “He knew that television shows do not bring peace to the world, but he wasn’t so cynical to say we can’t think about it. There was a kind of idealism there that could seem naive and childlike, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t come true.”

“When I go see a film, when I leave the theater, I like a few things,” he explained. “I like to be happier than I was when I went in. I like a film to leave me with an ‘up’ feeling. And I like a picture to have a sense of substance. I like it to be

about life, about things that matter to me. And so I think it’s what we’re trying to do with this film, is trying to do a film that would make a difference to you if you saw it.”

While critics were split on what it was about Labyrinth that annoyed them the most—was it trying to be a music video?

with The Dark Crystal, it had been all about artistic vision and artistic integrity. Labyrinth was “absolutely the closest project to him,” said Jane, the one in which he had invested most of his creative capital—and to have audiences reject it felt to Jim like they were rejecting him personally. “That movie looked exactly the way Jim wanted,” said creative consultant Larry Mirkin.

The Storyteller—which finally made its debut on NBC on the evening of Saturday, January 31, 1987—was a qualified success. While it failed to crack even the top thirty in the ratings for the week, The Storyteller was an immediate critical hit—and, in fact, would go on to win the Emmy as the Outstanding Children’s Program. It would also earn Jim some of his best reviews in years. “It’s time to stop thinking of him simply as the man who created the Muppets,” said an impressed Hollywood Reporter, finally conceding a point Jim had been trying to make for two decades. “When a show arrives under the auspices of Jim Henson, we can be pretty sure we won’t be disappointed,” wrote Walter Goodman in The New York Times. “If it [The Storyteller] were turned into a series, that would be a real happy ending.” USA Today, meanwhile, hailed it as “one of Jim Henson’s finest moments on TV.”

Jim had always kept a breakneck pace—multiple projects were the rule, rather than the exception—but lately some of the projects had

slight whiff of indifference to them, as if Jim were simply launching a handful of darts at a dartboard, hoping for any of them to hit. “I think Jim felt … he was responsible [for us],” said Richard Hunt. “And he would go out of his way to keep creating new work so that these people had something to do.”

“I’ve never particularly wanted to have a large organization,” Jim confessed to one reporter.

dramatically,”

“Using state-of-the-art technology we can create settings that exist only as electronic information.” With new technology at his disposal, Jim envisioned Lead-Free TV as “The Muppet Show of the future!” The third

To the delight of the press, Jim also announced that he was at work on another Muppet movie, which he hoped to start shooting in early 1989.