How to Fly a Horse

by Kevin Ashton

  Inside the tent, a “scoreboard calendar” counted down the 180 days, keeping everyone focused on creation’s most precious resource: time.

  The challenges grew toward the end of the project: half the team fell ill because of the workload, the barely heated makeshift building, and colder-than-usual midwinter weather. They had to build the plane without ever seeing its engine—it had been shipped from Britain, but the expert sent with it in secret was arrested on suspicion of spying because he could not explain why he was in America. Then the day before the plane was scheduled to fly, the engine exploded. There was no choice but to wait for another—the only other one in existence.

  The proof of the organization was the result. Despite these obstacles, the Skunk Works beat the schedule by thirty-seven days, and Lulu Belle flew the first time.

  5 | THE SECRET OF BERT AND ERNIE

  Mike Oznowicz and his wife, Frances, escaped the Nazis twice during the 1930s. First they fled from Holland to North Africa and then, when the war followed them, they fled from North Africa to England. They had two children while they were in England; the second, Frank, was born in the barracks town of Hereford in May 1944. In 1951, Mike and Frances spent their last dollars moving their family to the United States, eventually settling in California, where Mike found work dressing windows.

  Mike and Frances’s passion was puppets. Both were active members of the Puppeteers of America, a nonprofit founded in 1937 to help promote and improve the art of puppetry. In 1960, the Puppeteers’ annual Puppetry Festival was held in Detroit, Michigan. Mike and Frances befriended a first-time attendee named Jim Henson. Henson, his wife, and their three-month-old daughter had driven five hundred miles from their home in Bethesda, Maryland, in a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow to attend the show. One day a friend drove the Rolls-Royce around Detroit while Henson performed puppetry through the sunroof with a hand-and-rod frog he called “Kermit.”

  Henson became close to the Oznowiczs. In 1961, when the Puppetry Festival was held in Pacific Grove, California, they introduced him to their son Frank, who had just turned seventeen. Frank was a skilled manipulator of the puppets on strings called marionettes, and he won the festival’s talent contest, even though he preferred baseball and, he said, practiced puppetry only because he was the child of a family of puppeteers.

  Henson was building a successful business making TV commercials with a new style of puppets he called “Muppets.” Henson thought Frank had great talent and wanted to hire him. At first, Frank declined—he wanted to be a journalist, not a puppeteer, and he was only seventeen years old. But there was something about Jim Henson, and the meeting, that he could not forget: “Jim was this very quiet, shy guy who did these absolutely fucking amazing puppets that were totally brand new and fresh, that had never been done before.”

  After Frank finished high school, he agreed to take a part-time position with Henson’s company, Muppets, Inc., and also enrolled in City College in New York so he could get an education. But within two semesters, Frank stopped going to college and started working full-time with Henson. Frank said, “What was going on with the Muppets was too exciting.”

  By 1963, when Frank joined Henson, the Muppets were moving beyond commercials. A popular country music singer named Jimmy Dean was planning a variety show for ABC Television, and he wanted Henson to provide a puppet for the show. Henson created Rowlf, a brown, floppy-eared dog. Rowlf got up to eight minutes of airtime per episode, often upstaged Dean, and received thousands of letters from fans each week.

  Rowlf was what is known as a “live-hand Muppet.” Some Muppets, like Kermit the Frog, are “hand-and-rod Muppets”: a single puppeteer—technically, a “Muppeteer”—puts one hand in the Muppet’s head and uses the other to manipulate the Muppet’s hands using rods. Live-hand Muppets need two Muppeteers: one Muppeteer puts one hand, usually the right one, into the Muppet’s head and the other hand into the Muppet’s glovelike left hand. A second Muppeteer puts his or her right hand into the Muppet’s right hand. The two Muppeteers stand close together and must think and move as one. Henson was Rowlf’s voice, head, mouth, and left hand; Frank was Rowlf’s right hand. One night, Jimmy Dean, the show’s host, stumbled saying “Oznowicz” on air and accidentally gave Frank a more magical name: Oz.

  Oz and Henson were at the beginning of what would become a potent creative partnership.

  A few years later—partly because of Rowlf—Henson, Oz, and the rest of Muppets, Inc., were recruited to work on a new television series for children to be called Sesame Street.

  While they were preparing for the first show, Henson and Oz found two new Muppets in the rehearsal room, made and designed by master Muppet maker Don Sahlin, the creator of Rowlf. One was a tall hand-and-rod puppet with a long yellow head like a football about to be kicked, crossed by one thick eyebrow. The other was its opposite, a short live-hand puppet with a squat orange head, no eyebrows, and a meadow of black hair.

  Henson took the yellow puppet and Oz took the orange one, trying to discover the characters inhabiting them. The puppets felt wrong. They switched. Henson took the short orange guy with the scared-cat hair; Oz took the tall guy with the unibrow. Everything clicked. The yellow Muppet, played by Oz, became “Bert,” careful, serious, and sensible; the orange Muppet, played by Henson, became “Ernie,” a playful, funny risk taker. Bert was the kind of guy who wanted to be a journalist, not a puppeteer. Ernie was the kind of guy who would cruise Detroit in a Rolls-Royce waving a frog through the sunroof. And yet, somehow, Bert and Ernie were kindred spirits, worth more together than apart.

  The first episode of Sesame Street was broadcast on Monday, November 10, 1969. After the words “In Color,” two clay animation monsters appear, followed by an archway with the words “Sesame Street.” The monsters walk through the arch, the screen fades to black, and the show’s theme song, “Can You Tell Me How to Get to Sesame Street?” begins, sung by a choir of children over clips of real urban kids—not the scrubbed and tailored angels normally seen on television at that time—playing in city parks. The title sequence ends, and the show opens on the green street sign that says, “Sesame Street,” while an instrumental version of the song, played on harmonica by jazz musician Toots Theilemans, begins. A black schoolteacher named Gordon is showing a little white girl named Sally around the neighborhood. After introducing her to some human characters and an eight-foot-tall full-costume Muppet called “Big Bird,” Gordon hears singing coming from the basement of 123 Sesame Street and points to the basement window, saying, “That’s Ernie. Ernie lives down in the basement, and he lives there with his friend Bert. Whenever you hear Ernie singing, you can bet he’s taking a bath.”

  The show cuts to Ernie in the bathtub, singing while scrubbing.

  ERNIE: Hey, Bert. Can I have a bar of soap?

  BERT (entering): Yah.

  ERNIE: Just toss it into Rosie here.

  BERT (looking around, perplexed): Who’s Rosie?

  ERNIE: My bathtub. I call my bathtub Rosie.

  BERT: Ernie, why do you call your bathtub Rosie?

  ERNIE: What’s that?

  BERT: I said, why do you call your bathtub Rosie?

  ERNIE: Because every time I take a bath, I leave a ring around Rosie.

  Ernie giggles a glottal, staccato giggle. Bert looks at the camera, as if asking the audience whether they can believe this guy. With that sequence, Bert and Ernie became the first puppets to appear on Sesame Street. They are still major characters today.

  Bert and Ernie’s close relationship has often aroused suspicion. What were two male puppets doing together? Why were they so close? Pentecostal pastor Joseph Chambers of Charlotte, North Carolina, thought he knew: “Bert and Ernie are two grown men sharing a house and a bedroom. They share clothes, eat and cook together, and have blatantly effeminate characteristics. In one show Bert teaches Ernie how to sew. In another they tend plants together. If this isn’t meant to represent a homosexual union, I can’t imagine what it’s supposed to repr
esent.”

  But no, Bert and Ernie are not gay. To discover what the characters represent, we need look no further than the men inside the puppets. Not only were Henson and Oz Bert and Ernie, Bert and Ernie were Henson and Oz. Sesame Street writer Jon Stone recalls, “Their relationship reflected the real-life Jim-Frank relationship. Jim was the instigator, the teaser, the cutup. Frank was the conservative, careful victim. But essential to the rapport was the affection and respect which these two men held for each other. Ernie and Bert are best friends; so it was with Jim and Frank.”

  Some of the greatest creative work comes from people working in twos. The partnership is the most basic unit of creative organization, and it holds many lessons for how to build creative teams. Some creative partners are married, like Pierre and Marie Curie; some are family, like Orville and Wilbur Wright; but most are neither. They may not even be friends. They are people like Simon and Garfunkel, Warren and Marshall, Abbott and Costello, Lennon and McCartney, Page and Brin, Hanna and Barbera, Wozniak and Jobs, Henson and Oz.

  As in the story of Bert and Ernie, the intimacy of the creative partnership confuses some people, perhaps because they overestimate the importance of individuals.

  The secret of Bert and Ernie is that nothing is created alone. Steve Wozniak’s advice to “work alone,” mentioned earlier, is not as simple as it seems. As Robert Merton observed, we never act as individuals without interacting with myriad others—by reading their words, remembering their lessons, and using tools they made, at the very least. A partnership puts this interaction into the same room.

  6 | WHEN THE ROAD SEEMS LONG

  In a creative partnership, the alternating nature of ordinary conversation and the problem-solution loops of ordinary thinking combine: partners use the same creative process as individuals but do their thinking aloud, seeing problems in each other’s solutions, and finding solutions to each other’s problems.

  Trey Parker and Matt Stone have been creative partners since they met at the University of Colorado in 1989. In 2011, they won nine Tony awards for The Book of Mormon, a Broadway musical they co-wrote with Robert Lopez; they have created movies, books, and video games; and they are best known for South Park, an animated television series they created in 1997. Parker and Stone have written, produced, and voiced hundreds of episodes of South Park, most of them made, from conception to completion, in six days.

  The process begins in a conference room in Los Angeles on a Thursday morning, where Parker and Stone discuss ideas with their head writers and start to create the show that will air the following Wednesday. Stone describes the room as “a safe place, because for all the good ideas that we get, there’s a hundred not so good ones.” No one else is allowed in, but, in 2011, Parker and Stone let filmmaker Arthur Bradford put remote cameras in the room to make a documentary called 6 Days to Air: The Making of South Park.

  On day one of the film, Parker and Stone discuss script ideas, including the Japanese tsunami, bad movie trailers, and college basketball, ad-libbing possible scripts as they go, much like Henson and Oz trying out Bert and Ernie for the first time. By the end of the day, Parker and Stone have nothing—or, at least, nothing they like. Parker is worried. He tells Bradford, “There’s a show on this Wednesday. We don’t even know what it is. Even though that’s the way we’ve always done it, there’s a little voice saying, ‘Oh, you’re screwed.’ ”

  On the morning of day two, Parker makes a suggestion to Stone: “Let’s try this. Let’s go to eleven-thirty trying to come up with something completely new; then from eleven-thirty to twelve-thirty we’ll pick which of yesterday’s ideas we’re going to do.”

  Stone is skeptical: “A whole other show?”

  But rather than argue for improving the existing ideas, Stone tries the process. Eventually, Parker throws out an idea about something he finds frustrating: “Last night, I went onto iTunes, and that window came up again that says, ‘Your iTunes is out of date,’ you know, which happens every time. ‘God damn it. Here it goes again. I got to download another version of iTunes.’ How many times have I hit ‘Agree’ to those terms and conditions, and I’ve never even read one line of them?”

  Stone laughs, then suggests how Parker’s frustration with iTunes might yield a plot: “The joke is that everyone always reads the terms and conditions except for Kyle.” (Kyle is one of the show’s main characters.)

  Stone, speaking later, explained what happened next: “And then we said, ‘Oh wait, this is actually starting to be something.’ ”

  The pattern—Parker directing the process and finding the points of departure, and Stone refining and building on them—is typical of Parker and Stone’s working relationship. Partnerships tend not to be hierarchical, in the sense that one person has authority over the other, but they are seldom leaderless. In Parker and Stone’s partnership, Parker leads. Stone says, “Even though we’re a partnership, and we each bring something different to the table, the way that the stories are expressed is completely through Trey. It’s like Trey’s the chef. Whatever I’ve got channels through him.”

  Parker agrees, but he is under no illusions about Stone’s equal importance. Referring to another famous partnership from the rock band Van Halen, Parker says, “You can sit there and say, ‘Well, it’s all Eddie Van Halen,’ but as soon as David Lee Roth leaves, you say, ‘Well, forget that band.’ Eddie can sit there and say, ‘I write everything,’ but you’re not Van Halen without David Lee Roth.”

  On Monday, with less than three days until airtime, the script is still not complete. Animation and voice work is under way on the main plot, which features Kyle being forced to do the crazy things he agreed to when he accepted the iTunes terms and conditions. But the show lacks a subplot and an ending. Parker begins the day by describing the remaining problems to Stone: “We are in danger of doing our typical first-show thing where we’ve just got way too many ingredients; we haven’t introduced the idea of apps at all; and I am worried about time—whatever this thing is at the end, it is going to have to be fast.”

  Parker then starts solving these problems—by, for example, describing a subplot where another main character, Eric, tries to persuade his mother to buy him an iPad. Stone’s role here is evaluation: he laughs as Parker acts out the idea.

  Parker is worried. That evening, he tells documentary maker Bradford, “I am pretty scared right now because I am up to twenty-eight pages of script and I still have five scenes to write. Each scene’s about a minute long usually, so this is going to end up being about a forty-page script, which just becomes brutal, because I have to start taking scenes and figuring out how to do this same thing in half the time.”

  Even in a partnership, the literal, physical act of writing—choosing the words, rather than having the ideas—is an individual activity. This is what Wozniak means when he says, “Work alone.” Two people and a blank page is no formula for creation: a pencil is a one-person device. Stone does not hover on Parker’s shoulder trying to be helpful. He is in another room, working on script edits. Parker says, “I hate writing because it is so lonely and sad. I know everyone’s waiting for me to get it done, and it is a battle of fighting over lines and trying to figure out what the best way to say things is. I just hate it so much.”

  As Monday ends, Parker paces while Stone watches from a couch. Both men are rubbing their heads and plucking at the bridges of their noses. Parker summarizes the current problem: “We’re a minute short and I have four scenes to write.”

  In four days, he has gone from worrying about having no material to worrying about having too much. Stone says he hits rock bottom every Sunday and Parker hits rock bottom a day later. Sure enough, on Monday, Parker says, “I feel terrible about the episode. I am embarrassed we are putting this piece of shit on the air.”

  The laughter of a few days ago is gone. Parker and Stone stalk the studio, hunched and miserable.

  Tuesday, the day before the show will air, starts with exhausted animators sleeping under their d
esks or at their keyboards. At six a.m., while the sun rises, Parker and Stone meet alone in the writers’ room. Parker has erased the crude pictures that were on the whiteboard a few days ago; now there is a flat list of scenes with names like “Playground,” “Eric’s Home,” “Jail Scene,” and “At the Genius Bar.” Parker stands at the whiteboard with a marker while Stone leans back in an armchair, his hands behind his head.

  The roles have changed. Parker is no longer leading. He is pitching ideas: “Beginning of act two, we come back, and that’s when it’s ‘Okay, the Geniuses are going to see us now.’ And then, act three: we just start with the unveiling of the thing. And then we go to, they’re doing the bubble thing, and Gerald flips out, joins Apple. We’re back, and that’s it.”

  And Stone is not being led; he is coaching and cajoling. He sounds paternal when he says, “That’s great. Yeah, that actually works.”

  Reinvigorated, Parker returns to the keyboard. An hour later, the animators are being woken up and handed the completed script for South Park’s episode 1501: the first of the fifteenth season and the 211th Parker and Stone have written.

  The story shows how many creative partnerships work. Parker trusts Stone. Stone complements Parker. Parker may appear to make a greater creative contribution, but Stone enables it, in particular by giving Parker emotional support during the loneliness and stress of creation. Stone creates, too, and Parker enables that by providing impetus. Partners create together by helping each other create individually.

  7 | THE WRONG TYPE OF ORGANIZATION

  The common thread that connects one person creating to two people creating can—or should—extend to larger groups of people, too. Creative partners talking sound a lot like creative individuals thinking aloud, and nothing needs to change when the group gets larger. The purpose of a creative conversation is to identify and solve creative problems, such as “What should this episode be about?” or “What order should these scenes be in?” The only participants in the conversation should be people who can make a contribution to answering these questions, which is why Parker and Stone’s writers’ room is a “safe place,” offlimits to all but a few writers. There is no room for managers, “devil’s advocates,” or any other species of spectator in a creative conversation. This conversation is the main purpose of creating in a group. The detailed creative work is still done alone, unless help—practical, emotional, or both—is needed to get past the inevitable pressures and failures.