Even with the meeting over, there would usually be someone trying to talk with Jim during his walk to the elevator and the forty-five-second elevator ride down three floors. As Jim walked toward the studio floor—and he never rushed, but would simply walk at a rapid clip, taking long loping strides—members of the Muppet staff would walk backward in front of him, trying to finish their conversations before Jim ducked into Studio D.
When filming finished that evening, Jim would attend more meetings—often with Lew Grade or Muppet staff from the New York workshop—in his office in the Muppet Suite, or over dinner, finally wrapping up at midnight. He would return to Elstree early Friday morning to review edits with his directors—including the insertion of two additional minutes of material for the U.K. version of the show, since British television had fewer commercials—and spend time in the Muppet workshop. At the end of the day, he and Lazer would discuss next week’s show over dinner. “My work schedule here is extremely full,” Jim wrote in his private diary. “Work days usually start when I get up and go late into the evenings—shooting days end at 8 PM and often I’m meeting someone for dinner—business mostly. I go to ATV virtually every day … weekends I drop by the editing and sound dubbing.”
And so it would go, twenty-four weeks a year. It was a grinding, grueling schedule—and Jim loved every minute of it. “One of Jim’s real talents was that he had the ability not to take most things more seriously than they deserved,” said Juhl. “And that means that most things are pretty funny. I think that’s what got him through the kind of schedule he had.… While he was doing it, he always knew that it was just a Muppet show. And he could keep things in that kind of perspective.”
It was more than just keeping things in perspective; Jim just flat-out loved to work. As he confided in his diary:
I don’t resent the long work time—I shouldn’t—I’m the one who set my life up this way—but I love to work. It’s the thing that I get the most satisfaction out of—and probably what I do best. Not that I don’t enjoy days off—I love vacations and loafing around. But I think much of the world has the wrong idea of working—it’s one of the good things in life—the feeling of accomplishment is more real and satisfying than finishing a good meal or looking at one’s accumulated wealth.
Still, Jim’s ideas of vacations and “loafing around” were becoming more and more ambitious with his increasing success. That first summer in London, Jim flew his family and several members of the Muppet team—including the boisterous Richard Hunt—to Athens, where Jim had reserved a boat and crew for a week’s worth of cruising the Greek islands. Jim found even his extraordinary patience quickly tested by the ship’s bullheaded Greek captain, who refused to bow to any of Jim’s polite requests to put up the sails and visit certain islands, and instead went chugging slowly around with the diesel engine belching purple smoke. Brian Henson remembered his dad being frustrated, yet refusing to put his foot down. “Oh well,” Jim would say with a shrug. “That’s what it is.”
Other times, Jim would make short sprints to Europe with one or more of the kids, taking sixteen-year-old Lisa and Brian with him to Paris in early August of 1976 to sightsee and visit the French abstract puppeteer Philippe Genty, or traveling to Morocco for five days with Lisa, Cheryl, and Brian. Those trips, said Brian, were “fantastic.” Looking back, said Cheryl, she could see that her father perhaps felt “a little bit burdened” with family and that the trips were his way of “keeping it all together.” “He wanted everyone to be happy,” said Cheryl, “he wanted everyone to be included, and I think he really also was making an effort to be a family man.”
Jim completed work on the first half of The Muppet Show’s first season on August 13, 1976. With the first fifteen episodes complete, he returned to New York on August 16, and went immediately into the studio to spend a week working on Muppet inserts for Sesame Street, for which Jim and the Muppet team had been awarded two more Emmys over the summer. Three weeks later, the promotional tour for The Muppet Show was in high gear, with Jim crisscrossing the country to appear on Merv Griffin, Dinah Shore, and The Tonight Show, and chatting amiably over the phone with reporters in St. Louis, Cleveland, and San Diego. Already there was a buzz of excited anticipation; before even a single episode had aired anywhere in the United States, Backstage was already lauding it as “one of the fastest selling half-hour series” of all time.
Indeed, Brillstein and Mandell had worked hard to sell the series, showing the two pilot episodes to any station programmer who would listen, and aggressively promoting the series at the 1976 conference for the National Association of Television Program Executives. “Seeing was believing,” Mandell said later. “The station executives were genuinely entertained.” After that, The Muppet Show had picked up stations at an almost exponential rate, growing quickly from the initial five CBS O&Os in late 1975, to 112 stations by May 1976, including 87 of the top 100 markets in the United States. By the beginning of the 1976 television season in September, The Muppet Show had been picked up by a record 162 U.S. television stations—making it available for viewing in a staggering 94.6 percent of American households—as well as in a wide number of international markets, including Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Taiwan.
The first episode of The Muppet Show went on the air in New York on channel 2 at 7:30 P.M. on Monday, September 20, 1976. With a batch of fifteen shows to choose from, most stations chose to start with the episode featuring Rita Moreno—a strong episode featuring a notable moment when Moreno performed “Fever” with Animal backing (and interrupting) her on drums. Local reviewers were enthusiastic—“If you have a child, or ever were one,” wrote the Chicago Tribune, “you ought to watch,” while the Louisville Times raved simply, “Long Live the Muppets!”—but though it was widely watched, the show wasn’t an immediate hit. More typical was the review in Variety, which liked the first episode, but found the humor rather ho-hum, astutely noting that the material “bore more of the [head writer] Jack Burns touch … than the wry, whimsical Henson type of humor fans are more familiar with.”
Jim wasn’t concerned. “We are well on our way to a smashing success,” Jack Burns had written to Jim in a private memo at the end of July, and Jim was inclined to agree—though he didn’t always agree with everything Burns wanted to do with the show. Jim had scuttled a suggestion from Burns that the writers play up catch-phrases and specific quirks to help viewers more quickly differentiate between characters—that was trying too hard, in Jim’s opinion—and would ignore Burns’s objections to refilming the show’s opening credits. While Jim and Burns respected each other, friction between the two was increasing. Besides serving as head writer, the strong-willed Burns was also serving as a producer during the first season—and that, said Lazer, “was hard for Jim … Jim needs to be in the role.” Burns would eventually be fired by Bernie Brillstein, after Jim complained tactfully to the agent that Burns “gives me a stomachache.” But “it was never personal,” said Oz, and Jim would continue to collaborate with Burns on other projects over the next decade.
Jim flew back to London on September 23—turning forty years old on the airplane as it crossed the Atlantic overnight—and returned to work at Elstree to shoot the final nine episodes of The Muppet Show’s first season, working nonstop right up until the day before Thanksgiving. Two days later, he was back in New York in time to oversee the company Christmas party at the upscale Rainbow Room at 30 Rockefeller Center before spending a quiet New Year’s Eve with the family in Ahoskie, North Carolina. All in all, it had been a good year.
Nineteen seventy-seven began with Jim working on what would become one of his best-loved projects, a musical Christmas special based on Russell and Lillian Hoban’s 1971 children’s book Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas. Jim was an early fan of the book, featuring Emmet and his widowed mother, each of whom sets out to win a talent show’s $50 prize—and gamble each other’s most prized possessions in the process—so each can buy the other a Christmas present. Jim h
ad successfully snagged the rights from the Hobans and in 1976 assigned Jerry Juhl the task of adapting the story for an hour-long special. Juhl completed his first draft by fall, turning in an inspiring, fully realized treatment on November 1. As he and Jim worked their way through several drafts of a script, Jim would keep most of Juhl’s outline intact.
Emmet would also require several original songs—and given the importance of the songs to the story, Jim had opted to go after an established pop tunesmith who shared his own quirky, Tin Pan Alley tastes. Songwriter Paul Williams—who had penned the Top 10 hits “An Old Fashioned Love Song” for Three Dog Night and “We’ve Only Just Begun” for the Carpenters—had come to London in June 1976 to appear as a guest star on The Muppet Show, and he and Jim had gotten on so well they agreed to find another project on which to collaborate. Jim thought Emmet was a good fit for their combined sensibilities—and after reviewing Juhl’s treatment, Jim had tried to connect with Williams in person, narrowly missing him in California five days before Christmas. Just after the New Year, however, Jim finally caught up with Williams and explained the project to him over dinner in Los Angeles. “It felt like the warmest, funniest thing to tune in to,” said Williams. “Something in me lit up when I was exposed to anything Jim Henson did. So when they asked me to come over, I was really happy to do it.”
At the same time, Jim had the New York workshop creating an entirely new cast of Muppets—based largely on the Hoban drawings—and designing and building not only some of their most picturesque sets, but also some of the first radio-controlled puppets. It was a project both designer Don Sahlin and technowizard Faz Fazakas devoured, building puppets of different sizes with different functions, and creating an ingenious device—based on a remote-control system developed by NASA engineers—in which a puppet’s mouth could be manipulated remotely by a radio control device resembling an electronic mitten. Jim’s favorite, though, was a mechanized Emmet who could actually row and steer a boat in the water. Jim couldn’t keep his hands off of it. “Oh, I love this thing!” he would say as he leapt for the controls.
The Muppet team spent the first few days in March 1977 recording the songs for Emmet Otter in Los Angeles, performing in the recording studio backed by Paul Williams and his road band. All agreed that the songs were extraordinary. Once again, Jim had seemed almost intuitively to find the best person for his particular project—a knack that, in this particular case, at least, amazed the notoriously skeptical designer Michael Frith. “When [Jim] chose Paul Williams to do the music for Emmet Otter, did he know what a brilliant, brilliant contribution Paul was gonna make?” Frith said later. “There’s just one wonderful song after another.” “We all love the music in this show,” Jim wrote to Williams immediately afterward, “and think it all works fantastically well.” While it was the hymnal “Where the River Meets the Sea” that gave Emmet heart, Jim’s guilty pleasure was the hard-rocking song Williams had written for the rival River Bottom Nightmare Band, which Jim, Oz, Nelson, Goelz, and Hunt performed with snarling relish. Laughed Williams, “I think there’s some little piece of Jim Henson’s soul that just wanted to be in … some nasty rock and roll [band]!”
Filming began in earnest on March 13, 1977, when Jim and his crew took over one of the larger television studios in Toronto. Here the Muppet designers—keeping an eye on drawings by Frith—had constructed most of Emmet’s world, including an enormous Frog-town Hollow set, with a real river snaking through it. The lighting crew had set up a sunrise and sunset that ran on regularly timed cycles throughout the day, leaving the sets aglow in soft morning purple and, later, blazing evening orange. Real grass, covered in artificial snow, was used to dress the set, though to Jim’s amusement, the studio lights were so warm that the grass began to turn green and sprout through the fake snow. It was big and impressive, and Jim was clearly proud of it, slowly strolling the set’s quaint Main Street in his leather jacket and wide-brimmed hat, looking as if he had stepped directly onto his set from a spaghetti western.
Other sets were just as painstakingly designed. “Emmet Otter was the first time we got into elaborate sets where we had floors in the interiors and we could take a wide shot with characters coming up through holes in the floor, and we’d remove parts of the floor and have the characters moving through space in waist shots,” said Jim. “That was the most elaborate production we’d gotten into at that point.” Said Jerry Nelson, who performed Emmet, “This was a way of working that we had done before, but never on the scope of this production—particularly because there was a huge, fifty-foot-long river.”
The puppetry itself was typically flawless, with a few flashy moments: there was Kermit pedaling a bike again, as well as Muppets driving snowmobiles and jalopies, and the How’d they do that? Moment utilizing Fazakas’s remote-controlled singing and rowing Emmet—an illusion “so perfect and so beautiful,” said Frith admiringly, “because you knew darn well—at least at some subliminal level—that there was no puppeteer down there in the river with his hand up inside this rowboat doing that!” The performers also had more to be particular about than any previous Muppet production; for the first time, said Jim, “we were looking for realistic movement and animals that looked like animals. They still had cartoon-like features, but we were looking for three-dimensional animals out in the real world.” With this in mind, Jim would film certain sequences over and over again if he didn’t think they were convincing enough, or if he decided a character was moving too much like a puppet and not enough like a real animal. “Working as I do with the movement of puppet creatures, I’m always struck by the feebleness of our efforts to achieve naturalistic movement,” said Jim later. Consequently, when a puppet bird flew “too straight,” Jim rolled tape over and over again until he had it right, at last remarking quietly, “Very nice.”
Shooting for Emmet lasted twelve days, followed by eight more days of editing at the end of March. Jim had invested over $525,000 of his own money on Emmet and he and the Muppet performers were rightfully very proud of the project. “Everything about that production was magic,” said Nelson; Goelz, who had played Emmet’s porcupine friend Wendell, called it “one of the highlights of my career.” And yet, incredibly, after completing the final mix in April, Jim couldn’t spark the interest of a single television network. Brillstein would make the rounds, eventually getting it aired on Canadian television in December 1977, but Jim would have to wait more than a year before Emmet Otter made its American debut—and even then it would only show up on HBO, a subscription cable channel with a minuscule viewership at that time.
In the meantime, Jim spent the rest of the spring zipping between New York and London, meeting with the Muppet designers in the Elstree workshop, presiding over a company meeting at Tavern on the Green, cutting together an official Muppet Show record, and marking Kermit the Frog’s birthday with a celebratory appearance on Dinah Shore. At home, he had finally relented to thirteen-year-old Brian’s pleas for a motorcycle, and had decided that both he and Brian would each get bikes and learn to ride together. Unfortunately, Jim’s knowledge of and passion for cars didn’t carry over to motorcycles, and he ended up purchasing a gigantic bike with a tiny engine built for rough-and-tumble enduro racing. Brian, who had simply wanted a dirt bike, could barely sit astride it, and Jim’s own enthusiasm waned quickly. “I don’t think he ever rode the bike,” Brian recalled with a laugh.
On May 8, 1977, Jim headed for London to begin production on the second season of The Muppet Show, once again taking the Queen Elizabeth 2 from New York—and paying to take most of the members of The Muppet Show’s creative staff with him. Jim was positively beaming as the ship pulled out into the open waters of the Atlantic. “It was such a good time for him,” said Juhl. Whether it was a good time for everyone else, however, the writer couldn’t say. Juhl, who had spent his 1971 vacation writing scripts and outlines with Jim, understood all too well Jim’s inability to sit still. “We have all these days when there is nothing happening out at sea
… and we worked like fools!” said Juhl. “That’s a typical Jim Henson vacation.”
In the six months Jim had been away from London, The Muppet Show had slowly but steadily been building a following with British audiences. In 1976, the Rita Moreno episode had been submitted by ATV as a nominee for the prestigious Golden Rose of Montreux Award—perhaps the most important international festival in television—and had won, beating out entries from twenty-nine other countries. That had given the show the gloss of critical and artistic gravitas it needed to catch the eye of the press, but more than anything, British viewers themselves had been loyal and patient. To build an audience, Jim said, “we needed time”—and the TV audience in Britain had stuck with the show week after week, even as local programmers, in a move reminiscent of WRC’s treatment of Sam and Friends over a decade ago, bounced the show from time slot to time slot.
Initially, The Muppet Show had been consigned to England’s “family time,” airing on Saturdays at 5:15, a relatively dead zone of TV time—and yet, as a reporter from the Evening Standard was quick to note, every television set on display at Harrod’s department store was tuned to The Muppet Show, with a throng of shoppers and employees crowded around to watch. Sensing they had a winner, the network moved the show to Sunday evenings, traditionally a ratings stronghold, though The Muppet Show’s 7:00 P.M. time slot still put it well outside peak viewing hours. Nonetheless, it became the number two show in the United Kingdom, only narrowly trailing the hugely popular Bruce Forsyth and the Generation Game. Its following was so large and loyal, in fact, that when Granada TV in Manchester moved the show from Sunday evening to the less popular Saturday night, network executives were disparaged in the Evening Mail as “Muppet Murderers” and the program was wisely moved back to its Sunday time slot.
Jim Henson: The Biography Page 31