Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

  Things were far less harmonious outside Abbey Road Studios, however. That January, Lord Grade had found himself suddenly, almost inexplicably, driven out as the head of his own organization, now broadly known as the Associated Communications Corporation, or ACC. The culprit was a soft-spoken but ruthless Australian entrepreneur named Robert Holmes à Court, a corporate raider who acquired real estate, oil and gas producers, and television and film studios as casually as other businessmen collected cuff links. Over the past eighteen months, Holmes à Court had vacuumed up non-voting shares in Grade’s ACC, then worked his way onto Grade’s board, where he stealthily acquired more stock. By January 1982, he finally had enough leverage to force Grade from his own company. “It was a clash of an old-style film mogul-entrepreneur with our more disciplined management style,” said Holmes à Court.

  That sort of management style was bound to grate on Jim, who still preferred doing business with a handshake over a good meal. “Holmes à Court was a cold, carpetbagger businessman,” said Oz. “He’s just money and power, that’s all. And to Lew, that’s not what it was about. Jim was like Lew. Their spirits were together.” But with Grade out, Jim was forced to deal with Holmes à Court as his new overlord at ACC—and on January 17, Jim and Holmes à Court met at ACC’s Great Cumberland Place headquarters near Hyde Park, mostly just so the two of them could size each other up. Jim likely left with a bad taste in his mouth. To Holmes à Court, who knew little or nothing about filmmaking, Jim and his projects were merely lines in an accounting ledger, assets to be traded and sold when they were no longer of interest. Jim was determined to get Dark Crystal away from him as quickly as possible.

  It was far cheerier back in Toronto, where Jim arrived in early March to oversee the beginning of production on Fraggle Rock. Jim would direct seven episodes of Fraggle during its first season and occasionally perform several recurring characters—but once the show was up and running, he was content to turn the show almost entirely over to the Fraggle team. “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.

  By letting go, Jim was growing and nurturing the talent within his company—and he was impressed with the work that was being done on Fraggle Rock. While Jim had checked over Frith’s designs during the show’s development, he’d stepped back from trying to influence the overall look or feel, giving Frith a free hand to create a universe in much the same way he’d encouraged Froud to determine much of the look of The Dark Crystal. “I think of myself as fairly limited as a designer. Michael is much better than I am,” Jim said generously, “and he has been just right for Fraggle Rock.”

  He also loved the technology that was being integrated seamlessly into the Fraggle world, from the tiny, radio-controlled Doozers and their equipment that rolled and rumbled across the set, to the gigantic, walkaround Gorgs with their remote-controlled mouths. “Jim was a huge gadget fan,” said Brian Henson. “He just loved them. When the first Sony Walkman came out, he had to go out and buy one straight away. He loved the magical properties of technology.” The Gorgs in particular were another leap in puppetry, using the lessons—and technologies—from the Dark Crystal experience to allow the puppeteers a much more fluid motion for their performance. “Dark Crystal was a $25 million R&D project for Fraggle Rock,” said Michael Frith, “because all that stuff that we invented for Dark Crystal I rolled right into Fraggle Rock.”

  While the Gorgs appeared to be simple walkaround Muppets like Big Bird, there were actually two performers at work: one inside the full-body costume, and a second sitting just off-camera performing the mouth and eyes using a radio-controlled device called a waldo. The waldo resembled a high-tech oven mitt—and once Richard Hunt had his hand inside of it, he could bring his thumb and fingers together to remotely open and close the mouth of Junior Gorg ten feet away. Since the performer inside the costume didn’t have to work the puppet’s mouth, both arms were freed up, making the puppet’s movements even more lifelike. “Neat,” said Jim appreciatively.

  On the occasions when Jim did come in to perform or direct, said Steve Whitmire, “it was very special.” Jim loved playing the two characters writers Jerry Juhl and Jocelyn Stevenson had created for him—most likely because each channeled a very specific part of Jim’s own personality. Like The Dark Crystal’s UrSkeks, magically cleft into two disparate beings, Jim could well have been split into his two Fraggle Rock characters: the soft-spoken sage Cantus—who dispensed wisdom in enigmatic, Zen-like nuggets (“There are no rules … and those are the rules”)—and the energetic, persuasive Convincing John, who could talk the Fraggles into doing anything. Cantus in particular became one of Jim’s favorite characters to perform. “[Cantus] was great,” said Stevenson, “because he was goofy and wise at the same time, kind of like Jim was in real life.”

  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. “The idea,” said Jim, “was that we would do this home-base segment in different countries, replacing the Doc character with one developed especially for whichever country we were in,” and then edit these locally produced sequences back into the master show. In France, then, the Fraggle hole would be in a former bakery overseen by a chef and his dog Croquette, while in England the Fraggles existed in a lighthouse presided over by a crusty sailor known as the Captain.

  Fraggle Rock would make its debut on HBO on January 10, 1983, and become an immediate hit, embraced not only by viewers, but by critics, who hailed it as “completely endearing” and “fetchingly whimsical.” During its five-year run, Fraggle Rock would eventually be broadcast in over ninety countries—many of which dubbed their local language in over Jim’s English-speaking version—but Jim even managed to break into a foreign market no one ever expected: the Soviet Union. In 1989, 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. Intrigued, Gosteleradio added both Fraggle Rock and The Muppet Show to its fall broadcast schedule, making them the first Western television series to air on Soviet television. It was groundbreaking, goodwill television—or, as Jim called it with typical understatement, “a very nice project.”

  On March 19, 1982, Jim was finally ready to unveil the first full edit of The Dark Crystal at a special sneak preview in Washington, D.C. The purpose of the preview, wrote Jim in a memo to his staff, was “to make final decisions regarding the editing of the film as well as the audio and the music.” He had spent the last few weeks dubbing sound for the film, and he was still certain that having the Mystics and Skeksis speak their own foreign language was the right decision—that the visuals and the performance alone would be enough to clearly tell the story.

  Michael Frith wasn’t so confident. Months earlier, while he and Juhl were still in London working on Fraggle Rock, Jim had excitedly asked the two of them to watch one of the first segments he had edited together, the enormous and loud Skeksis banquet scene that Jim absolutely loved. Frith and Juhl sat in the darkened screening room and watched as the Skeksis cackled and hooted at each other in their own language, a scene that seemed to be “going on forever,” Frith lamented. Afterward, Frith walked down to the reception area where Jim was slouched down on a sofa, hands folded across his stomach, waiting for Frith’s verdict. “What did you think?” Jim asked brightly. “Jim, there’s one thing I just have to say,” Frith began slowly. But Jim was already sinking down farther into the couch, pulling a sofa pillow down over his ears in mock surrender. “I know what you’re going to say!” Jim laughed. “I’m not listening! I’m not listening!”

 
; “He knew,” said Frith. “I said, ‘Jim, I have no idea what that scene was about. You’ve got to have them talk or at least give them subtitles.’ … But he believed that the story would unfold and be clear through the actions and the personalities of the characters.” On the day of the Washington preview, Jim still believed it—and he had proudly invited his father to attend the showing of what he regarded as “close to being an epic” film as he might get. “He was so proud of it,” said Cheryl. “He had his father come up to see it. And the audience hated it.”

  “Not great,” Jim reported in his private journal after the preview—and that was putting it mildly. The audience was baffled. As the theater emptied, Jim slowly stood up and walked out, stunned. 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. And this was completely wrong. People wanted to understand every word of it.” Executives at ACC and Universal—which had picked up the film’s distribution rights—were similarly confused. An earlier private screening for film company executives hadn’t gone well, either. “The movie went off,” said Oz, “and there was dead silence.”

  Jim was crushed. “He felt the studio was trying to make it into something that they felt the audience would want—and I don’t think that Jim was too interested in working for that,” said Jane. “He sincerely did not believe that you … get an audience by trying to please them; you get an audience by doing good work.” But in its current state, The Dark Crystal seemed to ACC and Universal to be nothing more than a $25 million art film, an expensive failed experiment. Cheryl remembered being “very anxious” for her father. “[There was] that sense of dismay,” said Cheryl, “and I think that it was very hard for my father—and he rose above it.”

  There was nothing to do but go back and redub the entire movie with English dialogue. Screenwriter David Odell was dispatched to begin the difficult task of drafting dialogue that not only conveyed the plot, but also matched the mouth movements and gestures of the puppets. “It was a huge overhaul,” said Lisa, and for weeks, Odell hunched over a videotape of the film in a hotel toom, “running a tape backwards and forward,” recalled Odell, “counting lip flaps to see where we could put dialogue that would sync with the action.” Odell completed the task by early June, and Jim sprinted to London to begin the final mix for The Dark Crystal, recording new character voices with English actors—including Barry Dennen and Billie Whitelaw, who had chewed the scenery as The Omen’s demonic nanny—and then spent several weeks synchronizing the voices with the visuals. In mid-July, four months after the disastrous Washington preview, Jim headed back to the States, bound for Detroit, where he would again try Dark Crystal before an audience.

  “A bit better,” Jim wrote afterward in his journal, but as he left the preview he was becoming more discouraged by the moment. While the dubbed language had taken care of the main problem, Holmes à Court’s bankers were meddling in things now, asking for more changes, this time relating to the story and to what Jim regarded as the underlying philosophy of the film. The Mystics, they thought, were “too boring”; they recommended that Jim reduce their screen time and devote more attention to the Skeksis, which the audience seemed to like. Jim hmmmmed politely, then sank silently into his seat. “He felt that the movie was about a balance,” said Jane, “and when they wanted to take out a lot of the Mystic stuff … and made it much too heavy on the Skeksis, it turned it into a different and darker thing.… Because Jim was actually much more interested in the Mystic side of it.”

  That kind of pressure was almost more than he could bear—but when ACC insisted on participating in the editing process, Jim decided he’d had enough. “I can’t work like this,” he said flatly. “I’ve got to get these guys out of here.” “There was really only one thing he could do,” said John Henson. The moment he returned to the Henson Associates offices at One Seventeen in New York, Jim called Bernie Brillstein. “I’m going to buy back The Dark Crystal,” he told the agent.

  Brillstein was stunned. “How much?” he finally stammered into the phone, and was further shocked when Jim explained that he was planning to take all the cash he had on hand—about $15 million, most of it revenue from Muppet merchandise—and make Holmes à Court an offer. “You’re crazy,” Brillstein exploded. “Anyone who invests in their own movie is nuts!” But Jim wasn’t hearing it. “Bernie, I don’t like what they’re doing with it,” he said—and the two of them went back and forth for several minutes, their voices growing louder and louder, their sentences more clipped.

  “And then,” recalled Brillstein, smiling at the memory years later, “he hits me with it, the son of a bitch—and I love him.” Quietly, Jim reminded Brillstein of their conversation from fifteen years earlier, when Brillstein had urged Jim to license his Muppet characters for merchandising. If it works like I think it’s gonna work, Brillstein had said then, you will be financially independent and you can use the money for your own independence. He was buying his independence and creative freedom. “You told me I could do this,” said Jim calmly.

  “What do you say?” recalled Brillstein. “He nailed me.” Jim was determined, but Brillstein was still nervous about the deal. As far as he was concerned, it was just Jim’s whim of steel again, and Brillstein spoke at length with both Al Gottesman and David Lazer, still in retirement on Long Island, to see if there was any way to talk Jim out of it. It was clear there wasn’t. “That was a business decision no one could dissuade him from,” said Gottesman. Even Jane, who was conservative when it came to financial decisions—especially those requiring such leaps of faith as gigantic as this one—knew it was useless to try to talk Jim down. The movie meant too much to him. “When he had made up his mind,” said Lazer, “there was no deterring him. Money couldn’t deter him. People’s opinion couldn’t do it. He went ahead and did what he felt was right. And most of the time, he was right.”

  In less than a month, Jim owned The Dark Crystal. While he would still have to deal with Universal as the distributor, he had gotten himself entirely away from Holmes à Court and ACC, paying $15 million cash to relieve the mogul of Grade’s initial $25 million investment. It was an enormous risk not only for Henson Associates but for Jim personally—and John Henson remembered being terrified as a teenager that the family was going to lose everything. “It was a huge gamble,” said Cheryl. Despite the hand-wringing around him, Jim had remained unflappable during the entire transaction; it had seemed only logical. “It was a good deal,” he told Oz.

  After much back-and-forthing with Universal, the studio finally agreed to release The Dark Crystal nationally the week before Christmas 1982. In the months leading up to the December release, Jim was determined to build a buzz about the film, making a presentation at the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago, producing a behind-the-scenes documentary, and opening Dark Crystal–related exhibits at the Craft Gallery in Los Angeles and at New York’s Lincoln Center Library. Most ambitious, perhaps, he had also asked the costumers in the London workshop to create a Dark Crystal Clothing Collection—described by its designers as “dramatic haute couture”—to be sold exclusively through four high-end boutiques, including Jim’s favorite, Liberty’s of London. The fashion line ended up being more notable for its flashy window displays, which used puppets and props from the film, than for its sales—but for Jim, who appreciated craftsmanship and design, the fun had been more in the doing than in the selling.

  In early December, Jim, Oz, and producer Gary Kurtz began a worldwide press tour to promote The Dark Crystal, set to premiere in New York in mid-December. Anticipation for the film was high—Jim’s name was enough to stir up interest in almost any project—but as he made the rounds with television reporters and newspaper writers, it was becoming clear he had a problem. 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 said. “With all of the developments in special effects—makeup, opticals, matte work—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.”

  The Dark Crystal premiered in New York on December 13, 1982. The early reviews weren’t promising. The New York Times’s Vincent Canby, who wanted desperately to like the movie, couldn’t muster up much enthusiasm for what he called “a watered down J. R. R. Tolkien.” Canby quickly zeroed in on the problem: “A lot of obvious effort has gone into this solemn fairy tale,” he wrote, “but all of it has been devoted to the complicated technical problems.… [The] story by Mr. Henson, is without any narrative drive whatever. It’s without charm as well as interest.” Worse, he found the characters “unexceptional” and designed without any sense of “humor or wit.”