Still, it wasn’t all bad. Following its December 17 nationwide opening, a reviewer for The Washington Post was so awed by the film’s visuals he could hardly bother to concern himself with the story, noting, “Jim Henson and his colleagues have reached a point where they can create and sustain a powerfully enchanting form of cinematic fantasy.” The Boston Globe found it “enjoyable [and] imaginative,” while Variety was generally positive, saying the story was “sketchy” but “well handled.”
The mixed response was typical. “The Dark Crystal really polarized opinion,” said Brian Henson. “People who liked it, loved it. But others were not so keen.” Generally, though, the reaction from moviegoers was a disinterested shrug. While Dark Crystal was impressive—“ambitious” was the word used most often to describe it—it just wasn’t much fun. “I find that often the most effective things we do are simple,” Jim had once said, “and that elaborate production does not always add to the entertainment value of the film.” That was the biggest problem with The Dark Crystal; for the first time, Jim had let spectacle get in the way of the story. His vision had come first, the story second—and the audience, usually willing to meet Jim more than halfway, had been unforgiving.
Still, Dark Crystal performed steadily and respectably, grossing $40 million during its initial nine-week release, well over the $15 million Jim had paid Holmes à Court for it. The gamble had paid off—but for Jim, The Dark Crystal had never been about profit and loss; it was about vision and inspiration, and the fact that audiences didn’t or couldn’t appreciate it hurt him terribly. “I felt sad for Jim,” said Oz. “I helped him with Dark Crystal, and I learned an incredible amount, but it wasn’t my vision. I just felt bad for him.”
“I thought I had failed miserably and I just couldn’t watch it,” said Kathy Mullen, who had spent six months performing Kira. Over time, however, she came to appreciate what had been accomplished. “What you have here is something that could never have been done before and will never be done again,” she said. “It stands alone as the only all-hand-puppet, all-live-action extravaganza ever made.… Today you’d rely on computers or visual effects to accomplish all that we did. But back then, everything on the screen—everything—was handmade.… That makes The Dark Crystal a unique artifact from a unique moment in media history. I think that’s a phenomenal thing.”
Oz, however, thought it was even simpler than that. “The most impressive thing is that it was done at all. It came from Jim’s head and it actually happened. Yeah, it didn’t go over quite the way Jim wanted. But he’s a phoenix,” said Oz, “he rose again.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
TWISTS AND TURNS
1982–1986
Jim with the heroes of 1986’s Labyrinth. (photo credit 12.1)
“WE HAVE BEEN VERY PLEASED WITH THE RESULTS OF THE DARK CRYSTAL,” wrote Jim in early 1983—and with good reason. Despite Universal’s marked lack of faith and a tepid response from critics, Dark Crystal ended up being one of the most successful films distributed by the studio in 1982, eventually grossing over $60 million worldwide in less than a year. Part of its success was likely due to Jim’s active promotion, especially in the foreign market; in the first three months of 1983, Jim traveled to Italy, England, Germany, France, Spain, Japan, and Australia (“first time,” Jim noted in his journal) to chat about the film.
If Jim had been frustrated by moviegoers who didn’t seem to appreciate the art of The Dark Crystal, he found a much more receptive audience among science fiction and fantasy fans who more fully understood just how groundbreaking the film 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 Jim, the critical acclaim was even more gratifying than the financial success. “[The Dark Crystal] was a huge undertaking—a vision I had,” he wrote, “and one which ultimately has helped to carry our art form to a more sophisticated and technically advanced stage. The most important thing, however, is to love what you’re doing and to go after those visions, no matter where they lead.”
Although his schedule in early 1983 sent him leaping from continent to continent for press junkets for Dark Crystal and to Toronto to work intermittently on Fraggle Rock, for the first time in more than seven years Jim had neither a weekly series nor a film in production. For all his involvement with Fraggle, its day-to-day operation was left largely in the hands of producers Diana Birkenfield and Larry Mirkin. That left him time to do a bit of skiing and dog sledding in Aspen in January, followed by a two-day vacation with family at the recently opened EPCOT theme park at Walt Disney World, a place Jim quickly came to love.
As she watched Jim interact with the cast of Fraggle Rock that winter, Diana Birkenfield—who had only recently returned to Henson Associates after seven years away—thought Jim had changed much in the last decade. The Muppet Show had made both Jim and his characters internationally famous; wherever he went now, he was recognized—and, indeed, was slightly flabbergasted if he was not. While living in London, he flitted from private club to private club, drove to the theater in his low-slung Lotus, hosted loud dinner parties, and joyously flew kites on Hampstead Heath. Those experiences, that lifestyle, had made him more cultivated and—though he might argue otherwise—trendier and hipper.
And he even looked hipper. While Jim would always enjoy bright colors and would continue wearing fashionably cozy and flashy Missoni sweaters, he had lately begun dressing entirely in white, wearing white linen pants and comfortable jackets with no tie, with white canvas shoes. He had even become a “white meat vegetarian,” eating only vegetables with white fish or chicken, and drinking kir or white wine. His beard was more tightly trimmed now, shaped closer to his face, and his hair, lightly flecked with gray, was cut shorter, and often swept back, falling just onto his collar and exposing a very visible widow’s peak. He had to wear glasses every now and then, too, sporting chic, rectangular lenses in tortoiseshell frames that shaped his face and made him look studious.
There were some who grumbled that he looked and acted as if he had “gone Hollywood”—an accusation Jerry Juhl thought was inevitable for anyone who happened to make films. “In this business, there is nothing more compelling, more exciting [than] … feature films,” said Juhl kindly. “There’s something seductive about the process.… I think Jim really felt it. He really loved it. And got caught up in it.” Bernie Brillstein thought it was more about celebrating and enjoying success and fame. “He loved the good things,” said Brillstein. “And he loved to be in the world of celebrities.”
Yet, when it came to family, Jim remained as grounded as ever. A devoted and diligent son, he had always made an effort to visit his father whenever he could, dropping into Albuquerque on his way to California, and was now traveling regularly to and from Ahoskie, North Carolina, where he was having a house built for his dad and Bobby. But it was the five Henson children who would always be the most important part of his life—he frequently alluded to them as his proudest accomplishment—and Jim would work with some, and travel and vacation with others.
And then there was Jane. Their marriage had grown increasingly fractious over the last decade; further, it had become well known that Jim had dated several women while in London—including some of his own employees—and Jim did little to deny or defend his reputation for a wandering eye. Even in the Muppet workshops, there would always be whispering about which female employee Jim might favor at a given moment, though such conversations rarely erupted into the open. Still, Jim was mindful of Jane’s feelings, doing his best to do his going out—as Jane still called it—as discreetly as he could. Discussing it with Jane wasn’t his style, and hurt feelings weren’t Jim’s way; instead, he merely compartmentalized his life into two distinct pieces, Work Jim and Home Jim, with one on each side of the
Atlantic. “He wanted my mom to be happy,” said Cheryl, “and he wanted it all to be okay, so he wound up living a London life and a New York life.”
Now, however, with Dark Crystal completed and the London workshop idle, Jim’s London life had come to an end. After years in the house in bustling and picturesque Hampstead, it was time to return to the suburbs of Bedford, New York—and to Jane. One afternoon, Jane came home to find Jim looking wistfully at his surroundings and at the life they had built in Bedford. “I can’t come back here,” he told Jane quietly. In fact, he told her, he had already found himself an apartment on the nineteenth floor of the upscale Sherry-Netherland hotel in Manhattan. “Fine,” said Jane, mistakenly thinking Jim was merely looking for a place in the city where he could stay when he was working, instead of camping in the top-floor suite of One Seventeen as he usually did. Over omelets the next morning, Jane asked Jim how they would decorate the new apartment. “I thought we were sort of still doing things together, like we did in the house in London,” said Jane. But Jim just shook his head. “This time,” he said softly, “I’m doing it by myself.”
Refusing Jane’s help with the decorating was an indication of the state of their marriage—and was likely as confrontational as Jim was ever going to get about it. “It was the first time that had ever happened,” said Jane. “It felt very poignant.” Yet, Jim still wasn’t ready to ask for a divorce. “Jim wanted to be separated and married,” Jane said. “He wanted to do both. He didn’t really not want to be married.” The truth was, Jim loved the idea of family. “He could have asked for a divorce at any time, but he didn’t, and neither did I,” said Jane. “He held the family together. He liked to come home to a house and kids and pets.”
After much discussion, however, Jim and Jane agreed to legally separate—a “handshake of a separation,” Jane would call it—something that would permit Jim to “have an above-board independent life,” said Lisa Henson, allowing him to openly have other relationships, without the associated guilt he always felt. Typically, Jim favored keeping the proceedings as quiet as possible, asking Al Gottesman and Karen Barnes—two of Henson Associates’ most trusted and discreet attorneys—to represent him and Jane in the negotiations. It was an ill-advised jumbling of private and professional affairs, tangling company business in Jim and Jane’s private disagreement—and things “escalated quickly,” remarked Jane, with the most contentious point being Jane’s rightful share in Henson Associates. It was “painful and inevitable,” recalled Lisa, and the finalized agreement would separate Jane not only from Jim, but from the company she had helped him found and build more than two decades ago.
The formal separation would remain in place for the rest of Jim’s life—and the stack of legal papers would eventually tower to nearly a foot high, with an eye toward divvying up the company and permanently dissolving their marriage. Heather Henson, then twelve, remembered being “really upset” and burst into tears when she learned her parents were separating and heading toward divorce. “There was a part of me that wanted them to stay married, even though all this hoo-hah was going on,” said Heather later. For now, Jim and Jane would officially separate, and Jane and Heather would remain in the house in Bedford while Jim moved out of the suburbs and into his Fifth Avenue apartment in the sky. As if modeling himself on the UrSkeks in The Dark Crystal, he was at last merging his two separate selves—Work Jim and Home Jim—into a single Jim Henson.
As the weather warmed, Jim had two major projects under way. The first was another Muppet-related movie—at the moment titled simply Muppet Movie III—that he was planning to put before the cameras in late spring. Jim had decided to serve as a producer of the film, along with David Lazer, but had placed the directing duties squarely in the hands of Frank Oz. “I was looking at the year ahead and I thought my own life was going to be very busy,” said Jim, “and I thought maybe this is a time to have Frank try directing one of these.… He went into shock first, then said he wanted a couple of days to think about it.” Oz didn’t need long to tell Jim yes. “I had learned a lot about directing by co-directing with Jim on The Dark Crystal, and I think he just felt at this point he could trust me not to fuck it up,” said Oz. “I think by producing it with Dave, Jim could be a part of it and still do other things he wanted to do.”
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. As the limo pulled away from the theater, Jim and Froud stared at each other in stunned silence. Then Jim started giggling. “The next one will be so much better!” laughed Jim, and excitedly began describing several Eastern and Indian folktales he had heard from Lisa, who was studying mythology at Harvard. Jim pictured colorful gods soaring across the sky—but Froud was quiet; that sort of folklore, he told Jim, wasn’t really his forte; he much preferred goblin stories. Jim brightened. “Great!” he said—but explained that he didn’t want to repeat what he thought had been The Dark Crystal’s most fatal flaw. “This time,” he told Froud, “I want people in the film.”
While the lack of live actors actually wasn’t Crystal’s biggest problem, the suggestion of a human cast was enough for Froud to begin to address what really had been the film’s main weakness: the story. “I immediately pictured a baby surrounded by goblins,” said Froud, “[and] I told Jim that traditionally goblins steal babies.” Jim nodded and hmmmed thoughtfully. “That’s the beginning of our story,” he told Froud, “but what else?” Froud was stumped, but suggested that perhaps a maze “would make a really good metaphor for the soul’s journey.”
Jim was intrigued by Froud’s suggestion, and while promoting The Dark Crystal in Japan, he began filling pages of a notebook with notes for a film to be called The Labyrinth—or, perhaps, The Maze or even The Labyrinth Twist. Jim’s first outline involved two of his favorite archetypes, a king and a jester, working their way through a maze filled with elaborate traps and exotic monsters. Even at this stage, Jim already had a strong sense for the look of the film, sketching out a giant Buddha statue trapping the heroes in a cage, rooms filled with snakes, and an island with a trapdoor in it. He also knew he wanted a carved door that somehow came to life, as well as an Escher-like sequence in which it was impossible to tell up from down—both images that would end up in the final film. While there were also some darker sequences—he envisioned a room full of jewels that would bleed if one was picked up—Jim very deliberately wanted to include plenty of humor, an ingredient critics had found distinctly lacking in The Dark Crystal.
At the end of March, Jim flew to London to meet with Froud and Dennis Lee, the Canadian writer and poet who co-wrote songs for Fraggle Rock, to see if they could tease a coherent story from Jim’s notes. “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. “We played around with various story lines,” said Froud, “then I created some paintings just to give a general feel to the approach and style of the film.” One of Froud’s first paintings was a piece called Toby and the Goblins, featuring a baby smiling happily amid a sea of grinning, leering, and skeptical monsters. Jim loved it—it would “define and inspire” their work over the next three years—and hung the original painting in his house on Downshire Hill. Lee, meanwhile, would begin trying to compress their conversations and notes into a viable first draft.
As Jim and Froud talked over their next big project, Oz had been hard at work on the script for the next Muppet film, overhauling the first screenplay submitted by Muppet Caper writers Jay Tarses and Tom Patchett—initially titled The Muppets: The Legend Continues—which Oz had dismissed as “way too over jokey.” “I asked Jim if I could take a stab at it,” said Oz, “and I think Jay and Tom were both probably very unhappy that I did. But it just didn’t have t
he oomph of the characters and their relationships.” Jim encouraged the tinkering; Oz, said Jim, was “very precise in terms of his characters and what they’re all about and thinks through that depth of why they are and where they came from … and all of that creates wonderfully real characters.” But capturing that spark of the characters—that oomph, as Oz called it—was the 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.”
While Oz put the final touches on the script, the New York workshop was constructing dozens of new Muppets for the movie, including a roller-skating Miss Piggy, a water-skiing Gonzo, and radio-controlled versions of nearly every major character. (As the workshop assembled multiple versions of Miss Piggy, Oz made certain he was always present when builders attached her eyes, just as Jim had insisted on doing twenty years earlier when overseeing Don Sahlin’s construction of Rowlf.) The Muppet builders had continued to refine the technology now being used on Fraggle Rock, making mechanisms increasingly smaller and allowing puppeteers to remotely control more and more functions of the puppet with the waldo mitt. When using the waldo, there was no need to find a way to keep the puppeteer crouched out of sight; instead, a remote-controlled Kermit could now be propped up on a bench out in the open, while Jim sat several yards away using the waldo to radio-control Kermit’s mouth and head.
The third Muppet movie—now titled The Muppets Take Manhattan—began filming in New York City on May 31, 1983. “We did our first film in Los Angeles, and our second in London,” noted Jim. “I thought it would be nice to do the next one in our hometown.” All shots of the Muppets in Manhattan, then, were done on location, with the Muppet performers wheeling around on their backs on rolling carts in Times Square or Central Park. Even uninterested New Yorkers, long accustomed to seeing film crews in their city, would stop to watch the filming—their eyes locked on Kermit and Miss Piggy, rather than on Jim and Oz rolling around underneath—and beg to take pictures or just touch the puppets. Jim didn’t mind a bit. “We got a very nice, happy feeling from people in the streets,” he said.
Jim Henson: The Biography Page 42