For The Jim Henson Hour, the technology was used in the creation of a vaguely birdlike, bouncing, hovering shape-shifting CGI Muppet called Waldo C. Graphic, which Jim put in the hands of veteran performer Steve Whitmire. The computer image of Waldo would be overlaid on video images of other live performers—and Whitmire, working in the traditional Muppet style, could watch the low-resolution Waldo move on-screen as he performed, talking and interacting virtually with other performers. Once the low-resolution image was recorded, it would be sent to PDI where the character would be rendered in high resolution; once complete, the final version would then be matted back into the original scene. A complicated process that “worked out quite nicely,” reported Jim.
Jim put the technology to work in the background, too. In early February 1989, he began shooting an environmentally themed special initially titled Snake Samba (Jim would rename it Milton’s Paradise Lost before finally settling on Song of the Cloud Forest) about an endangered golden frog searching for a mate in the rain forest. Jim wanted the backgrounds to look like primitive South American art, almost abstract, with intensely bright colors. Using the state-of-the-art PaintBox graphics program, Jim turned drawings and designs by Cheryl into fully realized virtual backgrounds. It took several tests before he was happy with it, but Jim loved playing with the technology. “It’s so incredible,” he enthused. “I love the things that you can do with it.” The only real problem was the cost. “It’s quite expensive, and the tricky thing is to try to get it down to the point where we can afford it on a television budget.”
To Jim’s dismay, budgets, not backgrounds, would take up more and more of his time in the coming months. In London, the Creature Shop had been hired by Mirage Enterprises to create the title characters for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—a live-action adaptation of the successful independent comic and Saturday morning cartoon—and was having an absolute blast. Meanwhile, Jim was stuck in New York attending Henson Associates board meetings, discussing business plans, squinting at new logos, and sitting in on endless rounds of planning meetings and budget review sessions. There were some eye-rolling discoveries as Jim and his business managers scoured their ledgers; one executive had been taking regular trips to France with his wife on the company’s dime, while an art director was paying for expensive monthly haircuts with his corporate credit card (“Maybe if it was a better haircut,” Jim offered wryly). “I think we are getting a handle on the status of the company, and it’s coming together nicely,” he wrote to staff with forced enthusiasm. “I really appreciate the way everyone is pitching in to help.” He even sat through his own appraisal process, “a very healthy exercise,” he assured his employees.
Even The Witches had become more bogged down than usual in personalities and drama. “It hasn’t been an easy film,” said Jim with a sigh, who now found himself “a bit in the middle” of a spat between Nic Roeg and Warner Brothers over edits in the film. Jim had finally settled on the more conventional ending, in which the young hero is changed from a mouse back to a human, and now he and Roeg were putting together a final cut to be delivered to Warner Brothers. Then, of course, Dahl was certain to check in with his response to the film—and Duncan Kenworthy was already bracing for the explosion.
On Friday, April 14, the first episode of The Jim Henson Hour finally made its debut on NBC. Jim was disappointed in the time slot he’d been given; he wanted the Sunday evening spot that had traditionally been occupied by various iterations of Walt Disney’s one-hour show. While The Jim Henson Hour had no real competition in the lineup—it was opposite the sci-fi love story Beauty and the Beast on CBS and the sitcom block Perfect Strangers and Full House over on ABC—Friday night was traditionally a dead zone, especially for family-themed fare. “They put us in a time slot that they [NBC] had been consistently not doing very well in,” Jim said later. It was not an encouraging start.
As he had promised Tartikoff, Jim was now structuring the first half hour of each show around a specific theme; for the premiere, it was science fiction, with comedian Louie Anderson appearing in sci-fi parodies like “My Dinner with Codzilla” or “Space Guy.” Throughout, Jim tried to hold everything together by interspersing “MuppeTelevision” sequences—a high-tech version of The Muppet Show (and the last remaining vestiges of the Inner Tube/Lead-Free TV concept) featuring Kermit in a control room crammed with television monitors where he “has to pick and choose the stuff he thinks we’ll enjoy.” One had to wonder about the frog’s decisions; most sketches fell flat. For the second half hour, however, Jim was on sturdier footing, filling the thirty minutes with “The Heartless Giant,” the episode of The Storyteller he had directed more than a year ago. When that finished, Jim came back on camera to cheerfully wrap things up.
Jim knew it wasn’t his finest moment. Only hours before the program aired, in fact, Jim had told an audience at the American Film Institute that the “biggest problem” with the show was the opening thirty-minute “variety show” portion. “Variety is not easy to do and no one is doing it successfully right now—and we may not either. But variety is a very difficult thing to get a handle on and make it work.”
Unfortunately, in the minds of most critics, he hadn’t made it work. While everyone still loved The Storyteller, most agreed that the rest of The Jim Henson Hour was a disaster. “Fixing what’s wrong … would be simple as microwave pie,” wrote Tom Shales in The Washington Post. “All NBC has to do is throw out the first half and keep [The Storyteller]. A Jim Henson Half-Hour would be plenty.” Matt Roush, writing in USA Today, was kind enough to concede that the first half hour had been “different,” noting that “such originality, even if flawed, should be encouraged”—but Shales was having none of it, insisting that the opening thirty minutes was “sadly frantic drivel.” Even Jim himself drew critical fire for being “astonishingly dull” in his on-screen appearances. “Henson should sit there,” sniffed Shales, “and the lion should talk.”
The reviews also made clear that Jim had a new and potentially more devastating problem on his hands: for the first time, the critics were disappointed in the Muppets themselves. Those who tuned in expecting to see the regular cast of The Muppet Show saw only Kermit and briefly Gonzo; the rest were new characters, designed by Frith and Kirk Thatcher and performed largely, though not entirely, by the second generation of Muppet performers. Shales thought the new Muppets were “ugly”—but more critically, no one thought the MuppeTelevision segments were very funny or even all that interesting. The Muppet segments—which had always seemed to come to Juhl and the writing team so effortlessly—simply sputtered, dragged down by slow pacing, heavy dialogue, and a distressing desire to be hip. Roush thought the segments resembled “the lame parts of Saturday Night Live scaled for kids. Judged by Henson’s typically high standards, MuppeTelevision is an undeniably creative mess.” This wasn’t The Dark Crystal baffling audiences or Labyrinth landing with a thud; this was a project with Kermit at the center—and for the first time Kermit was flopping.
There were some kinder reviews—the Los Angeles Times called it “a bright addition to prime time”—and Jim was certain that, given time, the show might find its way and begin to right itself. But after only three low-performing weeks in which The Jim Henson Hour failed to make a dent in the ratings, NBC was running out of patience. Lord Grade had given Jim the time he needed to find his way with The Muppet Show in the 1970s—but as Michael Frith pointed out, “that was then, and this is now. Very few shows are given that luxury.”
Jim built the fourth episode around Dog City, which ended up being little watched but highly acclaimed, and would win him an Emmy for Outstanding Direction the following year. By May 14, for the fifth installment, he finally managed to land the coveted Sunday evening time slot that had traditionally been held by Disney—an episode titled, fittingly enough, “The Ratings Game.” It would end up the lowest rated episode of The Jim Henson Hour so far, finishing 72nd of 77 shows for the week. The following week, Tartikoff gently inform
ed Jim that after the network aired the episodes it had ordered, NBC would be canceling the series. “I’m sorry the Sunday experiment didn’t work out,” Tartikoff told Jim in a handwritten note. “I am proud of the painstaking care and love and innovations you and your group put into the show. I just wish more people could have seen what we did.”
Jim was “hurt” and “embarrassed” by the network’s decision, recalled Bernie Brillstein. Jim told staff he was “disappointed” and called the cancellation “a major aggravation”—for him, a strongly worded indictment. “I don’t particularly like the way NBC handled us,” he wrote in one of his quarterly reports, “but what the hey, that’s network TV.” Jim still believed the series “was really coming together nicely.… I’m sure that we would have made it even better in subsequent seasons.” Larry Mirkin thought so, too. “We were very ambitious,” said Mirkin, “we just didn’t have enough time. I think we could have sorted it out but we weren’t allowed to do that.” NBC, however, wasn’t even willing to give the remaining episodes a chance, banishing four installments—including the episode featuring Song of the Cloud Forest—to the wilderness of the summer schedule, where they sank to the bottom of the Nielsen ratings. The last two episodes would be pulled from the network’s schedule entirely.
Jerry Juhl wasn’t certain that the show would ever have been salvageable, no matter how much time they might have spent on it. There was “a kind of craziness about that project that we could never put our finger on,” Juhl said. One of The Jim Henson Hour’s underlying problems was a familiar one that had plagued Jim since the days of The Dark Crystal: namely that new technology—the visual effects, the virtual backgrounds, the CGI Muppets—had gotten in the way of storytelling or character development. “He was in love with technology and future-thinking stuff,” said Henson Associates producer and creative consultant Alex Rockwell, “and so, when he revisited the Muppets on The Jim Henson Hour, he wanted to bring that sense of futuristic techno-hipness into the show [and] the marriage of those technological visuals and CGI with the Muppets didn’t work that well.” In the case of the CGI character Waldo, even Jim agreed he was “one of those characters I don’t think we ever really got a handle on in terms of how to use him.… He hasn’t really gelled as a major contribution to the show except technologically, I suppose.”
At the heart of it, however, the real problem with The Jim Henson Hour was that it had a massive identity crisis. “It was like the show didn’t know what it wanted to be,” said Juhl. “This was Jim trying to do a whole lot of things at once, and it always puzzled us, and we couldn’t talk him out of it.… Most things didn’t work on that show. It was a huge frustration and a great sadness.” Rockwell called it “a chaotic hour” that took a physical toll as well. “It was rigorous to make … because one minute you’re shooting the Muppet stuff in Toronto and then you’re up in Nova Scotia doing one of those Creature Shop stories,” said Rockwell. “It was really exhausting, and Jim’s energy got pretty diffused—unlike on The Muppet Show, where it was so focused.”
Oz, too, thought the disarray in the show was reflective of Jim’s increasingly divided attention, split between the creative work he enjoyed and the obligations of “flying around and getting money for the overhead.” “Whatever Jim did, even some of the things that failed, there was always amazing stuff in it,” said Oz. “But The Jim Henson Hour just didn’t have the usual Jim focus. It was more like a grab bag of the brilliant things he’s done.”
Running the company was slowly sapping his creative energy, making it more difficult for Jim Henson to do the things that made him Jim Henson. The Jim Henson Hour was proof of that. Jim knew the strain was showing, both in the way the company was run and in the on-screen product. “I know that this period of time has been somewhat filled with a sense of uncertainty and an apparent lack of direction,” he wrote in a memo to his entire staff, “but I want to say that we are working and looking at various alternatives, and we should have a resolution in the not too distant future.”
Resolution was closer than he let on; he was already pursuing a course of action that, he hoped, “releases me from a lot of business problems. As anyone in the business knows, you spend a great deal of your time raising financing, finding distributors and all.” If everything worked out as planned, he explained, “I’ll be able to spend a lot more of my time on the creative side of things.” That spring, as he and Rockwell rode in the back of a town car in Toronto, Jim reached for the enormous brick of a cellular telephone he kept under the seat. He had talked with Brillstein and Lazer, he told Rockwell, and they both agreed with his decision. Now he was going to make a phone call to put the plan into motion.
He was going to sell his company to Disney.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
SO MUCH ON A HANDSHAKE
1989–1990
Agent Bernie Brillstein (left) and producer David Lazer were two of Jim’s closest and most trusted colleagues and business advisors. Brillstein, however, was largely sidelined during the Disney negotiations, while Lazer continued to argue that Disney was getting Jim too cheaply. (photo credit 15.1)
FOR DISNEY CEO MICHAEL EISNER, THE VERY IDEA OF JIM HENSON joining the Walt Disney Company was a match “made in family entertainment heaven.” For Jim Henson, it was a lifelong dream come true. “The first film I saw was Snow White,” Jim noted, “and ever since then, I’ve had a secret desire to work with this great company.”
Jim may have loved Disney’s animated features—“outside of my own films, these are the only ones I buy for my video library,” he wrote privately—but he was an even bigger fan of the Disney theme parks. Disneyland and Walt Disney World were, he said, “two of my favorite places,” and he had made regular vacations to the two parks for decades, even making a point to visit the newly opened EPCOT center in early 1983, within months of the park’s grand opening. Putting himself and the Muppets in the hands of Disney, then, would, in a sense, be like going on an extended vacation—one in which he would be expected to work and create, certainly, but then that was just the kind of vacation Jim liked best.
While Jim was working in the spring of 1989 to put his company in the hands of Disney, five years earlier things had very nearly gone the other way. In 1984, Disney had been on the verge of a hostile takeover at the hands of financier Saul Steinberg, who intended to dismember the company and sell its assets. With Disney’s stock plunging, Jim had asked Bernie Brillstein to make some discreet inquiries about Jim either stepping in as Disney’s new president or buying the company outright. The discussion went nowhere, due largely to bad timing; the Disney ship was in the process of righting itself, and later that year Paramount executives Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, along with Warner Brothers vice president Frank Wells, were chosen by a new Disney board to steer the company. Jim let the moment pass with no regrets, said Brillstein, “but a seed was planted about how perfect a Disney/Henson pairing might be.”
Still, Jim had a good relationship with Eisner, who had given the go-ahead for the first two Muppet Show pilots while working as an ABC executive in the early 1970s. Shortly before starting work on Labyrinth in late 1984, Jim had called Brillstein and asked the agent to set up a meeting with Eisner, now Disney’s CEO, and Katzenberg, the head of production. Jim’s projects were getting “very expensive” to produce, said Brillstein, and Jim wanted to discuss the possibility of Disney financing and distributing projects for Henson Associates—or, better still, having Disney buy Henson Associates outright. Brillstein called to set up the meeting, enthusiastically telling Eisner, “I have the best thing in the world for you: Jim Henson.” Jim and Lazer flew to California for a private dining room at Chasen’s restaurant in West Hollywood (“like a Mafia dinner,” joked Brillstein). This time, however, finances doomed any agreement. In 1984, the Muppets were entering a post–Muppets Take Manhattan holding pattern—and Jim was still negotiating with Holmes à Court to bring the Muppets back home—making their earning potential, in Eisner’s asses
sment, “very soft.” “The Muppets’ world renown wasn’t enough to carry the deal,” said a somewhat annoyed Brillstein, “so Disney passed.” But Brillstein assured Jim that if he wanted to sell his company to another major studio—and in fact, Disney rival MCA was interested—he could make it happen. But Jim refused; he wanted Disney, or no one.
Now, five years later, Jim had decided to try again—and in early spring 1989 had casually reopened discussions with Eisner. From a purely financial standpoint, Jim’s company was on sturdier footing than it had been on that day at Chasen’s in 1984. All of his properties were now safely back in his hands. Muppet Babies– and Fraggle Rock–related merchandise was steadily filling the company coffers, Muppet videos were selling well internationally, and The Muppet Show was in regular rotation on cable. The company had come a long way in the last five years, as Jim had expanded the company more broadly beyond television and into motion picture production.
As a reflection of the company’s growing film presence, Jim was in the process of changing the name of the company from Henson Associates to Jim Henson Productions, which made the company sound more like a major film studio than the small, independent organization of around 150 employees it actually was. He had even recently unveiled a new logo, built around his stylized signature (in Kermit green) with a swooping J and dramatically crossed H. Jim called it “disarmingly simple”—and perhaps intentionally, it also looked a lot like the logo for the Walt Disney Company, which was centered on Walt’s own widely recognized signature.
Jim Henson: The Biography Page 51