Jim Henson: The Biography (39 page)

Fozzie was intended to be Oz’s main character, and the perfectionist Oz was frustrated that he couldn’t get a handle on the bear.
“Frank was dying, because he knew it was bad and didn’t know what to do with it,” said Juhl. Jim promised to keep tinkering with the puppet to see if perhaps a change in design might spark something,
similar to the way in which the slight change in Big Bird’s eyes and plumage had helped Caroll Spinney get a firm hold on that character’s core personality. Juhl, meanwhile, blamed himself and the writing team for the character’s rough start. Writing scripts in California for a show produced in London, said Juhl, was like “working in a vacuum. There was no interplay with the performers, there was no sense of fun and excitement.… Jim and I knew there was a possibility that we would just start over again in London.” For Juhl, that interaction with the Muppet performers was crucial to the creative process. Once he was on the ground in London, watching rehearsals and working among the performers, Juhl thought he might finally “find that bear as a character.”

In the meantime, he and Burns would keep producing scripts and sketches as quickly as they could, in the hope that once the Muppet team relocated to London in May to begin producing shows in earnest, there would be enough material available to produce one show per week. Until then, Jim still had plenty to do that spring, taping inserts for
Sesame Street
, traveling with the family to Hawaii and Japan, and making a few more appearances on
Saturday Night Live
. Jim convinced
SNL
’s writers to let him script one of the Muppets’ final appearances on the show, turning in a clever, and uncredited, script in which the Muppets finally realize they’re puppets and pack themselves away in a trunk—a nice bit of closure for
SNL
’s problematic puppets.

J
im left for England on May 5, 1976, taking his time by traveling on the ocean liner
Queen Elizabeth 2
with Jane, Jack Burns, and several Muppet performers. London would be Jim’s home for six months of the year now, so he had made arrangements to move into a flat in Harley Gardens, in the fashionable Kensington district. Jane would remain with Jim in London for only a few weeks, helping him settle in and decorate his flat before returning to New York. The Muppet performers, meanwhile, were scattered around central London in hotels or flats that Jim had helped them find and, in some cases, had negotiated an affordable rent. Each year, in fact, Jim would send each Muppet performer a brief questionnaire, asking where in London
they wanted to live and what kind of accommodations they needed (most asked for a “
real shower”), and would then make the appropriate arrangements. “
[Jim was] accused of spoiling everyone,” laughed Lazer.

Not that any of them were going to be spending much time in their flats anyway. During each season of
The Muppet Show
’s five-year run, Jim would produce one show each week for twelve weeks—usually from early May until late July or August—then, after a brief break, shoot the remaining twelve episodes of the season from September through November. Such a schedule meant that on almost any given day, the Muppet team could be working on at least three shows at one time—filming the current episode, doing editing and postproduction on the previous week’s show, and writing and building sets for upcoming episodes.

Fortunately, Grade was committed to providing Jim with everything he needed to produce
The Muppet Show
without ever having to set foot outside of ATV’s Elstree studio complex. In fact, the facilities at Elstree were some of the best in the United Kingdom—fifteen acres of stages, editing rooms, warehouses, and offices, all professionally laid out, splendidly equipped, and superbly maintained solely for television production. At the center of the compound were four massive studios, and Jim and the Muppets had been assigned Studio D, perhaps the best of the four. It was immediately adjacent to an editing area and the closest to Elstree’s main office building, an L-shaped, six-story, glass-fronted structure called the Neptune House, a tip of the hat to Neptune Studios, which had constructed the first film studio at Elstree back in 1914. Grade had set aside part of the third floor of the Neptune House for Henson Associates, giving Jim a place to set up offices for himself and Lazer, as well as conference areas and rooms for Juhl and the writing team—“The Muppet Suite,” as Jim would call it.

For most of the 1960s, the cavernous Studio D at Elstree had been the home to the popular
Morecambe and Wise
variety show, filmed in front of a live studio audience of about 350 people, sitting in a raised, auditorium-like seating area along one wall. Normally, the spacious rooms under the seats were used for storing large equipment—but Jim had other plans for the space, and cleared them
out to make room for a Muppet workshop, just steps away from the studio floor. “
We were setting up with this room that had nothing in it but a bunch of black cases that we brought over,” said Bonnie Erickson, who had been assigned by Jim the task of setting up and overseeing the Elstree workshop. Erickson had converted the cramped but cozy space into a veritable Muppet factory, pushing in workbenches and tables and lining the walls with makeshift metal shelves sagging under the weight of boxes filled with costumes, fur, feathers, and eyes. Here Muppets could be quickly built, repaired, clothed, or modified without the need for materials from New York or even the costume or prop shop at Elstree. “We prided ourselves on the fact that nobody from the set shop or from the costuming took any time away from the shooting schedule, because we knew how valuable that time was,” said Erickson.

Time was indeed a precious commodity, for Jim and the Muppet team were working at a breakneck pace. A typical work week began at 10:00
A
.
M
. on Sunday, when the Muppet team—writers, performers, builders, and musicians—would gather in Elstree’s Rehearsal Room 7/8 on the fourth floor of the Neptune House for the first read-through of the script with the guest star. It was Jim’s policy that guest stars would be treated well, and therefore it only made sense that they be placed in the care of the suave, smooth-talking Lazer, who made sure guests were ferried around London in style—often in Lew Grade’s own limousine—and stayed in first-rate hotels. Especially in that critical first season, when Jim felt the guest stars were “
slightly sticking their necks out” working on an untested show for not much money, he wanted as few surprises for them as possible. For that reason, Lazer would often go to the guest’s hotel the night before the read-through to personally deliver the script and address any questions or concerns.

At the read-through, the crew sat facing each other at long Formica-topped tables pushed into a loose rectangle, reading the script aloud and in character, with Burns or Juhl reading out the scripted stage directions. Folding himself into one of the rehearsal room’s hard plastic shell chairs, Jim would scribble notes on his script as he read aloud his parts—sliding easily into the characters of Kermit or Dr. Teeth or the Muppet Newsman—and noting where
additional puppets might be needed to fill in a crowd scene, or where an ad-libbed line worked better. Juhl, long used to watching Jim and Oz “talk around” a
Sesame Street
script, actively encouraged ad-libbing among the Muppet performers, as he thought such spontaneity gave him additional insights into the characters that made them that much more interesting to write. “
Let’s leave that in,” Juhl would say excitedly as he scratched out the old line in his script and replaced it with the ad-lib.

Once the read-through was finished, the performers and musicians would head for what they called “The Music Hall,” which was actually just the far end of the rehearsal room where a Bosendorfer piano, painted battleship gray, squatted among a scattering of chairs. Here they would rehearse any songs for the coming week, enthusiastically performing their own routines or practicing harmonies as they backed up the guest star. While Jim could barely read treble clef and only tinkle at the piano—and often joked that he could barely sing—his passion more than made up for his lack of technique. During rehearsals, Jim would always sing with gusto, gleefully announcing a key change by calling out “
Modulate!
”—a habit that so amused Frank Oz that he would incorporate it into the personality of the unconventional Muppet musician Marvin Suggs.

Music would be an important part of
The Muppet Show
, and Jim chose the songs to be performed on the show with the same relish with which he had once chosen records for
Sam and Friends
. Each week he would sort eagerly through Tin Pan Alley sheet music and old songbooks—including old favorites
Songs of the Pogo
and A. A. Milne’s
Pooh Song Book
—as well as scouring the current Top 40 charts for songs with unusual or catchy hooks. Consequently,
The Muppet Show
’s first season alone featured an impressive array of songs reflecting Jim’s quirky musical sensibilities, rolling through traditional tunes like the vaudeville-era “You and I and George,” A. A. Milne’s rollicking “Cottleston Pie,” Latham and Jaffe’s novelty tune “I’m My Own Grandpa,” and Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Tit Willow” (a selection that prompted a confused Sam the Eagle to ask, “Is it cultural?”).

When it came to popular music, Jim’s personal tastes had mellowed slightly with time; while he may have looked like he would be
right at home lounging in a beanbag chair listening to 1970s stadium rock through oversized headphones, he actually preferred so-called adult contemporary artists like Jim Croce, James Taylor, and Billy Joel. Still, even when selecting songs from the mellower side of the Top 40, Jim could make some surprising choices, pulling deep cuts and obscure B-sides rather than the more familiar chart toppers. After listening to Barry Manilow’s 1976 album
This One’s for You
, for example, Jim opted to use “Jump Shout Boogie” for
The Muppet Show
rather than any of the album’s four Top 40 hits.

After Music Hall and a break for lunch, rehearsal and blocking would take up the rest of the day—but Jim was always in and out of the rehearsal room, huddling with the writing team during lunch in the canteen, running over to the editing room to check on the progress of last week’s episode, or in the Muppet workshop consulting on costuming needs. “
[Jim] worked the hardest of anybody,” said Lazer. “He was in the writers’ meetings, he was in the performers’ meetings, in the scenery meetings. He was in every possible meeting, constantly.” By the time the lights went out at Elstree at 7:00
P
.
M
. on Sunday night, the Muppet team had been at work for nine hours. And that, said Juhl, was “
a light day.”

O
n Monday began what the Muppet crew affectionately termed “Band Day,” which started in the morning with the ATV studio musicians—conducted by Jack Parnell, a former big band drummer and bandleader who had served as ATV’s musical director for twenty years—recording the music for that week’s songs. During these sessions, the band would also record several isolated music tracks—just drums or bass or piano or sax—that each puppeteer who performed a musician would be given to listen to on their own. This way Jerry Nelson and Richard Hunt, for example, could familiarize themselves with the bass or the lead guitar solos so they could make their performances that much more convincing. Jim, for one, took great pride in his ability to make Rowlf or Dr. Teeth convincingly play the piano, listening to their performances on the tape deck in his car on his way into Elstree each morning. “
I’m really enjoying it,” he reported. “I haven’t played piano for years.”

Once the band had completed its work, the Muppet performers would gather in the main band room to begin recording their vocals. While all dialogue on the show would be performed live during the taping of the show, the songs would almost always be recorded in advance to ensure the song would sound the same—and the Muppet performers’ voices would remain intact—over multiple takes. Recording sessions could last anywhere from an hour to half a day—but Jim used much of the day to meet with Burns, Juhl, and the rest of the writing team to review scripts and talk through ideas for upcoming episodes.

The Muppet writers each had different strengths and writing styles that would shape both the show and the characters—sometimes through trial and error—as the show progressed from year to year. Writer Don Hinkley had a knack for puns and verbal wordplay—and was, in the minds of many, the funniest guy in the room—while quick-writing Mark London, a veteran of
Laugh-In
, was a workhorse who wrote straight-ahead comedy routines, like the soap opera spoof “Veterinarian’s Hospital.” Head writer Jack Burns understood how to put together a show, though he tended to think of episodes as a series of roughly strung together vignettes, with no underlying story gluing the episode together. Instead, regular routines like “Veterinarian’s Hospital” or “At the Dance,” in which couples waltzed past the camera and told jokes, were mostly just pushed together, giving the shows a rhythm, but no cohesion. That would change in the second season, with the removal of Burns and the promotion of Juhl to head writer. Juhl’s first order of business: “
We phased out that ballroom dancing thing,” said Juhl, “partly because everybody hated to write for it, and everybody hated to perform it … it was boring kind of writing. Pointless one-liners. No character and no motivation of any kind.”

For Juhl, the former Muppet performer, it was character and motivation that mattered more than puns or vaudeville-style jokes—a predilection Jim and the puppeteers appreciated. “
What he always seemed to do best was to watch … us develop our characters and then write along those lines,” said Hunt. In the writing room, however, Jim was adamant that “
these puppets are not just characters up there telling jokes. If you just stand there and tell jokes,” he continued,
“the whole thing will die. The humor only holds if there’s visual interaction between the characters.”