Jim Henson: The Biography (43 page)

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.

O
n 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.

As a result, when Jim arrived back in London that May,
The Muppet Show
was already being watched weekly by
15 million faithful Britons. Fan mail poured into the Muppet Suite at Elstree, burying Jim’s desk until his return.
The Muppet Show Album
, scarcely a month old, was speeding up British music charts, and would knock
The Beatles Live at the Hollywood Bowl
from the number one spot by summer (meanwhile, back in the United States, the album would never even crack the Top 100, reaching only 153). And like the Beatles whom he had displaced on the music charts, Jim suddenly found himself—and the Muppets—in the middle of a fan and media frenzy that surprised even him. “
It’s like they’re creating this ‘Muppetmania’ thing,” Jim said with just a hint of exasperation. But what did he expect? “
The show was a big smash hit,” said Jerry Nelson plainly. The first week back at Elstree, the shuttle bus Jim used to ferry the Muppet team around the area—emblazoned with
The Muppet Show
logo on the sides—was mobbed by fans at a traffic light. In Parliament, several members of the House of Commons would “
rendezvous secretly” each Monday morning “to discuss the weekend show.”
It was even reported in the
Daily Express
that the entire staff of the Russian embassy in London would gather around the embassy’s lone TV to watch the show, peering in on Kermit and the Muppets at a time when most Western television shows were prohibited in the Soviet Union.

“
It’s fantastic the way the Muppets have really taken off,” Jim told the
Daily Mirror
—but British journalists were just as interested in the Muppet performers, profiling Jim and “the Muppet Men” as if they were pop stars. Jim was demure about his own celebrity. “
I don’t think or talk about superstars,” he told one journalist. “A lot of the credit for the Muppets must go to Lew Grade for putting money and faith in us.” But once the subject of money had been broached, Jim was typically reluctant to discuss numbers, and parried efforts to speculate on how much he and the Muppets might be worth. “
Really, money doesn’t concern me at all. I’m only worried about getting each show right.”

Regardless of Jim’s deflection on the matter, it wasn’t just the show that was successful; Muppet-related merchandise was booming in the U.K. as well—during the first four years of the show, British merchandising alone would take in more than
$25 million. As was his habit with any Muppet-related
Sesame Street
merchandise, Jim took it upon himself to act as his own quality control, personally authorizing the licenses for any Muppet products himself, signing off on puzzles, jack-in-the-boxes, and T-shirts, but rejecting other products with artwork or materials he considered “
shabby.” “
I feel I owe it to the many people who think of the Muppets as personal friends to keep the standards high,” Jim explained. “The most common comment people make [is] that Kermit … and all the other Muppets seem to be real people. That is very gratifying to me, but it also means I have a big responsibility.… After all, they’ve become real people to me, too, and I like them too much to let anyone take advantage of them.”

The huge success of the show also made the job of landing guest stars that much easier. By the second season, said Jerry Juhl, “
there were times when the stars would call
us
. It was the thing to do.” Letters from agents and publicists flooded into Lazer’s suite at Elstree or Brillstein’s office in California, every one offering their client as an ideal guest, and assuring Jim that their client “adored” the Muppets. Some of these appeals were successful; Brillstein booked Kenny Rogers as a guest during
The Muppet Show
’s fourth season after receiving an imploring telegram. There were also intriguing offers from nontraditional entertainers like the opera singer Régine Crespin,
who wanted to be on the program (“
I love that show!” she gushed) and the humor writer Erma Bombeck. And each week, Jim and Lazer would make lengthy—and expensive—long-distance phone calls to Brillstein to gauge the agent’s reaction to the countless letters and telegrams and postcards. “
Bernie was a rock, an anchor for show business for us,” said Lazer. “He kept us real. We were in London and he would [tell us] what’s entertaining now, what the networks want.”

Jim also wrote down his own list of dream guests—and urged the Muppet writers and performers to do the same—filling pages and pages of his yellow notepads with columns of names. On one page, Jim put together a list of puppeteers and personal influences he wanted on the show, including two—Señor Wences and Edgar Bergen—that he eventually got, as well as some tantalizing possibilities in those he didn’t, such as Bil Baird, Shari Lewis, Burr Tillstrom, and Stan Freberg. On another sheet, Jim took great care to note potential female guest stars, drawing up a long and somewhat quirky list that included Mae West, Mia Farrow, Princess Anne, Kim Novak, and Katharine Hepburn. At the bottom of the page, written in giggling afterthought, Jim had added Liberace’s name to the list. As it turns out, it was one of the few names on this particular wish list he actually booked, with the pianist appearing during
The Muppet Show
’s third season. “Everybody had only the nicest things to say about him,” Jim wrote of Liberace in his diary, though he confessed he was shocked to learn what a “surprisingly bad pianist” he was.

The dream lineup assembled by the Muppet performers and writing staff was no less quirky, though slightly hipper than Jim’s somewhat stodgy list. The performers asked for interesting, slightly dangerous actors, artists, and musicians to work with, putting Dustin Hoffman, David Bowie, Salvador Dalí, Michael Caine, and Robert DeNiro near the top of their list. The writers, meanwhile, aimed even more adventurously, proposing Frank Zappa, Meryl Streep, the entire Monty Python troupe, and staggeringly, a reunited Beatles. Lazer, in fact, was convinced the Beatles could be persuaded if their schedules could be accommodated—and with Jim’s encouragement, he made a serious though unsuccessful run at each member of the Fab Four, nearly securing Ringo Starr and getting at least a
passing interest from Paul McCartney, who was, his representatives promised Lazer, “
a great fan of t
he show.”