Jim Henson: The Biography (49 page)

To celebrate the success of
The Muppet Movie
, Jim threw a costume party at the new house on Downshire Hill, inviting guests to attend in Elizabethan-era attire. Many of the Muppet crew raided the wardrobe department at ATV for their costumes, and showed up at Downshire Hill to find Jim warmly greeting his guests dressed as a king. Fifteen-year-old Brian Henson, taking a quick trip to London during summer break, came straight to the house from the airport and found the party still in full swing well into the evening. Jet-lagged and groggy, he dutifully pulled on a jester costume Jim had
put aside for him and joined the party. “
We were the best party givers in the world!” crowed Lazer. All that was needed, said Lazer, was “good food and drink,” though it was generally Jim’s presence that ensured the necessary “happy environment.”

W
ork on the fourth season of
The Muppet Show
continued through the summer, until August 6, when ATV’s technicians—always touchy to begin with—suddenly went on strike, following the lead of London’s public sector unions, which had successfully leveraged their own strike for higher pay during the previous winter. Jim and the Muppet team had just begun working on an episode with Andy Williams when “
the electricians broke for tea,” recalled Bonnie Erickson, “and they never came back.” Grade’s television stations went dark. Anyone tuning in to
The Muppet Show
that week saw only an on-screen apology, promising to resume programming “as soon as possible.” Until then, production was indefinitely postponed.

Even as others huffed around him, Jim was unfazed; it was out of his hands, a matter to be resolved by the unions and television company executives. With ATV closed down, Jim left for an extended vacation with his family, spending a week in late August in the British Virgin Islands, before heading with them to the English seaside resort of Blackpool, where the Muppets had been given the honor of turning on the Blackpool Illuminations—a gala known as the Big Switch On—for the spectacle’s one hundredth anniversary. The town had gone all out for Jim, integrating the Muppets into the gigantic light display along Blackpool’s central promenade, and Jim and Goelz performed as Kermit and Gonzo at the opening ceremonies, throwing the switch together to light up the town. Jim loved it.

With the strike still unresolved in September, Jim returned to the United States for a week to attend the Emmy Awards—where
The Muppet Show
lost to
Steve and Eydie Celebrate Irving Berlin
—and to see fifteen-year-old Brian off to the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he planned to study physics and astronomy for his last three years of high school. Brian was fascinated with knowing how things worked, tinkering with gadgets and electronics, and building elaborate Heathkit stereos and televisions. At thirteen,
Brian had even constructed a small mechanical puppet in the Muppet workshop, building a puppet potato with a trigger-activated mouth and eyes. “
[My dad] was very intrigued that I was inclined in that direction,” said Brian. “He was enormously appreciative and loved seeing what I was doing.”

Still awaiting the resolution of the London strike, Jim spent much of the early fall traveling with his family, spending several days in Scotland in late September, a “
delightful weekend” marred only by the theft of Jim’s Nikon camera from the trunk of his typically unlocked car. Several more days were spent in Amsterdam, followed by a road trip to visit Oxford Scientific Films, where Jim spent several hours looking at the magnifying cameras the company used to film tiny subjects, like ant hills, at ground level. “
It would look so otherworldly because you’re looking at the mosses and the ferns and everything right up close,” said Cheryl. “
Neat!” Jim wrote in his journal, hoping to find some use for the technology in
The Crystal
.

On October 24, the strike ended as quickly as it had begun, though Grade’s channels would find their
viewers slow to return after eleven weeks away. Jim immediately returned to Elstree to wrap up work on two unfinished
Muppet Show
episodes, completing both in only four days. On November 2, he headed back to the States, this time stopping in Maryland to receive a Distinguished Alumnus Award from the University of Maryland and to serve as grand marshal in the school’s homecoming parade. Wearing a flowered shirt and paisley tie under a corduroy suit, Jim waved Kermit from the back of a convertible, trawling along in a sea of floats filled with papier-mâché Muppets. While he was becoming known around the world, Jim still blushed at the attention lavished on him in his former backyard,
mumbling only half-audible responses to shouted questions at a press event.

In early November, the Muppet team spent a week in Los Angeles taping a Christmas special with John Denver, to coincide with the release of a Christmas album Denver and the Muppets had recorded in London during the heat of the summer. Denver had guest-starred on
The Muppet Show
in May, where his easygoing, no-drama attitude—his strongest epithet was usually
golly
!—meshed easily with Jim’s own way of performing. Shortly after finishing Denver’s
Muppet Show
episode, Jim called Denver in Aspen to discuss working on a Christmas album together, the two of them tossing ideas back and forth for hours over the phone and deciding which songs to record. After settling on thirteen tunes—ranging from traditional songs like “The Twelve Days of Christmas” to the Beach Boys’ “Little Saint Nick”—Denver recorded the basic tracks at a studio in Los Angeles, then met Jim and the Muppet team in London in late June to record their vocals together. The resulting album,
John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together
, went gold before Christmas 1979, and platinum by early 1980. “
I can honestly say that collaborating with Jim Henson and the entire Muppet Gang in putting this recording together was one of the most enjoyable experiences of my career,” said Denver.

The television special, taped over a relatively leisurely eight days, featured the Muppets at their sentimental best, softening the trademark Muppet madness in favor of the quieter, more deferential tones suitable for a Christmas special. It was the right choice—the show’s finale, with Denver and the Muppets singing “Silent Night” with the children in the studio audience, is genuinely sweet without being saccharine—but to some critics, the Muppets seemed out of character. “
It’s discouraging to see the Muppets succumb with increasing frequency to sentimental impulses overly exercised in
The Muppet Movie
,” wrote Tom Shales in
The Washington Post
, lamenting that the Muppets had gone for “sanctimoniousness, rather than their playful anarchic streak.” Still, Shales had to admit it was “lavish, warm and insanely entertaining,” which was probably good enough for Jim. “
He was easily proud, actually,” said Brian Henson. “He didn’t look at things that he’d finished and grimace. He enjoyed what he made.… I mean, he
knew
he was good.”

In mid-December—after spending Thanksgiving shooting inserts for
Sesame Street
, riding in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and presiding over the annual Christmas party—Jim returned to London to spend the holidays with the entire Henson family in the house on Downshire Hill. After the long and somewhat frantic year, Jim was pleasantly relaxed, chatting casually on the phone with Brillstein—who delivered the welcome news that he had placed
Emmet Otter
with ABC for Christmas 1980—and strolling Hampstead
Heath, where he would sometimes sprawl out on Don Sahlin’s bench, looking out over Parliament Hill in the brisk cold. For the members of the Muppet team spending their Christmas in London, Jim hosted a formal dinner party at the White Elephant on the River, pulling up at the curb in his Lotus, grinning broadly as he entered the club.

Christmas Day in London was sparklingly clear and cold—“
lovely,” wrote Jim in his journal in typical understatement—and as 1979 came to a close, Jim jotted down several notes in his journal, as if to remind himself of just what a successful year it had been. “
The Muppet Movie
has grossed around 75 million—I
think
,” he wrote, slightly hedging his bets (the real number was closer to $65 million). “
The Muppet Movie
album with Atlantic went gold just before Christmas.
John Denver and the Muppets
album has sold over a million—according to John. The Miss Piggy Calendar is out this year.
The Muppet Show
Music Album just came out in England this December.
The Muppet Movie
book is out.”

Meanwhile, he still had
The Crystal
in its early stages, and had even started talking with Lord Grade about a sequel to
The Muppet Movie
. It truly had been—as he at last wrote in his journal without a whiff of understatement—“
a very major big year.”

Kira, one of the heroes of 1928’s
The Dark Crystal,
with a villainous Skeksis
. (
photo credit 11.1
)

W
ITH THE WORLDWIDE POPULARITY OF BOTH
T
HE
M
UPPET
S
HOW
and now
The Muppet Movie
, Jim had, it seemed, conclusively put to rest the puppetry prejudice that had plagued him since
Sesame Street
. If there were still critics clinging to the stifling misperception that puppets were purely kids’ entertainment, Jim had a universally acclaimed major motion picture, an Emmy, and 235 million weekly television viewers who would likely help him argue otherwise. But the international success of the Muppets on television and the movie screen had created a different kind of perception problem for Jim. True, he was no longer considered a children’s performer; instead, to the entire world, he was now “the Muppet Guy.”

It was a label Jim had struggled with before. In the late 1960s, as Jim was branching out into various non-Muppet-related projects—television specials, commercials, documentaries, computer graphics—he had deliberately sought to downplay the prominence of the Muppets in the company, even changing the name over the door from Muppets, Inc. to Henson Associates.
“Back in the sixties—when I was working on movies like
Time Piece
—I thought of myself as an experimental filmmaker,” Jim said—and to some extent, that was still true. While the Muppets were certainly the most well known, and most profitable, of Jim’s projects, Jim never had, and never would, consider himself to be solely about the Muppets.

“When you try to get people in the industry to accept a big idea, it usually takes a long time—months or years,” said Jim, who had devoted more than a decade to the task of bringing the Muppets to television and film. “And when they finally say, ‘yes—let’s go with it,’ part of my creative mind is already somewhere else, doing something quite different. I think that’s the normal pattern. By the time I’m actually producing something, part of me is wanting to do something else. I don’t particularly want to make my life go crazy doing several things at the same time, but it always seems to happen that way.”

That “something else” was
The Crystal
, still in its preliminary stages at the Muppet workshop in New York in 1980—but even before deciding on
The Crystal
as his next project, Jim had wanted to make a non-Muppet fantasy film for a long time. In the early 1970s, in fact, he had briefly flirted with the idea of doing an adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings
series, but eventually passed on the project after deciding Tolkien’s sweeping epic was “
too big to handle” in a single film.

In 1975, while paging through a copy of
The Pig-Tale
—an illustrated version of the poem by Lewis Carroll, with lavish drawings by Leonard Lubin—Jim had been struck by one of Lubin’s illustrations of a crocodile in sumptuous Victorian attire. “
It was the juxtaposition of this reptilian thing in this fine atmosphere that intrigued me,” Jim said later—and with that spark of an idea, he began writing a treatment for a fantasy film called
Mithra
, a dry run of the various plot elements that would eventually coalesce as
The Dark Crystal
.
Even in this early treatment, Jim was already certain he wanted the two warring factions—the villainous Reptus and the wizardlike Bada—to have split from a single species, through the influence of a mystical source of power, “
perhaps a lodestone,” Jim wrote tenuously.