Jim Henson: The Biography (69 page)

At the same time, Jim had in production a number of specials he
was hoping could be incorporated into the second half of
The Jim Henson Hour
. The most important was a celebration of
Sesame Street
, which would be marking its twentieth anniversary in 1989. Jim had been trying for years to produce a
Sesame Street
special—a decade earlier, he had unsuccessfully proposed a behind-the-scenes documentary—but now, with Joan Cooney’s approval, he finally had a one-hour retrospective under way. For Jim, working on the special was a pleasant reminder not only of
Sesame Street
’s growing and lasting impact, but it also gave him an opportunity to reflect on the show that had made the Muppets a household word. Every six months or so, Jim and the Muppet performers still regularly made time—usually about a week each year—to perform their inserts for
Sesame Street
. And they still loved it. “
[It’s] still so much fun to do,” he told Cooney. “The show, from the beginning, was a good idea. It’s been a delightful thing to be a part of for all these twenty years … and I think it will be around in another twenty years. I’ll be sitting in my rocking chair, and I’ll still be doing Ernie.”

He was having just as much fun working and performing on another special, a “
Damon Runyon with dogs” film noir parody called
Dog City
, which had been in development for over a year. With expressive Muppet dogs inspired in part by C. M. Coolidge’s painting
Dogs Playing Poker
, and elaborate, detailed sets,
Dog City
had some of the highest production values of any Muppet production—“
I just love it,” said Jim. So much, in fact, that he took his time directing it, lingering on the Toronto set for more than eighteen days—about twice as long as usual—bumping several other production companies who were waiting for studio time. Whether he was performing
Dog City
’s main villain, or staging elaborate puppet car chases, gun-fights, and billiard games, Jim just didn’t want the fun to stop. “
He was just having such a wonderful time,” said Juhl. “It was the kind of puppetry stuff that nobody had ever done before, and Jim did it.”

J
im spent late 1988 reviewing the first rough edits of
The Witches
, screening it with test audiences in London and Los Angeles, and making careful notes for director Nic Roeg on where he could trim down scenes Jim thought were too frightening. Jim still hadn’t decided
on the ending, however, merely noting in his journal that the film “
need[ed] work”—Dahl would have to wait. He also visited with Industrial Light and Magic, George Lucas’s groundbreaking special effects company, to discuss special effects for
The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever Made
, which he was determined to put into production in 1989. Meanwhile, he was continuing to stitch together a number of installments of
The Jim Henson Hour
, and sent another episode to Tartikoff for review over the Christmas holidays. The new shows, thought Jim, were “
looking good,” and Tartikoff seemed pleased—yet Jim couldn’t get a commitment from NBC on when the series would premiere. Initially, the network had told Jim to prepare for a January 1989 start, but had then delayed the series until March, and then finally decided on April.

It was frustrating, but
“given the extra time,” Jim said later, “we took it”—and spent much of it in a computer lab at Pacific Data Images (PDI) in San Francisco. Jim was still fascinated with the possibilities of computer animation; in the mid-1980s, he had tried to develop a television special on computers with Chris Cerf, and had explored the possibilities of creating a computer-generated Kermit. For several years, then, Jim had been studying ways to develop a kind of virtual puppet, a computer-generated figure that could be manipulated by a performer in real time and interact with live actors and puppets. Now the technology had finally caught up with the idea—and with the help of PDI, Jim had set up a system wherein a waldo, which usually remotely controlled an animatronic figure, was wired instead into a computer to control a low-resolution computer-generated image.

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.

O
n 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 informed 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.