Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (27 page)

Many careers start with a library book, because self-directed learning is the kind that really sticks. More valuable than an MBA—which might indoctrinate you to think in a business-as-usual state of mind—are the cheaper tools available to anyone: library books, an adult education classes, joining a guild, or engaging with a community of other entrepreneurs.

Of course, these things will not protect one against failure. Bill Gates’s first business, Traf-O-Data, failed. Disney’s Laugh-O-Gram Studio declared bankruptcy. Is it risky to go it alone? Yes. But that is the only way you will truly learn. Business school only hedges you against failure by delaying the inevitable. And in the meantime it perniciously indoctrinates you to the common way of doing something. To go “the same direction as everybody else.” There’s a reason business-as-usual is so competitive and cutthroat; there’s a lot of competition in that pool.

HOW TO
INNOVATE FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE

It is the uncommon entrepreneur who can make her own market. Though she may be unready at first, trying and failing is the only way to learn. To be uncommon, avoid being overly influenced by what has come before. Use your influences promiscuously—appreciating what is good about each one. Put many technologies into your toolbox and start finger-painting.

Do not fetishize a technology just because it is new. Use whatever works well. Think toilet scrubbers, not rod scrubbers. Henson would use any tech—any trick would do, even something as simple as a well-placed mirror under a stool in one
Muppet Show
scene, to create an elegant illusion of Kermit sitting on a stool with no puppeteer beneath. In
The Dark Crystal
, Henson had a Lucasfilm artist paint on glass for one backdrop, a trick dating back to the earliest days of cinema. It didn’t matter what the tech was, but it had to work toward making the characters and story feel
alive
. For Henson, that came from performance, something that comes out of a human being in a state halfway between work and play.

Quality is not perfection, as Disney believed. It is not achieving exactly what you envisioned, everyone else be damned. It is not asking people to erase mistakes or to do the work of robots. Quality is asking for one more take, getting everyone to focus and work well together, helping others to co-create and achieve their own personal best.

Pay attention to the emerging technology of your time, because it will become the newest ingredient to your mix. The emerging technology in Henson’s time was television. For many of us, the emerging technology will involve the Internet. You might look at what innovations happened at the time of your birth. Video games? Streaming videos? Texting? Word processors? What technology has fascinated you? How might you combine that tech with something very old?

Be on the lookout for all that is uncopyrighted, or uncopyrightable. Folk tales, well-worn comedy set-ups, and very old literature. What is in the public domain belongs to everyone, especially artists. But when you try to copy your heroes, do it as a tool for self-exploration. Notice the flaws in the copy. They are uniquely yours, and they may not be flaws at all. How might you use them to open up a space for yourself?

Think of innovation not simply as doing something new, but as doing something amazing. Many rush to copyright their work in order to keep up with the Joneses, but this is a small way of thinking. Copyright is merely a legal restatement of the artist’s creed to not copy one another. Think not about how to register your work, but rather how to use the power of innovation to make people trust your name, which is naturally your trademark and no one else’s.

Realistically, file sharing has erased the twentieth century’s copyright goldmine for artists. It is almost as though we are going back to the performance-based economy of vaudeville and dancehall—with DJs, lectures, and appearances meaning more than the songs, words, and recordings that can be duplicated. With the
Billboard
Hot 100 now counting YouTube views in their rankings, it seems that recordable material has a different role in the artist’s ledger than it did before. “Likes” don’t earn you money, but they earn you exposure, which earns you performance gigs. Notice how technology plays into your work, because we cannot help but be affected by it.

The concept of the Internet was born around the time I was, 1980, and I’ve been playing around there since high school, when I made websites and used the message boards of indie rock labels. Going back earlier than that, my dad instilled in me a love of video games and keyboard typing. I could probably
live
online. New technology is great. This book wouldn’t be possible without Twitter and Facebook sending my work viral. But the truth is that my most clutch technology is ten years old—Microsoft Word for XP. Having a flip phone is also critical for my art; it gives me the ability to turn off my connection and
focus
. And I still marvel at the old tech that still works like magic: pen and paper.

Continue to invest in your own R&D, to innovating your art with technology old and new. Henson didn’t wait for a network to fund him; he put his own money into the development of his projects. Innovation costs a lot—not because of technology but because of man-hours. And yet, even if your work doesn’t earn you profit for the time being, its quality is what can earn money down the road—sometimes years later. Karmically, Henson, Disney, and Pixar were rewarded financially for their costly artistic risks. This does not mean a payday is inevitable, but it means it is worth trying. As new technologies are being developed faster than ever, it makes sense to trust that if you make something of quality, it could increase in value. Hollywood insiders thought Henson was crazy to spend so much money on his films, twice as much as Disney was spending at the time.

Now, thanks to DVDs and Blu-ray, we will pay to watch Henson’s most glorious scenes remastered: the pool number with Piggy in
The Great Muppet Caper
—a tribute to 1940s Hollywood, Piggy, in a couture ball gown, underwater, with synchronized swimmers; the crumbling tower in
The Dark Crystal
—filmed once and months of work actually destroyed on camera; and that “Couldn’t We Ride” bike reverie in
Muppets Take Manhattan
—each of these was a one-of-a-kind first, never to be copied. They give Henson’s work a timelessness—his projects can be rewatched many times and continue to earn well beyond their one-time budgets.

As an artist, you probably aren’t thinking of an endgame in which you get to quit art and just enjoy life. And so, the ever-increasing cost of quality should not be depressing to you as long as you can find a way to get money to flow long enough for you to make your quality projects. The worth of your company—the final tally—isn’t your ultimate goal. It’s the ability to keep making great art. The next chapter recommends you hire someone to keep watch on the numbers for you. Because in order to leave a lasting legacy, you don’t want to die with the most money in your account; you want to leave behind pieces of work that feel as alive as you once were.

The work environment for Henson’s projects was one in which artists really
cared
about what they were doing, and the amazement audiences feel correlates directly to the glee felt by Henson and the people who worked with him. Get out of companies that don’t value people and that don’t let them innovate. When you are ready, start your own company that will.