Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (29 page)

While art and tech have a nice way of feeding
off each other, there are so many ways that art and money can come into
conflict.
Businesspeople often fail to understand how art works. Henson’s agent, Bernie
Brillstein, once tried to convince him to do a remake of
Gigi
with the
puppeteer as the romantic lead. Henson wasn’t interested. Later, Brillstein successfully
convinced Henson to make the cheaper-looking-than-usual
Muppet Babies
series in order to get exposure. There were times when Henson had to say “no”
to his businesspeople, and because of the way he built his company, he could.

On the other hand, we can understand
why
businesspeople have problems with artists: art leeches money. Financing high-budget
films may have led Lew Grade to lose his media empire. Art requires a large
investment in money that may not be repaid—essentially a gift. Any business
professional will tell you that doesn’t make business sense. There are many
ways the relationship between art and business can go very wrong. It’s only
natural, since each has its own ends, yet when art and money can work
together
,
they tend to create the greatest art the world has ever seen.

The primary reason Henson, Disney, and Pixar were
able to achieve symbiosis with their business departments rested in
who
those businesspeople were. Walt Disney’s brother Roy, Pixar’s majority investor
Steve Jobs, and Henson’s business guys—agent Bernie Brillstein, lawyer Al
Gottesman, manager David Lazer, and producer Lew Grade—all had a
personal
connection to the artist and all valued the art as the thing that made the
money possible. More than that, these uncommon businessmen were able to function—in
a way—as a barrier, keeping art and money separate.

Walt Disney found the keeper to his
purse-strings in his own family—his brother Roy, whom Gabler called “his
guardian angel.”
^[14]
This fraternal connection turned out to be crucial to the success of the
business, because Walt could more easily fend off Roy than a typical manager.
Gabler explains:

Dave Hand recalled a meeting where Roy complained, as
he often did, that the pictures were costing too much. “There was complete
silence,” Hand related. “Then Walt’s loose eyebrow shot up at an unusually
sharp angle, and turning to Roy in an uncompromising matter-of-fact
straight-from-the-shoulder answer, said quite simply, ‘Roy,
we’ll
make
the pictures,
you
get the money.’ That was that.”
^[15]

For Henson, finding the right business guy started with a
friend.

YOUR AGENT WORKS FOR YOU
BUT YOU ALSO WORK FOR YOUR
AGENT

In 1960, Jim Henson attended the Puppeteers of America
Festival and met television puppeteer Burr Tillstrom of
Kukla, Fran, and
Ollie
.
^[16]
Tillstrom’s agent was a young man named Bernie Brillstein at William Morris,
and Henson had no agent. To help out a friend, Tillstrom begged Brillstein to
meet Henson. In Brillstein’s words, “He said please, for me, do me a favor, get
him off my back.”
^[17]
Serendipitously, three things came together to secure Henson’s agent—his
friend’s endorsement, a mystical connection, and a stroke of luck, as
Brillstein recalled:

“You’ll like him,” said Tillstrom. “He’s funny. See
him.”

I didn’t want to, but I said okay.

When the friend showed up, I couldn’t believe my
eyes. In walked this guy who looked like a cross between Abe Lincoln and Jesus:
six three, hippie arts-and-crafts leather suit… He’d brought a big box of
puppets. When he put them on his hands, it was magic… For some mysterious
reason, although I’d never met anyone like Jim before, when Jim performed I
understood
it. I got it. Instinct told me what to do.

After Jim left, my boss [at William Morris] called
and said, “Bernie, have you ever heard of Jim Henson and the Muppets? Someone
wants to book him into Radio City Music Hall.”

“Heard of him? I said. “I just signed him!”

We were together thirty years, until he died.
^[18]

One gets the sense that it was fate, and yet I’ve
never heard that Henson actually performed at Radio City Music Hall that year.
It’s more likely that Henson himself arranged for William Morris to get a call
about him on the same day he auditioned—maybe saying they were already his
agency, or maybe getting a friend to call as a publicity stunt. Whatever the
case, Henson got to Brillstein, through enough friends that it appeared he was
everywhere.

But more importantly, Henson’s
work
got
to Brillstein. Laughter is a magical thing. According to Brillstein, “Jim
appealed to my perverse sense of humor.”
^[19]
Henson and Brillstein didn’t see the world the same way: “I don’t think we ever
completely understood, in our guts, what the other did,”
^[20]
Brillstein said. Though Brillstein didn’t “understand” how the artist worked,
he “understood” the art, “for some mysterious reason.” The relationship between
an agent and an artist is a very strange one—and that is the nature of the job.

Although Brillstein worked hard for Jim Henson,
he was not a Henson employee. To be technically accurate, Jim Henson was Brillstein’s
client. In practice what this means is that both of them worked for each other.
Either one of them could fire the other. The best comparison might be to
business partners or husband and wife. Henson was already familiar with this kind
of relationship because he and his wife, Jane, incorporated a business
partnership in 1958.
^[21]

Before finding an agent, Henson had already been
doing
Sam & Friends
, commercials, and television appearances. Then
in 1964, he moved his family to New York City and signed Brillstein as his
manager.
^[22]
It is telling that Brillstein’s business logo when he started his own company
was a turtle
^[23]
—Henson
was known for his long patience, and any businessman who worked with him
probably had to have an even longer patience. Henson paid homage to Brillstein
on-screen—he named the agent played by Dom DeLuise in
The Muppet Movie
Bernie, and any time Piggy calls her agent and gives him a mouthful, it’s also
Bernie.

Agents typically take 15 percent of an artist’s
deals. That may seem like a lot for someone who doesn’t perform or share in any
of the work—an agent’s work tends to reside in phone calls. So why did Henson need
a 15-percent man when he was clearly so good at networking himself? Brillstein
did indeed get Henson more commercials and appearances, including a weekly gig
for Rowlf on
The Jimmy Dean Show
that significantly increased his national
exposure. But Brillstein’s value went beyond the actual jobs he was able to get
Henson. More philosophically, an agent is someone who makes money
when you
make money
. In effect, an agent makes you make money. If you don’t, your
agent leaves you. The nature of the relationship is such that, in many cases, a
person with an agent will earn more than a person without one. He has two
people looking out for his financial health.

In business, the client is always right, but if
agent and artist work for each other, who has final say? When it came to what
work Henson would do, it was Henson who had the veto power. Brillstein tried to convince Henson to do many things that
he refused. According to Brillstein:

When we were first together, I’d get offers of fifty
or sixty grand for him to do a commercial. Jim needed the money, so I’d say,
“Let’s do it to pay the overhead.” Sometimes he’d agree, but usually he’d pass.
“Not this one,” he’d say. “Because they want to own the character.”
^[24]

Of course, Henson was not a despot. He could be reasoned
with. As Brillstein explains, it was often more of a dialogue, as when Jim and
Jane debated his idea to merchandize:

I completely understood their hesitation, but as
Jim’s manager I was paid to have my own long-term vision. Fortunately, Jim was
not the kind to act stubborn and say, “I just won’t do it.” If I had a
counterargument, he always listened and considered it fairly.
^[25]

Perhaps the nature of the agent-artist relationship makes
open dialog like this more likely. As in a marriage, either party may walk away
at any point. If either side can leave, both sides can have a say. But this
marriage of equality requires the artist to put his foot down more than he may
like. There is a reason that 85 percent of profits go to the artist, and that
is because an artist can make art without an agent, but an agent needs an
artist to make money. There are times when an artist needs to just say no.

The agent is a gentle reminder to make more
money, but not from a boss, and not at all costs. The relationship between
Brillstein and Henson was in many ways like the relationship between Roy and
Walt Disney. Both Roy and Brillstein looked out for their artists in a paternal
way—letting the artist have his way more often than not, but quietly steering him
to financial solvency.

Sesame Street
profiler Michael Davis said:

I know they weren’t separated by age in that many
years, but [Brillstein] took on a more paternal role with Jim as his son, and I
really do think that Jim’s death was not unlike when a parent loses a child.”
^[26]

Neal Gabler notes a similar paternalism in Roy Disney:

He admitted that he was afraid that without his
protection, his “fervent protection,” Walt would have been taken advantage of.
^[27]

In fact, Walt had been. When he got a contract
to make Laugh-O-Grams, he asked for “thirty cents a foot,”
^[28]
which was at-cost, meaning he worked for free. His business strategy, Gabler wrote,
“was excellence,” not money. Gabler often notes Walt Disney’s “disdain,”
^[29]
as he called it, for money:

“If you want to know the real secret of Walt’s
success,” longtime animator Ward Kimball would say, “it’s that he never tried to
make money. He was always trying to make something that he could have fun with to
be proud of.”
^[30]

This led to great art, but it didn’t
always
lead to staying in business, and so it was important to the Disney studios that
someone
be good with money. Snow White needed her prince to come and
save her, and so did Disney. Time and time again, Roy got Walt the money he
needed to make his masterpieces.

Yet Roy knew that his brother’s talent was
something special, something he did not have himself. For that reason, he
became his brother’s keeper. Similarly, Brillstein wrote:

I called Jim Henson and his band of puppeteers “the
arts and crafts set.” They wanted as little as possible to do with the
money-first, deal-making, soul-killing aspects of show business that I
confronted every day. Jim didn’t want to ignore reality, he just didn’t want
any contact with the parts that were pollutants and alien to his company’s
creativity. It was better, Jim believed, to live in a fantastic world of
creatures and characters that tried to speak to the humanity in us all through
magical performances. He was a hippie. That’s why he had me.
^[31]

The “moonbeam” aspect of Henson was precisely why Brillstein
needed
Henson, because his art was what people lined up to pay for. And
so it became important to a show-businessman like Brillstein that he
not
kill
the innocence of his client. In a sense, the agent is ambidextrous—he
can be tough as nails when talking to a TV executive, but he must be soft as
lace when dealing with the artist. The business partner must truly value the
art. He must trust that your hippie attitude is what makes you profitable to
him. You can’t have a business partner who doesn’t see your value.

Brillstein saw Henson’s value, though in some
ways it baffled him. He wrote,

If you could pick the most illogical pairing the
world, it would have been Jim Henson and me.… Our bond was the unspoken
certainty that we belonged together. We were who we were and it just worked.
^[32]

It is a delicate, almost familial relationship.
In a sense, the more fraternal the relationship, the more it allows the artist—arguably
the more delicate of the brothers—to have sway. “You never win with bankers,”
Walt said once of his lenders at Bank of America.
^[33]
On the other hand, when Walt was able to get around Roy’s austerities, he bragged,
“I beat Roy in this one.”
^[34]
Having Roy as an intermediary between himself and the bankers was crucial.
Disney could win with Roy. But without Roy, it’s an uneven fight—in the end, you
never win against bankers.

In his early days in Kansas City, Disney borrowed
heavily from friends and neighbors, declaring bankruptcy in his early twenties.
This is not so with Henson, who drove a Rolls Royce to his college graduation. Henson
came to his projects with his own money pile from his advertising work, whereas
Disney was constantly borrowing, first from family, and then from banks. Yet
while Henson didn’t have as much “disdain” for money, he still remained above
it. A 1990 article explains that he did pick a side:

Like other artists who
have become hugely successful entrepreneurs, Henson
had a decision to make: Was he a businessman or a creator? Despite media
interests all over the globe, he leaned toward the creative, remaining fascinated with little cloth
creatures and what they could do. If I spoke business with him, he was friendly
but matter-of-fact. On the subject of puppets, his voice lit up, with Kermit’s
looping tones detectable somewhere beneath the enthusiasm.
^[35]