Jim Henson: The Biography (55 page)

One of the film’s biggest fans was Joe Raposo, Jim’s songwriter of choice for the film, whose love song “The First Time It Happens,” would be nominated for an Academy Award. In the opening minutes of
The Great Muppet Caper
, Jim had chosen to give Raposo a prominent on-screen credit, with “Music and Lyrics by Joe Raposo” appearing by itself immediately following the film’s title card—and Raposo, who knew nothing of the credit until watching the movie in a theater—was nearly moved to tears by the gesture.

J
im completed primary filming on
The Dark Crystal
in early September 1981, marking the occasion with a party for the movie’s first unit at Stringfellow’s nightclub in London. For the rest of the autumn he would continue to oversee filming by Kurtz and the second unit on various locations around England before hunkering down for the winter with film editor Ralph Kemplen to assemble the final film. With
Crystal
winding down and heading into postproduction, Jim was ready to turn his attention to other projects—mainly
Fraggle Rock
—but he wasn’t the only one who was preparing for a change.

After six years at Jim’s side, David Lazer informed Jim that he had decided to take an extended leave of absence. Lazer had battled with various aches and pains since childhood—the symptoms resembled Lyme disease—and now, at age forty-three, he was suffering
from nearly debilitating arthritis, which had worsened over the last six years of almost nonstop work. Now he wanted to retire to Long Island to recover his health and oversee the construction of a house—and while he would retain his title as executive vice president and promised to continue to assist Jim as a producer for future films, he was removing himself from both the day-to-day operations of the company and television production. Jim took Lazer to a small dinner in London with Brian and Wendy Froud, then put him on a flight for New York the week before wrapping
Dark Crystal
, allowing Lazer to depart quietly, with little fuss or fanfare, just as he had asked—or so Lazer thought. Three months later, on the day after Christmas, Jim and Brian pulled up in front of Lazer’s house in a brand-new $35,000 limited edition black Mercedes coupé. Jim and Brian stepped out of the car, which they’d driven shoeless so as not to scuff or muddy up the car’s floor mats, and handed Lazer the keys. “
[Jim] was just like a little kid, beaming,” said Lazer.

As Lazer’s replacement, Jim brought back Diana Birkenfield, his producer from the late 1960s and early 1970s who had often rattled him with her frank appraisals of projects. Despite Birkenfield departing under a cloud in 1974, there were no doubts that the renewed professional relationship would work. “
Yeah, she was absolutely no bullshit,” said Oz, “but she was also very good at her job. For Jim, that was really all that mattered.” With Birkenfield in place, Jim could now focus on
Fraggle Rock
, a project that was falling into place with a cheerful efficiency entirely in tune with
Fraggle
’s colorful optimism.

Jim had Brillstein making the rounds among television networks with the comprehensive
Fraggle Rock
proposal, and was so confident the series would sell that he had put the show into preproduction in Toronto without a firm deal in place. Part of the preproduction process involved finding the right performers for each of
Fraggle
’s five main characters, which had been built according to Frith’s designs and now sat on workshop tables in New York. In early November, Jim called in all the major Muppet puppeteers and asked them to perform with each Fraggle—and with each other—to see if they could come up with characters. Such freewheeling play had helped define and hone the characters on
The Muppet Show
, and Jim
wanted to see how his performers ad-libbed and bounced off of each other. Partly, it had to do with finding the right chemistry between the five main characters, consisting of four distinctive character types—the athlete, the artist, the worrywart, and the indecisive one—revolving around a steady central character. It was the
Pogo
formula all over again, an approach that Jim’s fellow
Pogo
fans Frith and Juhl said was intentional.
“We said, ‘All right, we’re going to have five characters … each of whom is a different wedge of the pie,’ ” said Frith. “But when you put them all together, you get the
whole
pie.”

More important, for the first time Jim would not be performing any of the show’s central characters; with Jim out of the eye of the Muppet hurricane, then, getting the chemistry right was critical. Frith, an admirer of Jerry Nelson and in awe of his singing voice, had always intended for Nelson to serve as the show’s anchor in the lead role of Gobo—the role to which he was eventually assigned—but Jim still wanted each performer trying out different characters in case sparks flew among an unexpected combination of puppeteers. Karen Prell, for example, who came into the casting call hoping to land the role of the introspective poet Mokey, found herself assigned instead to the outgoing athlete Red. “
But I really have to thank Jim for wanting to try me as Red,” said Prell, “because it was obviously the perfect thing to bring out a lot of crazy Red stuff in myself that I guess he could see.” Dave Goelz, who was given the role of the fretful Boober, was convinced that Jim and the
Fraggle
writers had known all along which performer would play what role, and merely wanted to confirm their instincts through the auditions. “
I think we went through the motions of playing around with the puppets in New York before we went to Toronto to shoot,” related Goelz. However, Steve Whitmire, who was handed the amiable but indecisive Wembley, wasn’t so sure. “
I really pushed to do that character [Wembley], but we did ad-lib sort of improvisations.… I’m not sure how that ended up happening the way it did. I think it happened the best way that it could have happened.”

In the middle of casting, Brillstein informed Jim that he had found a home for
Fraggle Rock
—but not with one of the major networks. Instead, Brillstein had placed the series with the subscriber
cable channel HBO, which opted to co-produce the show along with Henson Associates, the British television company Television South, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. With only nine million subscribers, HBO’s viewership was still small—Jim didn’t even have cable, much less HBO, at his home in Bedford—but HBO was aggressively working to expand its subscriber base and promised creative freedom and a high profile for the Fraggles, intending for
Fraggle Rock
to be its first original weekly series—the colorful ancestor to later original series like
The Larry Sanders Show
and
The Sopranos
.

HBO was also hoping to have the series ready for broadcast in early 1983. Since each season would contain twenty-four episodes—and Jim intended for the team to keep to the one-episode-per-week pace they had maintained for
The Muppet Show
—that meant Jim had to begin shooting as quickly as possible. In preparation, the
Fraggle Rock
performers were sent to Toronto to spend several weeks rehearsing and improvising their characters, “
just kind of finding out who they were,” said Kathy Mullen, who was assigned the role of Mokey.

Jim, meanwhile, returned to a cold and snowy London to oversee work on
The Dark Crystal
, spending several days in January 1982 at Abbey Road Studios with composer Trevor Jones as the London Symphony Orchestra recorded the film’s music. Like the puppets in
Dark Crystal
, the music, too, was a fusion of the traditional and the technological, and Jones had brought several unconventional instruments into the session that seemed to embody this approach, carting in a synthesizer and a ninteenth-century double flageolet, a woodwind instrument that produced a droning, otherworldly sound. “
I like to think [that what] my music did is bridge the gap between the world that wasn’t real and the audience, giving a sense of a real world to something that is totally unreal,” said Jones later. “In that process the hardest thing to do was trying to enter the mind of Jim and think of the things he wanted for his film.” As so many others had come to understand, Jones could see that Jim saw—and heard—the entire movie in his head. “He knew how great the score would be,” said Jones, “he just wanted me to discover it for myself.”

Things were far less harmonious outside Abbey Road Studios,
however. That January, Lord Grade had found himself suddenly, almost inexplicably, driven out as the head of his own organization, now broadly known as the Associated Communications Corporation, or ACC. The culprit was a soft-spoken but ruthless Australian entrepreneur named Robert Holmes à Court, a corporate raider who acquired real estate, oil and gas producers, and television and film studios as casually as other businessmen collected cuff links. Over the past eighteen months, Holmes à Court had vacuumed up non-voting shares in Grade’s ACC, then worked his way onto Grade’s board, where he stealthily acquired more stock. By January 1982, he finally had enough leverage to force Grade from his own company. “
It was a clash of an old-style film mogul-entrepreneur with our more disciplined management style,” said Holmes à Court.

That sort of management style was bound to grate on Jim, who still preferred doing business with a handshake over a good meal. “
Holmes à Court was a cold, carpetbagger businessman,” said Oz. “He’s just money and power, that’s all. And to Lew, that’s not what it was about. Jim was like Lew. Their spirits were together.” But with Grade out, Jim was forced to deal with Holmes à Court as his new overlord at ACC—and on January 17, Jim and Holmes à Court met at ACC’s Great Cumberland Place headquarters near Hyde Park, mostly just so the two of them could size each other up. Jim likely left with a bad taste in his mouth. To Holmes à Court, who knew little or nothing about filmmaking, Jim and his projects were merely lines in an accounting ledger, assets to be traded and sold when they were no longer of interest. Jim was determined to get
Dark Crystal
away from him
as quickly as possible.

It was far cheerier back in Toronto, where Jim arrived in early March to oversee the beginning of production on
Fraggle Rock
. Jim would direct seven episodes of
Fraggle
during its first season and occasionally perform several recurring characters—but once the show was up and running, he was content to turn the show almost entirely over to the
Fraggle
team. “
Fraggle Rock
is the first show that I personally didn’t have to be involved with every day,” Jim said later. “A group split off to do that, and it’s worked out very nicely.” “
He just let it be what it was,” said Steve Whitmire.

By letting go, Jim was growing and nurturing the talent within his company—and he was impressed with the work that was being
done on
Fraggle Rock
. While Jim had checked over Frith’s designs during the show’s development, he’d stepped back from trying to influence the overall look or feel, giving Frith a free hand to create a universe in much the same way he’d encouraged Froud to determine much of the look of
The
Dark Crystal
. “
I think of myself as fairly limited as a designer. Michael is much better than I am,” Jim said generously, “and he has been just right for
Fraggle Rock
.”

He also loved the technology that was being integrated seamlessly into the Fraggle world, from the tiny, radio-controlled Doozers and their equipment that rolled and rumbled across the set, to the gigantic, walkaround Gorgs with their remote-controlled mouths. “
Jim was a huge gadget fan,” said Brian Henson. “He just loved them. When the first Sony Walkman came out, he had to go out and buy one straight away. He loved the magical properties of technology.” The Gorgs in particular were another leap in puppetry, using the lessons—and technologies—from the
Dark Crystal
experience to allow the puppeteers a much more fluid motion for their performance. “
Dark Crystal
was a $25 million R&D project for
Fraggle Rock
,” said Michael Frith, “because all that stuff that we invented for
Dark Crystal
I rolled right into
Fraggle Rock
.”

While the Gorgs appeared to be simple walkaround Muppets like Big Bird, there were actually two performers at work: one inside the full-body costume, and a second sitting just off-camera performing the mouth and eyes using a radio-controlled device called a
waldo
. The waldo resembled a high-tech oven mitt—and once Richard Hunt had his hand inside of it, he could bring his thumb and fingers together to remotely open and close the mouth of Junior Gorg ten feet away. Since the performer inside the costume didn’t have to work the puppet’s mouth, both arms were freed up, making the puppet’s movements even more lifelike. “
Neat,” said Jim appreciatively.

On the occasions when Jim did come in to perform or direct, said Steve Whitmire, “
it was very special.” Jim loved playing the two characters writers Jerry Juhl and Jocelyn Stevenson had created for him—most likely because each channeled a very specific part of Jim’s own personality. Like
The Dark Crystal
’s UrSkeks, magically cleft into two disparate beings, Jim could well have been split into his two
Fraggle Rock
characters: the soft-spoken sage Cantus—who dispensed
wisdom in enigmatic, Zen-like nuggets (“There are no rules … and those are the rules”)—and the energetic, persuasive Convincing John, who could talk the Fraggles into doing
anything
. Cantus in particular became one of Jim’s favorite characters to perform. “
[Cantus] was great,” said Stevenson, “because he was goofy and wise at the same time, kind of like Jim was in real life.”

Apart from its noble theme of global community, what truly aimed
Fraggle Rock
directly at the international market was its framing sequence, or the “home base,” as Jim called it—the real-world workshop occupied by Doc and his dog, Sprocket, with the small door that opened onto the Fraggles’ world. “
The idea,” said Jim, “was that we would do this home-base segment in different countries, replacing the Doc character with one developed especially for whichever country we were in,” and then edit these locally produced sequences back into the master show. In France, then, the Fraggle hole would be in a former bakery overseen by a chef and his dog Croquette, while in England the Fraggles existed in a lighthouse presided over by a crusty sailor known as the Captain.