Memoirs of a Muppets Writer: (You mean somebody actually writes that stuff?) (19 page)

Bob Hope

In an interview after he performed on
The Muppet Show
, Bob Hope said the success of the show was due, in a large part, to the talent of the writing staff. So, he’s okay in my book.

Madeline Kahn

Madeline Kahn was one of those very rare beautiful women who was blessed with a sense of humor and had absolutely no inhibitions about exercising it. It was easy to see why Mel Brooks loved using her in his films.

The night Madeline finished her Muppet appearance, Jerry Nelson had a small party in his flat. In a pensive moment, Madeline said that sometimes in life she wished she were like a New York taxi cab and had a sign on her head that said,
Off Duty.
“You know, as in, ‘Don’t ask me. I’m off duty.”

That reminded me of my days working for the R.A.I. There, the popular expression then was, Non
lo so,
Italian for,
I don’t know.
At R.A.I., if you answered a question like, “Where’s the camera?”, “Where are we shooting tomorrow?”, or “Do we have any film?”, with Non
lo so,
you were summarily relieved of any further responsibility in the matter.

A few days after Jerry’s party, Dave Goelz presented each of the guests with a T-shirt emblazoned with,
Off Duty
in large block letters. One was also sent to Madeline.

The shirt became an instant hit. For about a week the entire staff of
The Muppet Show
was
Off Duty.
When I returned to New York for a visit, my wife immediately confiscated my shirt. Then, alas, she started wearing it to bed.

GEORGE BURNS

The grand old man of the second season of
The Muppet Show
was George Burns, one of the most gracious and charming men I ever met.

The year before, 1976, he had just had a big hit with the movie, Oh,
God!
One of the younger staff members asked him if that was his first movie.

Oh, no.”, he responded. “Gracie and I made a bunch of films back in the 30s. Which just goes to show you, kid, you do something well and they ask you to come back.”

George also revealed the secret of his acting success. “The director says, ‘Stand up.’, I stand up. If he says, ‘Sit down.’, I sit down. That’s acting.”

“But the most important thing about acting is sincerity”, he told me. “If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

Judy Collins

Judy Collins trained as a concert pianist. During an interview, she revealed that when she practiced, she would prop a book up on the piano’s music stand and read it while she ran her exercise scales! I’ve been playing piano on and off for sixty years. If I practice another 60 years, I’ll never be able to do that.

Peter Sellers

If you can believe it, Peter Sellers claimed he wasn’t funny. He said he was an actor and if there was something funny in the script he could make it work. He said his great fear at parties was that someone would ask him to be funny - this from the man who invented Inspector Clouseau.

It was during Muppet Show rehearsals that Peter Sellers made his famous remark. When told he had to use his own personality in a Kermit interview piece, he responded, “I once owned a personality. But I had it surgically removed.”

I was fortunate enough to write a bit for Peter Sellers and Jim Henson. I’ve often described writing for the Muppets as loading the blunderbuss and pointing them in the general direction of the barn door. They may not always hit it where you expected. But they never missed.

The broad idea of the bit was very simple. A full-bodied Link Hogthrob (Captain of the Swinetrek), would be lying on a massage table. Jim would be under the table with his hand up through it to operate Link’s head. The arms and legs would be stuffed like a rag doll.

Peter Sellers is a masseuse. He comes in to give Link a massage and in the course of it bends Link’s arms and legs into impossibly painful positions while Link reacts. That’s basically all I wrote - a simple exercise in sadism.

The comedy would come from Jim and Peter working out the physical stuff in front of a camera. I had loaded the blunderbuss and led them into the barn.

Jim had worked Link into a wonderful victim. But the real surprise came from Peter Sellers. He decided the masseuse would be played by the most evil, maniacal, sadistic German ever to appear in a “B” Nazi movie.

“Veil, it’s time to limber up your nimble little body,” he said with an evil grin. He proceeded to drop bar bells on Link, roll his legs up to his waist, rotate his arms 360 degrees, all the while saying, “Yah. I’ll bet zat feels good.” He finally tied Link completely up in knots and left him bellowing like a sick bull.

Rudolf Nureyev

Somehow, Jim Henson and Rudolf Nureyev got together and decided that when Mister Nureyev guest starred on
The Muppet Show,
he would dance a ballet with a pig. The piece would be called, appropriately, Swine
Lake.

As the expression goes, this was much easier said than done. The pig ballerina costume had to be big enough to accommodate a real ballet dancer inside. (The job went to the smallest male dancer in the London Ballet.) It had to appear to weigh about 200 pounds more than Mister Nureyev while being as light as possible. Technically, the dancer inside had to breathe (Can’t forget about that!). And, for the piece to work, the costume had to bend as flexibly as a real dancer.

Two master Muppet builders, Mari Kaestle and Rollin Krewson spent two weeks on the project. Firstly, they dragged out books on porcine anatomy to make sure that the pig puppet looked convincingly like a pig, with as many of the right porcine muscles in the right places as possible. And, it had to move, as much as possible, like a pig dancing a ballet. Then, they had to figure out what it would finally look like and how to build it. The finished product was truly a work of art.

In the mean time, fifty or sixty gallons of Coca Cola had to be ordered. Rudolf Nureyev’s trade secret was Coca-Cola. He had it spread on the studio floor the night before shooting, so it would be nice and sticky when he danced.

While the Muppet workshop and studio crew were hard at work, the writing staff were working on the script. Normally, musical numbers were welcomed by the writers. They were three and a half minutes of the show that we didn’t have to write. Usually, we stuck a page in the script that read something as erudite as “Music Number: Rudolf Nureyev dances with a pig.”, which is exactly what I did.

Jerry Juhl called me into his office. “We can’t send a script to the great Rudolf Nureyev with a page that just says, “Rudolf Nureyev dances with a pig.”

“Rudolf pirouettes with a porcine?”, I suggested helpfully.

“No,” Jerry replied. “You have to give me at least a page or so of something. We have to look like we put some thought into it.”

I was back at my desk when the realization hit me, I’m
creating choreography for Rudolf Nureyev.
The only thing I knew about dancers I had learned the hard way by dating the female of the species. Female dancers eat like field hands and go home early and alone.

And so I sat and pondered. I knew I was pretty good at writing for pigs. But ballet dancers were another story all together.

And then, like a beacon of hope on a far horizon, the solution came to me in one simple word:
perhaps.

Perhaps, I wrote, Mr. Nureyev tries unsuccessfully to lift the pig/ballerina. Perhaps, instead, the pig/ballerina lifts Mr. Nureyev. Perhaps Mr. Nureyev can’t get his arms around the pig/ballerina. Perhaps we can take the male dancer out of the costume, allowing Mr. Nureyev to spin the pig/ballerina around and throw it up into the air. Perhaps
with a tape stop, we can drop the pig/ballerina onto Mr. Nureyev. And, when it comes down, perhaps it knocks Mr. Nureyev on his keister.

This went on for over a page and a half of script, which made Jerry Juhl very happy and, evidently Rudolf Nureyev as well.

The piece worked beautifully and is truly a Muppet Classic. And, perhaps, I even had something to do with it.

Chapter 36

Frank Oz

F
rank Oz is probably one of the best known and least seen actors of the 20
^th
Century. If you added up the time of Frank’s on-screen appearances, you’d be counting weeks, if not months.

Artistically, Frank has performed a range of characters from the highly sophisticated: Bert on
Sesame Street;
Fozzie and Miss Piggy on
The Muppet Show;
and Yoda in
Star Wars;
to the neurotic Grover on
Sesame Street;
to the sub-human Cookie Monster and Animal the drummer. Being a bit of a revolutionary, I confess to having a special place in my evil heart for the last two.

Caroll Spinney, the Big Bird puppeteer, has been making and performing puppets since childhood. He’s also a fine artist and designer. Caroll once told me that one secret of puppet design is controlling how intelligent the character appears. The more forehead and “brain” you give a character, the smarter he looks.

If you look closely at Big Bird, you see he does have a cranium. Granted, his bird “brain” is made of feathers. But, it’s sufficient enough to get him into trouble.

My point about Cookie Monster is he has no cranium at all! He is a mouth with two eyes on top of it. He’s an eating machine. He’s pure id. Yet, over the years Frank has managed to create a gruff, loveable character, with a definite personality.

Cookie even has ethics. I wrote a story line that started when Mr. Hooper had to leave his store on some emergency. But the only one around was Cookie Monster and Mr. Hooper had a giant glass cookie jar, filled to the brim right behind the counter. Mr. Hooper asked Cookie to watch the store but had him promise he wouldn’t eat any cookies.

In subsequent scenes he rhapsodizes about the cookies. But he doesn’t touch one. However as he fantasizes about the cookies, he eats a frying pan, a stool, the cash register, and most of the counter. Mr. Hooper returns to find an absolutely empty store, except for the cookie jar and an enormously bloated Cookie Monster.

I always thought the Cookie Monster was one of the great secret weapons of
Sesame Street.
Through him, we showed the kids that we’re really on their side, and they’re not the only ones that have those
I’ve gotta have it right here, right now, Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! fits.

Animal, if possible, is even less articulate than Cookie, Frank once told me he pictured Animal at a party over in a corner, making passionate love… to a lamp.

Frank, inadvertently, taught me two great lessons about writing for the Muppets. The first was illusionary.

Early in my
Sesame Street
career, I was watching a Bert and Ernie piece. As usual, Ernie had created an enormous mess in their living room. Bert entered and immediately began to complain about how messy the place was,
including the floor.
He pointed out several objects on it and “stumbled” over a few more.

What clicked immediately with me was that Frank Oz was completing the illusion. There is no “floor” in Muppet Land. But Frank was subconsciously creating one in the viewer’s mind. Since then, I’ve carried a “floor” around in my bag of Muppet writing tricks. I used it in Kermit’s “chewing gum” introduction, and Piggy’s aerobic sketch. We also used it in the Helen Reddy show.

It also inspired one of my favorite backstage episodes, when Fozzie decided he was going to do his act on roller skates. The mechanics were simple: We’d stand Frank on a dolly while he manipulated Fozzie overhead. Another puppeteer, below the camera frame, would roll him around according to script direction. Roller skate sound effects were added later. We got four or five scenes out of it.

In the first few, Fozzie crashed quite badly, But, later on, he gets better. I envisioned him skating on one foot while holding his other leg straight up in the air. All that was required was the shop building a Fozzie leg with a roller skate attached to the foot.

Fozzie could even spin just by rotating the dolly beneath him. I also suggested in the script that a close-up of the foot spinning on its toe could be inter-cut as Fozzie’s foot on the ground.