Memoirs of a Muppets Writer: (You mean somebody actually writes that stuff?) (4 page)

And there was I in my Madison Avenue pinstripes. We looked at each other for a long slow moment in the reception room. It was like the meeting of two alien species. Certainly neither one of us could predict what was to come.

Jon took me back to his small, unimpressive office, which was so comfortably messy it instantly reminded me of Ernie’s room, which in some ways it was. He shuffled through the papers on his desk and found my audition material.

He dove in and started telling me exactly how he wanted the four pieces rewritten, which was his way of letting me know I was hired. He then directed me to “the sharks down the hall” in the Business Affairs Department to see about salary and contracts. It was then I learned that “creative” people don’t discuss business with each other. We have our “people” to do that.

My first contract was for only four shows, so I was still on probation. But when I completed the four scripts, I was signed to a contract for the rest of the season.

And that’s how I got - how
I
got to
Sesame Street.

Chapter 6

Jon Stone

I
really can’t discuss
Sesame Street
much further without some discussion of Jon Stone.

There were many people who contributed to the creation of
Sesame Street:
Joan Ganz Cooney, who conceived of educational television commercials for children; Jim Henson, who created the wonderful Muppet characters, the puppeteers who performed them, Joe Raposo who wrote all the music, and Jon Stone, the producer who also wrote the show’s pilot.

But by the time I joined
Sesame Street
in 1973, the show was in full swing. It had been on the air for three years so the characters had been developed, the kinks had been worked out, and the show ran like a well oiled machine. It had to, in order to maintain its high level of quality over a season of 130 episodes.

In theory, a television show is supposed to be a rigid hierarchy with an executive producer at the top, a producer or producers answering to him, and writers, directors and actors answering to the producers. But this pyramid has eroded over the years with writers, directors and actors regularly negotiating Producer, and even Executive Producer credits.

The credit crawls on some shows have become so bloated that a new term has emerged: Show Runner. You won’t see it on the crawl. He or she will just be listed in the brigade of executive producers. As unglamourous as it sounds, the Show Runner is the guy who really is the boss and runs the show. If you’re looking for a job, you want to talk to the Show Runner.

When I joined
Sesame Street,
Jon Stone was the man who was in complete control of
Sesame Street.
He was the Show Runner. Jon was the Executive Producer and the Head Writer. He also directed 50% of the daily shows and all of the Muppet inserts. Jon was
Sesame Street
and
Sesame Street
was Jon. Wardrobe people, set designers, prop men, make-up artists, lighting designers, directors, writers, and cast members all answered directly to Jon. Not a word of script or a minute of tape went on the air without Jon’s personal okay. The far out, goofy humor, the music, the vaudeville skits, the outrageous puns were all Jon Stone.

Orson Wells once described a film studio as, “the world’s greatest set of electric trains.” Jon felt the same way about a television studio. The result was a hit show for children and adults and a hugely successful teaching tool.

Jon was one of those rare people who knew what he wanted to do at an early age and then actually did it. Television was in Jon’s blood. He once told me that as a kid, he would stand for hours, in a Connecticut winter, watching a small screen, black and white set through a TV store window without sound.

To say that Jon loved television is an understatement. Wherever Jon was, there was a television set and it was on. Once, when he called me from Hong Kong, I could hear the TV set in his hotel room broadcasting in fluent Cantonese. Jon’s daughters, Polly and Kate, had given him a framed cartoon. The sketch showed a beautiful alpine hotel with an incredible mountain view. A man is leaving the office and telling his family in the car, “They didn’t have cable, so I told them, ‘Forget it.’”

Jon was a graduate of Yale Drama School, and came to New York to pursue an acting career - with very little results. He appeared in a few musical revues. But as Jon explained it, an agent told him it was time to put the “H” back in his name and start over.

So, Jon joined the CBS Training Program and became a writer and producer on the
Captain Kangaroo Show
. During the ‘60s, he also wrote some Muppet Specials for Jim Henson, which was the beginning of their long relationship.

But at 35, Jon tired of television. He bought a Porsche, moved to Vermont and opened a hardware store.

It was Joan Ganz Cooney who lured Jon out of the woods in 1967 to begin work on her new children’s television show. Jon, in turn, recruited Jim Henson.

The first year I joined
Sesame Street
, Jon announced it was time to win some Emmys. The opening show of a new
Sesame Street
season was always very special. That season, Jon decided it would be special enough to submit for Emmys.

He commissioned Joe Raposo to write a song for the show’s opening that would be the basis of a major musical production number. It would include the entire cast, emphasizing those with singing and dancing talents. And, it would utilize the entire set, including fire escapes and second story windows.

Jon was thinking “Gene Kelly Musical.” And, to duplicate those high/low sweeping camera moves, Jon re-invented the Chapman Boom.

The Chapman Boom is that piece of movie equipment you’ve seen with two guys and a camera at the end of a crane. Its base is a vehicle that can move in any direction and operate on electric power for silence. It allows a camera to pan over great distances and change altitudes at will. But as big as our studio was, a Chapman wouldn’t have had room to operate.

Jon’s solution was to have a metal plate cut large enough to comfortably hold a camera and cameraman. He then had the plate attached to the fork of a fork-lift truck. Once the camera and cameraman were aboard and secured, they could be dollied all around the set while also being raised and lowered as needed. Jon called it the “Ghetto Chapman.”

The opening number was wonderful. And that season,
the Muppet
performers and the
Sesame Street
writers won Emmys for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Children’s Programming.

Jon was also a stickler for detail. There was no detail too small for his attention. During the first season of
Sesame Street,
the steps of the 123
Sesame Street
brownstone were made of wood. The “wooden” sound of people going up and down those steps drove Jon crazy. So the following season, 123 got new steps made out of concrete.

He also fought for years to get real sidewalks on the set, so the cast and the kids could sit on a curb. But that never happened. The sidewalks were, and still are, painted on the studio floor.

Bob Cunniff, the
Sesame Street
producer during the 70s once said, “There was always a slight sense of danger when Jon ran
Sesame Street.”
Muppet trains crashed through walls, ceilings fell in and furniture got eaten.

One day, Jon had an idea to illustrate the principles of “open and “closed.” It was a classic vaudeville bit which required a small bedroom set with a double bed and working window. The
dramatis personae
were two of our cast members, Luis and Gordon, dressed up as old men in floor-length night shirts and stocking caps.

Luis and Cordon enter and get into the bed. After a moment, Gordon declares he’s hot, gets up, opens the window and returns to bed. Shortly afterwards, Luis declares he’s cold, gets up, closes the window and returns to bed. They repeat this two or three times with generous use of the words, “open,” and, “close,” in the dialogue.

Finally, Luis says he’s cold again.

Gordon replies, “You want the window closed?!” He gets up and closes the window.

“Are you happy now?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

Gordon then produces a sledge hammer and bashes a man-sized hole in the wall to the outside and returns to bed.

It was this kind of lunacy from the top that inspired the writers to push the creative envelope ever further. Part of the responsibility of writing any show is to come up with ideas that fit it. I always felt my job was to come up with ideas that Jon would have had if he’d had the time. When I wrote for
The Muppet Show
, I tried to write like Jim Henson. The same was true for anyone else for whom I wrote. There’s a well-known writer’s nightmare: you’re writing for a producer who says,
I don’t know what I want.
But,
I’ll know it when I see it.

But, when you wrote for Jon Stone, you knew exactly what was required of you. Because, Jon
always knew
what he wanted. Jon was a tough taskmaster. He demanded your best. And he got it. Writers dreaded getting re-writes back with Jon’s curt notation across the top of a skit,
N.W.I.!
- Not Worth It! Or, halfway through a bit:
S.H.S.!
- Ship Has Sailed!

I knew Jon pretty well. We were writing partners. But our relationship had an added complication: Jon was always the boss. Whenever I was hired to write a
Sesame Street
special, I was hired by Jon Stone, the Executive Producer to be the writing partner of Jon Stone, Writer, to turn out material that would be acceptable to both Jon Stone, Executive Producer and Jon Stone, Director.

On and off, I worked and traveled with Jon for about two decades. So, let me give you some insight into someone who, if you’re in your late 30s or early 40s, probably bent your mind a little bit. And, you’re probably glad he did.

As you might imagine, Jon had an impish sense of humor. I have in front of me a postcard he sent me during a research trip for Big
Bird in China.
It’s a picture of an empty airplane cockpit with nothing but white showing through the windshield. On the back, Jon wrote:

I snapped this of the empty, snow-covered cockpit just after the crash. Out the
window, I
can see a line of chanting
monks
approaching to take
us to
their lamasery. One of them looks like Sam Jaffe. My fifty-first birthday is coming up - why do I feel so young all of a sudden?

(If you’re too young to get it, rent
Lost Horizons.)

Here’s a story Jon once told me about his youth. His father was a doctor and a classic pianist. When his kid sister was three or four, he and his brother, Emerson, would teach her very complicated piano chords. Later on, when Jon’s father got home, she would nonchalantly wander over to the piano, hit the chord with both hands, think for a moment and then announce in her little girl’s voice, “F flat seventh diminished with an augmented ninth.” Until he caught on, Jon’s father thought his daughter was a musical genius.

Among Jon’s broad panorama of oddities was a penchant for collecting especially ugly postcards. If a card had a swordfish on it, fat women on a beach, or a particularly hideous motel, Jon had a copy. He would then take these horrendous cards with him to exotic places and send them to friends back home. During a research trip that Jon and I took to Ireland, Jon was busily writing postcards. They all featured a glory shot of the Albany, New York Bus Terminal, circa 1958.

On the same trip, while traveling through the town of Limerick, Jon regaled us with one limerick after another, all of which are unprintable here.

Jon, of course, was also a great story teller. Several of his stories were eyewitness accounts of historic moments in television. These are a few of my favorite Jon Stone stories.

In the early ‘60s, when Jon was a junior staffer on the
Captain Kangaroo Show,
word came down from the CBS brass that on the next day’s program they would have to make do with two cameramen instead of the usual three. The network had a corporate assignment that needed a cameraman the following morning.

Two days later, when the cameraman returned, he told the following story:

On the morning of the assignment, William S. Paley, Chairman of CBS, addressed several thousand executives from the CBS affiliate stations around the country. He did it at a breakfast meeting in the main dining room of a mid-town Manhattan hotel. The cameraman’s job was to shoot Paley so his image could be projected on TV monitors located throughout the dining room.

After his speech, Paley sat down. However, as soon as he did, his speech reran on the monitor. Afterward, the cameraman, said the entire audience sat in stunned silence, because that
was the first time any of them had ever seen video tape.

Jon was privy to other early television events. In 1957 he had a low level job at CBS as an Assistant Stage Manager. At the time Elizabeth Taylor was married to Mike Todd. Todd was an impresario of the first order. The year before, he had produced
Around the World in 80 Days
which took the Oscar for Best Picture of the Year. Todd was bigger than life. It’s rumored that he’s the only man in the world who could handle Elizabeth Taylor.

On any given day Todd could either have ten million dollars in the bank, or be ten million dollars in the hole. It was reported that in 1957, Todd was in the hole again - big time.

Since Mike Todd needed money, he did what anybody in that situation would do. He rented Madison Square Garden, and threw himself a 48
^th
birthday party complete with circus acts, celebrity performers and 18,000 of his and Elizabeth’s closest friends.

He talked CBS into broadcasting it live. CBS then assigned Walter Cronkite to cover it. This was a big deal at CBS. A “remote” in 1957 was rare. The equipment was large, heavy and ungainly. Moving it was a major project.

So, because this enormous remote was being covered at Madison Square Garden, literally all of the CBS executive staff were at Madison Square Garden, “observing” the production from the open bar.