Jim Henson: The Biography (54 page)

Jim’s ideal process was to focus the build around the puppeteer. “
When we’re doing major characters that we know have to be used through the entire film … we build a very rough prototype, put it on a person, videotape it, take a look at it, and then do a critique of it,” said Jim. “Then we rip the whole thing apart, re-sculpt it, rebuild all the parts, and build it again.” At times, it took three or four tries before Jim was happy with it. Heavy costumes had to be mounted on harnesses so the weight was carried on the puppeteer’s hips, rather than on the back or shoulders. Jim also wanted to ensure that any large puppet, no matter how elaborate, could be put on easily and taken off quickly. “
My father had a unique way of working,” said Brian Henson. “He would visualize what you could do with a puppet or a person in costume before working on it. The whole film is a series of experiments in hiding people in costume, and creating movements that no one has ever seen before.”

Sometimes, creating those movements required more than just puppetry skills. “
We knew when we went into this film that there would be a lot of very difficult and uncomfortable characters to perform,” said Jim. “So we looked for dancer/acrobat/mime performers—people who had the physical stamina to hold up and work in hot, uncomfortable positions.” The first ads announcing auditions for performers for
The Dark Crystal
, in fact, didn’t ask for puppeteers at all, but rather for “
Mimes, Dancers and Actors.” After selecting his new performers, Jim brought in the European mime artist Jean-Pierre Amiel to lead them through eight grueling months of training to determine how different kinds of creatures might move and to get them into the physical shape necessary to handle what Jim knew would be a demanding shoot. Jim—who never asked of performers anything he wouldn’t do himself—thought those performing the quiet, stooped Mystics actually had the toughest job.
“
Performers were on their haunches all the way down on their rear end, walking along very bent over,” said Jim, “a position I could barely hold.”

For Jim, part of the fun of creating a fantasy world wasn’t just building the creatures, but creating everything else in the world as well, from plants and trees to swords and spoons. If a chair was needed in the background, for instance, the crew couldn’t just grab a chair from the prop department; they had to build a chair that looked as if it belonged in Jim’s fantasy world and had been made from materials found there. “
I think the idea of conceiving of and building the
Dark Crystal
world from scratch was really appealing,” said Jim. Working alongside the puppet designers in Downshire Hill, then, were jewelers, furniture and pottery makers, wood carvers and armor builders—an enormous team of craftsmen that ballooned the workshop staff from its initial seven to more than sixty. “
We could never have tried something like
The Dark Crystal
even a few years earlier because, until recently, we didn’t have the performers, the puppet builders or the technicians who could handle the problems involved,” said Jim. “I think the idea for
The Dark Crystal
came along at about the time we were ready to handle it—which is basically the way things have happened all my life.”

At last, on April 15, 1981, Jim began shooting on
The Dark Crystal
—a film he had been aching to make since 1978, and had pushed aside twice in favor of Muppet movies. “
He was trying to reach out to do some things that he hadn’t been able to do by doing Muppets,” said Jane. “He loved the idea of trying for a different reality.” So immersed was Jim in this world he was creating, in fact, that he had asked screenwriter David Odell not to write any dialogue for the Skeksis or Mystics. Instead, he wanted his creatures to speak a language all their own. While the film’s main characters, the Gelflings Jen and Kira, would speak English, the villainous Skeksis and the wizened Mystics would communicate with a combination of squawks, grunts, groans, moans, and snippets of ancient Greek or Egyptian, making the film even
sound
otherworldly. It was a gamble, but as he stepped onto the soundstage at Elstree to begin shooting, Jim was confident the film’s visuals were strong enough to clearly convey the plot and carry the story. “
I guess I’ve always been most
intrigued by what can be done with the visual image,” he said later. “I feel that is what is strongest about the work I do, even today—just working with the image, the visual image.”

Odell had made the best of Jim’s story outline, writing a script steeped in fantasy tradition, in which a young hero—decreed by a prophecy to be the savior of his world—sets out on a quest to “heal” a shattered crystal that will magically merge the evil Skeksis and sage Mystics back into a single, magical species, the glowing, godlike UrSkeks. “
It has a lot of elements of fairy tales and the standard fantasy elements,” Jim said proudly—but Frith, who never flinched from giving Jim his opinion, thought the plot was “awful.”
Dark Crystal
was “
a story about genocide,” Frith exclaimed, shaking his head even thirty years later. “And what you’re saying is that you can extirpate an entire race of people and then, because the stars come together right, suddenly you’ve become some godlike figure and everything’s okay.” Jim would hear none of it, however; that was thinking about it too much. “
We are working with primary images that appear in many stories of folk-lore and mythology,” he explained patiently, again stressing the visuals of the film. “I like fairy tales very much. I like what they are and what they do.” (Oz was more typically blunt in his response: “
Well, we can’t all be perfect,” he told Frith dryly.)

As they co-directed their lavish fairy tale, Jim and Oz were a study in opposites, and some on the set likened them to Ernie and Bert: Jim in his bright, comfortable colors, grinning as he unconsciously combed at his beard with his enormous fingers; Oz in a fedora, arms folded, eyes narrowed with intensity. Despite their differences in style, he and Oz “
had pretty much come to a common feeling about what we wanted,” said Jim. “Besides that, we’ve worked together for over twenty years, so we know each other rather well.” Still, having two directors on the set, Jim admitted, could be “a little tricky.… Movie units are not used to two people directing them … the units had to get used to the idea of running everything by both of us.”

Not everyone got used to that idea. One assistant director pulled Jim and Oz aside to inform them that the crew was confused and wanted Jim to direct the film alone. Jim said no—but looking back,
Oz agreed that his involvement probably
was
making things difficult for nearly everyone. “
Things were
not
smooth, but it was because of me,” said Oz. “Things would have been smoother had I been more mature, but I was completely inexperienced. Jim should really have fired me several times because I was just this young guy who felt slighted because the crew saw Jim as the key guy. I felt I was ignored. People listened to Jim—as it should be. So, I should have been fired—but Jim, God bless him, just supported me. He was always patient. I’m sure I drove him crazy during that time, too, but we loved each other.”

The
Dark Crystal
team, from the performers through the technical crew, quickly came to respect the power Jim could convey simply through his presence and respectful silence. “
Jim didn’t tell you what to do,” said Oz. “He just was. And by him being what he was, he led and he taught. But by not answering, sometimes you answered your own question, and you could do more than you thought you could.” Jim spent most of his time overseeing the technical side of things, directing elaborate special effects or large, noisy, crowd scenes—he especially relished working on the slobbering, gnashing Skeksis dinner banquet sequence, which had been in his story outline since the very first draft—while Oz worked more closely with the performers. Already notorious for calling for retake after retake on
The Muppet Show
, Oz continued to make similar demands on the set of
The Dark Crystal
. Jim, too, appreciated that several takes might be necessary, particularly when so many performers were trying to stay out of sight. But while Oz wanted takes to be perfect, Jim wanted takes to be right—a subtle, but important difference. “
Jim had the head of a producer,” said Lazer, “which meant he understood you can only do two or three takes and move on … and Frank, if he didn’t feel it was right, wanted to continue … and sometimes wanted to over-rehearse when Jim didn’t.”

It was also obvious to Oz that while he and Jim might generally agree on the “common feeling” of the film, the true visionary on the set, from day one, was always Jim. “
He saw the movie in his head,” said Oz. “I didn’t.” For Oz, that distinction was never more apparent than during the several days spent filming the movie’s climactic scene in which the stone walls of the Skeksis castle collapse to reveal their
crystalline inner structure. “He had that all in his head,” said Oz. “And he’d be doing a storyboard, and thinking about doing it in sections—and I’m thinking, ‘I’m directing here, and I have no fucking idea what Jim’s thinking or talking about.’ It was his vision totally.”

Jim was not only directing, he was performing one of the lead roles as well, taking on Jen, the Gelfling hero who ultimately brings order to the universe when he makes whole the Crystal of Power by merging it with the shard in his possession. Unlike most of the fantastic creatures populating
The Dark Crystal
, Jen bore a vague resemblance to a human child—a particular challenge for both the designers and the performers. “
Everyone knows how a human moves and what we look like, so you set certain expectations,” said Froud, “and if they are not fulfilled, people are disappointed.” For Jim, that meant special care in figuring out how to move the puppet in a convincing or realistic manner. “
I’ve never done any performing that difficult in my life,” said Jim. “And the things that were the hardest were really ordinary things.… The Muppets can just go bouncing across the room … but when you have some characters that you have to believe in as living creatures, the movements are much more complex and subtle. Like, do you cut your eyes before you turn your head or after? Little things like that, things you normally wouldn’t think about.”

While Wendy Midener and the puppet builders had done their best to keep Jen light and flexible—she had even constructed the puppet around a mold of Jim’s right hand—the figure was still heavier and clunkier than Jim would have liked. Kathy Mullen—only the third full-time female puppeteer in the Henson Associates stable—had rehearsed with her Kira puppet all summer, and had gone back to Midener several times for modifications that had significantly reduced the puppet’s weight and increased its flexibility. Jim, however, “
was just too damn busy to give it that much thought,” said Mullen. “I had all kinds of time.… But he never did go in and work on it. He just struggled with what he had. And he made it work because he always did—but he made it hard on himself.” Eventually, Faz Fazakas modified the Jen and Kira puppets so the delicate facial mechanisms could be operated by radio control rather than with
thick cables connected to black control boxes. “
I really do believe it saved our lives,” recalled Mullen. Freed from the restrictions of the heavy cables, Jim and Mullen could concentrate solely on their performances, and not on the need to work around the technology.

And so it would go for nearly six months, with Jim and Oz—along with cinematographer Ossie Morris and producer Gary Kurtz, who served as the lead director for the second unit—working their way slowly and deliberately through each scene, creeping their cameras carefully through the massive sets sprawled across nine of Elstree’s soundstages and out onto the backlot. While there were the usual challenges of filmed puppetry to overcome—even the most expensive, ornate sets were still platformed up, with removable floor panels—the complexity of the puppets, and the sheer number of people required to operate many of the characters, could slow things down considerably. “
You see this character walking in the woods and the audience has no idea that there are television monitors, and cables, and radio control boxes, and all these performers swarming around just out of sight,” said Jim. “
You have to be concerned about keeping the cable crews out of shot … it’s a slow process.” Oz called it “
an exercise in logistics”—and after five months of such meticulous filming, even Ossie Morris—who had shot his share of gigantic, sweeping epics—could be heard muttering, “This just never ends, does it?” “It was massive,” agreed Oz.

Through it all, Jim continued to meet his obligations for
Sesame Street
—“
You went off and built this great career,” Joan Ganz Cooney told Jim warmly, “but you remained faithful, and I really appreciate it”—and huddled regularly with the
Fraggle Rock
team as they continued their work on Downshire Hill. In May there was a quick sprint through Spain with John and Cheryl, and then a weekend shooting several commercials for Polaroid. Jim wasn’t thrilled with the thought of getting back into doing commercials again, but after several weeks of
“grueling work” on
Dark Crystal
, he and the Muppet performers “had a wonderful time” performing their familiar Muppet characters for the Polaroid ads. “It was just so great to get back to those same old guys again,” said Jim, “so we could play.”

In June 1981, the movie featuring “those same old guys,”
The Great Muppet Caper
, opened in the United States, though Jim was
still at work at Elstree and could only discuss the film with American reporters via satellite feed.
Caper
marked Jim’s first effort as a director, and as he waited for the reviews to come in, it didn’t take long before it was clear the film was a rousing success.
Variety
lauded him for his “
sure hand in guiding his appealing stars through their paces” and concluded that “no doubt remains that Miss Piggy and Kermit are now film stars in their own right.” That assessment of the Muppet stars was shared by Vincent Canby at
The New York Times—
always one of Jim’s most devoted admirers—who likened Kermit and Piggy to
an old Hollywood power couple. For critic Rex Reed, the film was gloriously sentimental, full of “
humanity, tenderness and intelligence” and “a musical in the best tradition”—exactly as Jim had intended.