Jim Henson: The Biography (73 page)

Typically, he finally saw it at Disney, which had premiered Michael Jackson’s science-fiction-themed 3-D film
Captain EO
at EPCOT in 1986. That movie—in which smoke and laser effects inside the theater were seamlessly synced with events on-screen—was hailed as one of the first “4-D” film experiences, an artistry Jim admired. He loved the idea of giving the audience a more complete experience, but wanted to take the concept to a manic extreme worthy of the Muppets. Instead of smoke belching and lasers flashing,
then, Jim wanted walkaround Muppet characters running frantically down the theater aisles and soap bubbles floating from the ceiling—and when audiences ducked one of Fozzie’s squirting flowers, Jim wanted them to get wet. “
He was
very
excited” about the idea, said Alex Rockwell, who had helped Jim develop the concept with Muppet writer Bill Prady. On September 11, 1989, Jim and Rockwell flew to California to discuss the movie with Disney Imagineers, meeting them in their exalted Glendale offices, a compound so secure that Jim needed a security clearance to enter the grounds. For two hours, Jim was given a full tour of the facility, then spent the rest of the afternoon discussing 3-D movie ideas with the Imagineers—the first of many energizing meetings Jim would have with the Imagineers over the next eight months. “Oh, they had so much fun in those meetings,” said Rockwell. “He was in heaven. Heaven, heaven, heaven.”

Back in New York, Jim was also holding regular meetings with Michael Frith and his creative team—usually including Alex Rockwell, Chris Cerf, Kirk Thatcher, and Bill Prady, among others—to brainstorm ideas for Muppet rides. Jim’s favorite attractions in the Disney parks were the Pirates of the Caribbean ride—the reliable favorite in which passengers float through scenes filled with comic, Audio-Animatronic pirates—and the lesser-known River of Time, a quiet boat ride through moments in Mexican history, housed in the Mexico pavilion at EPCOT. Both were dark rides in which riders floated through the attraction in boats, looking at Audio-Animatronic figures, so it is perhaps of little surprise that the first attraction Jim wanted to design was a massive dark ride filled with scenes featuring Audio-Animatronic Muppets. Jim thought it would be funny to parody Disney-MGM’s centerpiece dark ride—a slow cruise through great moments in film called the Great Movie Ride—with an attraction of his own called the Great Muppet Movie Ride. “
It’ll be a backstage ride explaining how movies are shot,” said Jim, giggling, “but all the information is wrong!” Michael Frith went quickly to work, pencil flying as he drew Muppet parodies of famous films.

It wasn’t all creative fun, however. Until the Disney deal was finalized, Jim was still responsible for running his company and for putting things in order to ensure a smooth transition to Disney’s
ownership. Part of the transition process involved downsizing staff—a heartbreaking task that Jim left largely to Lazer, though he took the time to write glowing letters of recommendation himself, including a letter for the regular morning housekeeper at One Seventeen, a woman everyone called simply Tainy. After a quick trip to California in mid-September—where he picked up an Emmy for directing the
Dog City
episode of
The Jim Henson Hour
—Jim spent several days almost exclusively in the company of Lazer and Brillstein, talking quietly over meals at the Sherry-Netherland, trying to deal with transition issues and discussing the ongoing negotiations with Disney.

The first week in October, he was back for an extended stay in Los Angeles to personally continue the conversation with Katzenberg. On October 3, Jim had formally set up the West Coast arm of Jim Henson Productions, running the company out of a set of offices in the Disney Tower in Burbank. He was also renting a house—for $15,000 a month—on a relatively remote stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway just north of Malibu, moving into a mission-style home jutting out of the bluffs just above Nicholas Canyon Beach. It was nearly fifty miles from the house into his offices at Disney, but Jim savored the drive, conducting business on his clunky cellular phone as he cruised into Burbank in a rented white convertible Volkswagen Cabriolet or, later, his own cream-colored Mercedes. And Jim loved driving
fast
, roaring down the Pacific Coast Highway with the top down, blaring the local Top 40 radio station. The speeding tickets piled up, but Jim paid them all with a shrug; he
liked
speeding.

His schedule was packed—but Jim was fully engaged again, in a way he hadn’t been since well before
The Jim Henson Hour
. Put simply, said John Henson, “
at the end of the day, what he was really excited about was working with the Disney company.” Over lunch, Jim would talk with the head of the Disney Channel about creating original content for cable, while at dinner he would meet with the president of Touchstone Pictures, a Disney film company that produced more adult-oriented fare. In between, he would attend countless meetings with Imagineers to discuss the 3-D movie and the Great Muppet Movie Ride. Weeks earlier,
USA Today
had noted admiringly
that Disney, by aligning itself with Jim, had purchased “
creative vitality.” It certainly seemed so; Disney Imagineers admired both his enthusiasm and his seemingly endless stream of ideas. “
[Jim’s] natural curiosity and openness and receptiveness to new ideas made him a perfect fit to work with Imagineering,” said one Imagineer. “The room always lit up when he was around.”

On his way back to New York, Jim stopped for several days in New Mexico to visit Mary Ann. “
The trips were often whirlwinds,” said Mary Ann. Ever since their reconciliation, she and Jim had tried to continue seeing each other as regularly as possible, but with Jim’s schedule they often had to cram as much activity as they could into three or four days. Jim liked casually strolling the galleries and museums in Santa Fe or riding horses along the arroyos near Albuquerque—and if there was time, they would get in a ski trip to Taos, or take long drives to Chimayó to explore spiritual sites. Jim, thought Mary Ann, was always “light [and] relaxed,” in New Mexico.

Things weren’t as light and relaxed back in New York, however, where Jim spent two days being briefed by his attorneys on the status of the Disney deal. On the evening of October 17, Jim boarded an all-night flight for London, where he would spend a week with producer Martin Baker meeting with Disney executives at Shepperton Studios—and he wasn’t happy. Jim “
was frustrated,” said Brillstein, “as Disney fought over every single point.” The day after his arrival at Shepperton, Jim fired off a note to Lazer, enclosing a draft of a letter he wanted to send to Eisner and Katzenberg, “
communicat[ing] to both … my concern about our relationship.” While Jim never raised his voice in meetings, his draft letter to the Disney chiefs had a markedly sharp timbre to it. “I feel we are getting started in a way that is not going to work for me in the future,” Jim warned:

He was further annoyed by his treatment at the hands of Disney’s accounting department, which was haggling over the costs he was billing for the 3-D film. Jim had asked for $1.2 million—most of which, he reminded them, would be paid to the puppeteers—and he was “disturbed” that Disney considered his fee for directing (which was “a couple hundred thousand dollars”) to be “too high and precedent breaking.” As their first major collaboration, he warned, “this doesn’t bode well for the future.” “I think I can make major contributions to the Disney company,” Jim concluded, “but if I’m going to have to spend my time defending my value to you, or in combat with your business affairs people, it’s good to know this now, because perhaps we would do better to go our separate ways.”

Lazer—who called himself “the peacemaker” in the discussions—was eventually able to talk Jim down and the storm passed. But it was clear, only a month into talks, that it was going to be a long negotiation. “
It was a tough process,” said Henson Associates attorney Peter Schube. “[Disney] was very aggressive and very thorough … [but] no one should have been surprised.… This was not a bait and switch. This was not anything other than them being who they promised and announced themselves to be.” For Jim, though, the tone of the negotiations mattered as much as the content. Jim might have been a realist when it came to business, said Steve Whitmire, “
but I think his idealism wasn’t able to deal with this cutt-hroat world … where suddenly everything is about being a commodity and it’s about buying and selling.”

Jim spent much of the autumn bouncing across from coast to coast, meeting with Imagineers in Los Angeles one week, then spending the next week walking his corner of Disney-MGM Studios in Orlando, pointing out potential locations for Muppet attractions. To his delight, Jim found Disney’s Imagineers—unlike their counterparts
in the accounting department—to be willing conspirators in almost any plan, no matter how ridiculous, or expensive, an idea might be. “
He loved the fact that the bar for excellence was set so high inside the theme parks,” said Schube. “Jim loved to solve really hard problems in the production work that he did … [and] Disney does that all day long in the theme parks. That’s all they do … and he loved how well they did it.” During one walk through the park, Jim and Michael Frith pointed out to an Imagineer a set of power lines that were visible as visitors entered the area where the Muppet pavilion would be located and mused that it was unfortunate there wasn’t a facade or a small building blocking the wires from sight. The Imagineer never even blinked. “
When do you need it?” he asked.

Back in New York, he had another construction project that was a bit more problematic, but just as much fun; his apartment at the Sherry-Netherland was again being refurbished, mostly to deal with problems caused by a crumbling inner wall. It was an expensive mess—Jim would spend nearly $140,000 on renovations—but he made the most of the chaos, bringing in subcontractors to install new fixtures, repaint, and clean all the carpets and marble surfaces. His collection of antiques had continued to grow over the years; he had recently added a carved chess set, which he intermingled with an ancient imperial Roman perfume bottle, a carved Egyptian cat dating back to 500 B.C., and a two-thousand-year-old grinning terracotta pig from Syria. On one wall, a brass elevator door from Selfridge’s department store in London hung alongside a Mystic cloak from
The Dark Crystal
. Comfortable and quirky, the apartment would always be a warm and welcoming place.

That December, Jim couldn’t resist throwing one more of his large, elaborate Christmas parties for his staff. Jim was notably relaxed, perhaps appreciating this would be the last Christmas party he would host before the company’s absorption into Disney. But in the throes of his Christmas cheer and benevolence, he made a regrettable error, and informed a few partygoers of the existence of The List and—even more critically—exactly how much money he would be giving them when the Disney deal finally went through. “
It was like he was Santa for the night,” recalled Mary Ann, but not everyone took the news with the gratitude Jim expected. Some grumbled
they should have received more; others were miffed when they learned of the amounts others would receive compared to their own. Jim was stunned by the reaction. “
It was a little bit heartbreaking,” said Lisa Henson, “because he was giving money from the bottom of his heart.”

Christmas itself, however, was a much happier affair, as Jim spent several days with Lisa, John, Heather, and Mary Ann at Walt Disney World. Each morning, Jim and the kids would dive eagerly into the parks, enjoying the rides but taking the time to savor the small things—the hedges clipped to resemble Disney characters, the inside jokes etched in the windows overlooking Main Street—that made up “the Disney experience.” “
My dad liked
everything
,” said Heather, “the atmosphere, walking around … he was so in awe.” He loved the parks, and was looking forward “to having his characters be so alive and well maintained” as the other iconic characters in the parks. On Christmas Day, Jim participated in his first Disney Christmas Parade, singing “Sleigh Ride” with Kermit from the top of a float, and then diving into the crowd with Kermit in his reporter outfit to interview parade watchers for television. John Henson remembered his father being truly happy that day. “
I gave him a bottle of white zinfandel wine [as a Christmas gift,] and he was just so appreciative of it. He was so thankful.” It would be Jim’s last Christmas.

I
n the second week of January 1990, Jim began production on the Muppet 3-D film—to be called
Muppet*Vision 3D
—shooting the majority of the movie on the gigantic Stage 3 at Disney Studios in California, where
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
had been filmed thirty-six years earlier. “
He was more relaxed in a lot of ways,” said Muppet performer Jerry Nelson. “I think it was because he thought he had found the solution to not having to chase the money … that he would just have these projects and be able to create stuff.” And yet, said Nelson, the more he talked with Jim about the details of the deal, the more he worried it wouldn’t be everything Jim wanted it to be. Jim was growing more concerned, for example, that his production company, regardless of its structure, would be anything but independent
once it was under the Disney umbrella. “I think they would not have let him just do projects as he wanted,” said Nelson. “I think their production people would’ve just gotten in the way of all of it.… It would not have been a company that Jim was running.”