Jim Henson: The Biography by Brian Jay Jones

Author:Brian Jay Jones [Jones, Brian Jay]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780345526137
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-09-24T04:00:00+00:00

During the final week of June 1978, Jim hopscotched across the country one more time, attending Lisa’s high school graduation ceremony in New York—she had already been accepted to Harvard, an accomplishment Jim noted proudly in his journal with the appropriate number of exclamation points—then spent two days in Lubbock, Texas, at a Puppeteers of America convention, before finally arriving at Bernie Brillstein’s beach house in Los Angeles just in time to celebrate the Fourth of July. The next morning—a bright and sunny Wednesday—cameras rolled on The Muppet Movie.

For eighty-seven days over the summer and fall of 1978, Jim and the Muppet performers sweated in the sun on locations in California and New Mexico, rolling around on their backs on furniture dollies or chairs with the legs cut off and wheels attached—almost anything that would roll and keep them out of the view of Frawley’s cameras. While the big screen allowed the Muppets the space to move about freely in the real world—many times out in the open where even their lower bodies could finally be seen—keeping the Muppet performers hidden from view required them to squeeze into even tighter and more claustrophobic spaces than ever. For some scenes, rectangular pits would be dug in which the puppeteers would stand to perform. Other times, the pits would be covered with a piece of plywood—which would then be covered by sand or dirt—and the puppeteers would stick their arms up through holes in the wood, watching themselves on monitors from their shallow underground crypt. As a first-time director of puppeteers, Frawley was surprisingly in tune with the physical demands placed on the performers. Jim, who had once made a particularly inconsiderate director stand holding his arm over his head for ten minutes to understand the pain involved in performing, found a sympathetic ally in Frawley, who would call out “Muppets relax!” between takes so the puppeteers could rest their aching arms and shoulders. “If you don’t dig sore arms,” said Richard Hunt, “don’t work with puppets.”

In Frawley’s view, the most difficult sequences were those in which the Muppets drove or rode in cars. “[The Muppets] had never been shot outdoors, or in a car or real locations,” said Frawley, “and we pretty much had to invent it as we went along. Every shot had never been done before, because nobody had taken Fozzie Bear and Miss Piggy and Kermit and put them in a Studebaker.” With four puppeteers and their monitors scrunched together in the front seat just under the dashboard, there was no room for a driver—so Frawley’s solution was to rig the car so it could be driven from the trunk by a stunt driver who watched the road on a monitor.

But it was Jim—in what Frawley called “the single most difficult sequence to execute”—who ended up in the most cramped spot of all. In one of the film’s most memorable moments, a long swooping camera shot eases out of the clouds over a swamp, floats down through the

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