The Unseen Photos of Street Gang by Trevor Crafts

Author:Trevor Crafts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2021-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

Muppet designer and performer Caroly Wilcox lends a hand to Henson, Oz, and Seagren.

Seagren performs with the “Fat Blue” Anything Muppet as Grandmother Happy for Episode 112.

Director Jon Stone goes over notes with Oz during an Anything Muppet scene about the “Hunt for Happiness.”

The control room at Reeves Teletape Studios in New York City during a taping of “People in Your Neighborhood” for Episode 106.

CHAPTER 2

130 EPISODES A SEASON

When Sesame Street began production, the Children’s Television Workshop had secured funding from both the U.S. government and private sources, a budget of $8 million, or about what a single season of Game of Thrones would cost in today’s dollars. With that money, the creators of the show researched, wrote, filmed, animated, puppeteered, scored, and finished 130 one-hour-long episodes. That is a staggering amount of production. There isn’t a network in the world today that would be able to create that much content for the same budget. For comparison, those 130 episodes would cost about $750 million per season today.

In 1969, one person was at the top of the production pyramid for the workshop, and that was Jon Stone. He had quit working on the Captain Kangaroo show a few years earlier, and as he puts it, “had done everything I had wanted to do in TV.” Jon was semi-retired and living in Vermont when he got a call from Joan Ganz Cooney. She wanted to know if he would be willing work with her at her new company, the Children’s Television Workshop. Jon’s quick reaction was to say, “No, thank you.” But Joan persisted and when they finally met, Jon saw the spirit behind what she was doing. It was her vision of social change that inspired him to lead both the writers room and the production floor. He knew all of the aspects of production as well as we can recite our ABCs. Jon’s daughters were interviewed for the first time for our documentary. We gained unique insight from them into the inner workings of a creative genius, one of the forgotten heroes of the creation of Sesame Street. The images in this collection show the world that Jon presided over, the chaotic wire runs and mic booms of the set and crew that made the Street come alive.

Brian Henson Jon Stone [writer, director, and producer; Sesame Street writer, director, and executive producer, 1969–1994] was bigger than life. He had all the extrovert energy that my dad Jim wished he himself had had. Jon was the guy who would walk into the room and be loud and funny, and everyone loved him. There was something so attractive about that to my dad, and he just loved working with Jon. He loved that big, bold, positive energy.

Polly Stone, voice actress; daughter of Jon Stone and actress Beverley Owen My dad would talk about the fact that he could watch television and tell you whether or not it was a happy studio making whatever show it was. He’d know nothing about the

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