Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career Read Online Free PDF Page A

Muppets?”
    I said that would be nice.… I had
mistakenly assumed that he just wanted to chat. When I got to know him better,
I learned that Jim Henson never wanted to chat. He almost always wanted to work.
… Now, in Utah, he wanted to talk to me again. I had a sense that this time
I had better find out what he wanted to talk about. I quickly stashed my show
safely away and rushed to the lounge.
    “I saw your show,” he said. “I liked what you
were trying to do.”
    …
    He recounted some of his own disasters, including driving a
hundred miles to do a show and finding he’d left the all-important audiotape
back in the workshop.
    Then he said, “Why don’t you come down to New
York and talk about the Muppets?”
    This time, amazed at this déjà vu moment, I
asked him to clarify. “What do you mean by ‘talk about the Muppets’?”
    “I mean, would you like to work for me?” he
replied. [42]
    Terry Angus had the same experience. After his audition,
Angus explained, Henson
    brought out this book and started signing it and I
thought, well, I’m being told very nicely with a little present “Thank you for
coming, we don’t need you” sort of thing. Or I got the job. I don’t know what
made me ask it right out, but I asked him, “Well, does that mean I get the job?”
And he said, “Oh yeah, sure.” [43]
    Joseph Bailey had already worked on Sesame Street when he was asked to audition as a writer for The Muppet Show . He wrote
a spec script, and was called in to meet with Henson:
    In his low key way, Jim told me he liked my material
and we discussed the show for a while. When the conversation came to a close,
he said to me, “Well what are you going to do now?”
    I told him that my wife and I were leaving soon
for a two-week vacation on the Caribbean Island of Antigua. He said he hoped
we’d have a good time and the meeting ended with no further discussion. [44]
    Bailey didn’t know he had a job to come back to until an urgent
telephone message came in at his hotel: “Call Jim Henson immediately.”
    “Where are you?” [Henson] asked. “We’re
having a writers’ meeting for the opening show of the new season. Why aren’t
you here?”
    “Well, Jim, you see, nobody hired me.”
    “Oh. (Pause) Well, how soon can you get here?” [45]
    Henson’s indirectness is extreme, and yet I would hesitate
to call it a fault. If we try to imagine things Henson could have said
to prevent these misunderstandings—“You’ve passed the audition,” “You’re
hired,” “Report to work at seven a.m.”—he would be veering into the province of
HR, into the realm of business and money. As we will see in Lesson 7, separating
business and creative conversations is important; it creates a sense of play
that is independent from economics. There is a time and place to discuss money
matters, and in Henson’s company, it was not when artists were discussing a
possible collaboration.
    For artists, money is often an afterthought, because
the primary goal is making something good. Bailey recalled he had agreed to
move to London before asking about pay:
    Jerry and I were standing at the elevators and Jim
was striding quickly on his long legs toward the door on the other side of the
lobby when suddenly I had a realization.
    “Hey, Jim!” I shouted across the lobby, “Who do
I talk to about money!?”
    “Al Gottesman!” Jim yelled back before
disappearing out the door. [46]
    Earlier, when Bailey was hired for Sesame Street , Jon
Stone had followed the same procedure:
    [Jon] 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. [47]
    To be fair, Bailey said that Al Gottesman was not a shark:
“I never needed ‘people’ to talk to Jim’s ‘people.’ I could talk to Al myself.” [48] Yet the “sharkiness” of money