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

negotiations was not something Henson wanted to
engage in while he was working with an artist.
    As a boss, Henson’s hiring methods were quite careful ,
but they weren’t exactly professional . They caused confusion, but they
also created a lot of great collaboration, because decisions were based on
criteria that had nothing to do with business, salaries, contracts, or per diem
expenses. Michael Frith, an illustrator, had been working for Dr. Seuss when he
heard about Sesame Street and “wondered if there might be some synergy
there.” [49] When we navigate our professional careers, we tend to move towards quantifiable
increases, greater money, and higher titles; we don’t change jobs on the whim
of some potential “synergy.” But recall that Frith would spend many late
nights working on a Sesame Street encyclopedia or a Miss Piggy
photograph. For people who work day and night, the line between job and life is
indistinguishable, and so is the line between coworker and friend. Most parents
won’t tell their children to chase synergy over salary, but the artists who
worked with Henson did.
    ADDENDUM TO LESSON 3
WHY PEOPLE WORK FOR YOU
    The downside to placing synergy over salary is obvious. When
Caroll Spinney left his job to puppeteer for Sesame Street , he didn’t
know what kind of money he was going to make:
    It was all settled except for one point—money. I
asked him what I could expect to earn.
    Jim looked thoughtful and raised a finger. “We
have a tradition,” he started.
    I smiled. Who doesn’t like a nice tradition?
    “What is it?” I asked.
    “You won’t get paid much.”
    That wasn’t at all what I’d expected to hear.
After all, I was joining the Muppets, the preeminent puppet troupe in the
world. Wouldn’t I get rich quick? His first offer was two hundred dollars a
week. I was making almost that much a day in Boston on Bozo’s Big Top . [50]
    Because this was public television, even Henson
made a “shamefully low salary” [51] according to Davis—not counting merchandizing. At one point, Spinney even decided
to quit Sesame Street because of the low pay. Puppet builder Kermit Love
saw that he was frustrated and told him to give it a month. The next week, Big
Bird was on the cover on Time magazine. This he describes in the chapter
of his memoir called “Take a Pay Cut.” So why did Spinney, in the middle of his
career, take a job for less money? He explains:
    The Bozo show paid well, but it got so that I
hardly had to work. It wasn’t the thing I had dreamed of as a boy. I wanted
more, to educate, to do something artful, meaningful. When Jim offered me Big
Bird, I knew that was it. [52]
    What Spinney wanted was what every artist wants—a chance to
be loved for the hard work that only he can do. To be rewarded for doing
one’s art. Not just a cheap, profitable derivative of one’s art, but the real
thing—the whole thing—what he was born to do, and do masterfully.
Spinney was born to play Big Bird. Even down to his mild cerebral palsy (his unique
postures and gestures undoubtedly translate into the distinctiveness of his
characters) and the latent artistic aspirations of his mother, who sewed
puppets for him. He developed an inimitable method involving reading glasses,
tiny folded scripts, and roller-skating backwards while puppeteering, seeing
only through a miniature, reversed-image monitor inside his suit. No one else
can play Big Bird the way Spinney does. That’s why, today, the seventy-year-old
earns over $300,000 a year. [53]
    But in 1970, Spinney couldn’t have known how
much money the future would hold. Spinney took the pay cut because he wanted to
do the best work he could. Because, in his own words:
    To me, that was the equivalent of—if I was a drummer,
having some fellow say, “I’ve got a little band from Liverpool, then, would you
like to be me drummer?” Because it was Jim Henson. Jim Henson and the Muppets
to me were the Beatles, completely, of the puppet world.