“We felt like there was in all probability solely going to be one documentary that might be made,” Lisa, present CEO of The Jim Henson Firm, says on a Zoom name along with her three siblings. “Our dream was for a filmmaker of actual stature to come back alongside and be an ideal match for Jim Henson.”
They obtained their want originally of 2022, when Howard, who represents the documentary arm of Creativeness Leisure (his and Brian Grazer’s manufacturing firm), visited the Henson household studio in Los Angeles. The Oscar-winning director knew Henson solely barely, having met him backstage at a spread present within the late Seventies. However after talking extensively with the siblings about their upbringing, and exhibiting them two hours of their father’s early commercials, experimental movies, and residential movies, Howard was satisfied he had a transparent imaginative and prescient of Henson as an artist, husband, and father.
“You may see a type of aesthetic thread all through the work, an undercurrent of wit and irony, and his great creativeness,” Howard says of Henson’s work. “Virtually instantly I wished to channel Jim’s sensibility and aesthetic via the issues we’d make.”
Out there to stream Might 31 on Disney Plus, “Jim Henson Concept Man” exploits Howard’s editorial instincts and the Henson household’s persistence. The movie, which not too long ago premiered on the Cannes Movie Pageant, comprehensively chronicles the life and work of the Muppeteer, investigating his creativity and relentless ambition via a mix of archival materials, animated and musical decorations, and interviews along with his shut colleagues and all 4 kids. It additionally makes room for loads of puppet exhibits, together with behind-the-scenes seems to be at Kermit the Frog, Sesame Road solid members, and the revolutionary puppets in The Darkish Crystal and Labyrinth.
To know the genius of his topic, Howard depends closely on Frank Oz, Henson’s buddy and longtime collaborator, who gives perception into their various work and revolutionary method to tv. However Henson’s newest and most illuminating insights focus on his romantic and inventive partnership along with his spouse, Jane, who helped discovered their firm, and their household life, which grew to become strained within the years earlier than the couple separated in 1986. “I noticed great worth in Jim’s story,” Howard says. And Jane, as a result of I had no concept how essential Jane was to constructing the muse of Muppets Inc. and every little thing that got here out of it.”
The couple met in 1954 in a puppetry class on the College of Maryland, the start of an in depth working relationship that finally led to “Sam and Associates,” a late-night dwell puppet present that aired on the native WRC-TV channel in Washington. Capital, station. Its musical parts and puppet fashion (the puppeteers would watch themselves in a dwell simulcast utilizing a tv display so they may see what the puppet regarded like within the body above them) laid the muse for Kermit, their Muppet Firm, and Jim’s bigger endeavors. “It was simply my mother and pop making this five-minute piece of music each evening,” says Cheryl, the corporate’s president. Jim Henson Foundation. “It was college-style humor. They have been entertaining themselves.”
A number of years later, Jim and Jane’s marriage appeared the pure development of their creative collaboration, much less the results of a deep romance than a ardour for being collectively, which Jane, who died in 2013, described within the documentary. “I personally thought it was extra romantic than a few of my mother’s statements sound,” says Lisa, who, alongside along with her siblings, declined to take producer credit or direct Howard’s editorial choices. As he explains within the documentary, the dolls functioned virtually like alter egos, permitting the couple “to be each humorous and insightful, and type of free and loopy,” Howard says, “which neither of them have been in individual.”
When Jane gave delivery to Lisa, and put her skilled artistic work on pause to begin a household, Jim continued at breakneck velocity, constructing a small staff of puppeteers, which included Oz, to make puppet-based commercials inside a Manhattan workshop. Over the subsequent decade, Jim’s output elevated, because the puppeteer developed a repertoire of characters and created experimental movies and tv specials — “early works which might be very revealing of my father as an artist,” Brian says. “You see uncooked creativity earlier than it turns into extra refined and complicated.”
Because of his many initiatives, the “Concept Man” notes that Henson’s workload — particularly when he hooked up himself to “Sesame Road” and started producing the TV sequence “The Muppets” in England all through the Seventies and early Eighties — made it tough to speak usually. With Gene and his 5 kids at dwelling. “This sort of factor occurs on a regular basis in relationships, and I believe they dealt with it very properly,” Howard says. “However apparently, the factor that introduced them collectively was finally the issue that led to the romantic aspect of the connection fading away.”
All through our dialog, the Henson kids (all taking part in totally different roles of their father’s firm and basis) replicate warmly on their dad and mom’ early relationship, their shared humorousness, and what Cheryl calls their “robust household life” and “splendidly artistic” childhood in Armonk, New York, which It included taking part in home made artwork initiatives, resembling clay making and woodworking, crafts they’d finally refine as they grew older and started aiding their father in skilled settings. “I positively did not really feel like my father was as absent from the household as he was portrayed within the film,” Cheryl says. “However that is partly as a result of we have been all the time invited to be with him on web site, in workshops, and likewise journey with him.”
The latter half of “Concept Man” traces Henson’s relentless pursuit of recent applied sciences, resembling extra superior puppets and the particular and visible results he created in his characteristic movies “The Darkish Crystal” and “Labyrinth.” Impressed by his topic’s expertise, Howard channeled a few of Henson’s work right into a documentary movie aesthetic, making use of stop-motion methods and conducting interviews on a stage surrounded by tv screens that was meant to resemble Henson’s 1969 documentary “The Dice.” “I cherished Realizing the worth of partaking in a medium, and studying it on the job.” “What Jim and Jen did jogs my memory plenty of what TikTok and Instagram creators have finished.”
Henson’s stressed vitality and workaholic persona (“He was drawing or writing on a regular basis,” Brian says) appear to stem, a minimum of partially, from his brother’s sudden dying in a automobile accident in 1956. Because the documentary posits, this occasion lent his work a way of The urgency his kids additionally felt when Henson died immediately at age 53 — and once more when their brother John died in 2014. “Till my father died,” Lisa says. “There is not any doubt {that a} sudden and surprising dying will change your thoughts just a little.”
When the household inherited the corporate, Jane based it Jim Henson’s legacy, devoted to preserving and perpetuating his contributions to the doll world, has employed Karen Falk as its full-time archivist. “The Concept Man,” which Lisa hopes will encourage viewers to “unleash their creativity,” serves, in some methods, because the end result of all their conservation work. In addition they really feel that it captured their father’s spirit and made the lengthy wait price it. “We have been afraid we would not be capable to do it,” Brian says. “This looks like the suitable strategy to rejoice Jim Henson.”
“It is so nice that we’ve this documentary,” Heather provides, whereas additionally acknowledging its inherent limitations. “Coming to an understanding of our relationship with our father is all the time an ongoing course of.”
