What can you say about Jim Henson that hasn’t already been said? A modern renaissance man, who created some of the most indelible art of the 20th Century that appealed to millions of fans around the world. To those growing up in the 70s and 80s, his presence was everywhere, not only on Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, The Muppet Movies, The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth but also in elevating the art of Marionette and Puppetry (that’s where the name Muppet was derived from).
Henson had manic skills as an entertainer, whose work was fluid with music, vaudeville, and comedy and was a celebration of life that few performers could hope to get in moments as great as his… let alone an entire career of greats.
Henson passed in 1990, and his spirit lives on in all of us. This past year legendary director Ron Howard took the task of channeling his life into a documentary. To help him on this journey, he enlisted a filmmaking duo of considerable power, Sierra Neal and Paul Crowder to edit this film.
Jim Henson Idea Man premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, then at Disney+ to great acclaim, with nine Primetime Emmy Nominations including Outstanding Editing for a Nonfiction Program. Neal and Crowder recently spoke to Immersive about this rewarding experience.
[The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.]
Paul, how did you get involved in this project?
Paul Crowder: I’ve worked with Ron Howard a few times before… on The Beatles: Eight Days A Week and the Pavarotti documentary and a few other things for Imagine Entertainment. When they asked me about this one, I immediately said yes. Working with Ron is always a yes.
What was wonderful about this project being about Jim Henson was I grew up on Sesame Street and I learned to count and spell watching it. It was so instrumental for part of that part of my life and then when I was a teenager and The Muppets came out, the humor was right on my level of humor.
What’s your work setup with Ron Howard like? Is he an in-the-edit room guy or “you got this and let me see the assembly when you are done“?
PC: Initially there are lots of meetings but after that, Ron’s wonderful in trusting the process and allowing you to edit it in the way you see fit. We would do a review after the first few scenes, and then another after the first act. We would go through the whole film bit by bit and give some valuable insights. You are always having such a collaborative situation, but you are allowed for a couple of weeks at a time to just get to yourselves.
Sierra, How did you get involved with the project?
Sierra Neal: Through that lovely man right there, my dear friend and truly a mentor, an editing mentor for me, Paul Crowder. We have worked on several projects together starting with The Beatles: Eight Days A Week. We connected creatively, musically, and editorially and I learned quite a lot from Paul over the years, but now we’ve come together and had a dual partnership editing this film.
I want to stay on the word that you used… mentor, I find that very powerful. Can you talk a little bit about how that came about?
SN: It’s a rare thing to find. I had always wanted a mentor. I started in advertising in New York and kind of looked for my space there and never found it. There used to be that word apprenticeship and people used to apprentice, and I always thought that was a cool thing. I always thought that was like, that makes sense to me. That’s a way to learn from someone really good and really connect and work hard. I was always a hard worker. And then Paul and I really met by happenstance, bonded over music, and then creatively found I think common ground right away. And he was willing to teach and I was very willing to learn at that time, to be fair.
PC: Sierra, you were a very accomplished editor when I first met you. It wasn’t like I had to teach you a lot, but we learned to style together where I would watch some of the cuts she was doing and I’d almost be like a proud father when she would play me stuff that she’d done on her own and oh man, this is great. It was like we were jazz musicians and trading.
Sierra would cut the sequence and send it over to me and I’d do some work on it and send it back to Sierra, and Sierra would do some more work on it and send it back to me. A lot of things would happen in that fashion and pieces grew and got better every time they jumped hands and came back. It was this great, wonderful rapport and way of working.
What was it like finding Jim Henson’s persona through this process?
PC: We were always inspired by Jim, right? Try and be Jim as best we can, and it was always taking it to the next level with Jim. It was always great to see new clips that Sierra had put in or moments or stuff we talked about where she’d seen an interview where he said this, and we should consider that when we do the next bit of editing. There was a wonderful weaving of what we do, what Ron likes to do, and Jim’s overall presence. That was always that we were trying to fit in. I felt very pleased with where we got because I felt like we did achieve that. I thought we did achieve Jim’s personality.
For me, there’s never enough Orson Welles. I just love seeing clips of him. I had never seen that clip before. How’d you guys find it and tell me a little bit about working with the Welles clip?
SN: It was a part of the Henson Archives. I don’t know that we would’ve found it if they had not had it. I don’t think it exists. We tried to find better tapes and things. It was a challenge, but what was so interesting about it is it, so it’s I think just a pilot episode of The Orson Welles Show. It was a very unique style of TV talk show that tried to be edited cinematically… It turned out to be one of the few interviews with Jim Henson that got into his life story and his perspective on his journey. It ended up being a great interview to cut back and forth to. Orson Welles expresses his adoration for The Muppets and what he did interestingly that we all couldn’t put into words, he did very intellectually. That ended up having real value I think in the film, being able to cut back to it.
PC: I thought it helped because of Orson’s passion for Jim and his creativity really sells it and gives it to the audience. He’s changed the platform of what this was, and he reiterates that. This is where we introduce Frank Oz, Frank was the living member of the duo that was in our story, and he’s the closest person to Jim. So while you’re watching the film early on you know before you brought Frank Oz into the story, you get an understanding that he’s an important character. And the part where Jim says he never saw a puppet show was priceless.
I was just about to bring that up. When he said he had never seen a puppet show before, it was just mind-blowing and said volumes about how amazing Jim Henson was. The fact that no one had ever done that before the way he did it where it looks like these are living organic beings.
SN: He was an artist. He would draw and he would draw characters. He would draw little monsters and characters. But puppetry allowed him to take all these different crafts, filmmaking, writing comedy art, and combine them and do something innovative in one new medium, one medium, which was puppetry. It just makes sort of sense when you get to it because he is talented at all those things. He is. During Sesame Street, writing and performing and doing voice acting and coming up with characters and running a business, it’s pretty amazing.
PC: If you think about all that, the characters, the amount of acting he’s doing and ad-libbing on the spot, and the coordination of the one hand and the mouth and making it work. And if you’ve got someone doing the second hand and the coordination between the two, I think it’s so underestimated what it takes to do just one of those things. But he’s doing it all at once. Frank Oz was great at that as well. The puppetry, it’s just an incredible art form, but he got into it just to do TV. I want to work in the television medium. There’s an opportunity. They need a puppeteer, I’ll be a puppeteer.
The story with his wife, Jane Henson, it was so well handled because there’s a duality to people. It could have gone down so many different paths… It was kind of like a literal fork in the road when they had children. So now he is going on a different path from his wife…
PC: Ron was all about getting that relationship, that story being told correctly, and what can we do to get Jane’s story into the story. We were both with Jim and Jane, very limited on what was available for us to use. All we had was some audio stuff. There was one interview that they did in the late seventies for a TV thing, and then there were a couple of audio things that were done on a Dictaphone that were just for books or articles or something but it was obvious that we needed to get Jane’s story in there and do it. That was Ron’s mantra was: more Jane, expand the Jane story, expand the Jane story, and it kept getting better and better every time we focused on Jane when we needed to. The film got better.
SN: We always knew that Jane was a big part of it and you would see, you’ve seen other maybe mini-documentaries or exhibits and you see there she is. Most people don’t even know that she was involved at all because she was behind the scenes. But the truth is that she was one of the performers on Sesame Street. She was there from the beginning and a huge part of the forming of the company. It was the two of them who formed the company in the very beginning.
We knew it was there and we struggled with the archival footage, how to tell her perspective, and we had to lean into the low-quality tapes to get her in there. Jim didn’t talk about it much. We have a small moment of him sort of acknowledging that in the film, but it was worth it to bring that to the forefront. It ended up being one of the main through-lines of the story because his family life was at odds with his work-driven nonstop, all-consuming life.
Paul, what was it like working with writer Mark Monroe again? What sort of involvement was there with the edit?
PC: Mark Monroe and I have been working together for 28 years now. He usually likes to get the interview bites on paper and try and put it together. Mark wrote a basic script of the interviews with Henson’s kids. He has a real knack for piecing the words together and again, it’s a bit like the Sierra and I are doing like playing jazz. Mark’s already set us on a path for the story, the arc of through the discussions we’ve had with creative. So he gives you a great lead and then you are in there looking at bites and you’ll find something else that you think, oh, I think that it’s in the same vein as this. It’s stronger.
I love all your music analogies and then it dawned on me during my research about you that you both have music backgrounds.
PC: Sierra did an incredible job picking the audio selections, so making a short list of great music jazz clips and good dance clip music that just fit the occasion that sounded like it was in Jim’s world. So that was great. I mean, where did you get some of those from? What were some of your inspirations…
SN: The Sixties. One of the strongest short film pieces that I had seen early on when I was going through the archive of Jim’s was Drums West, an animated short with all these little pieces of cutout paper, and it was done to this drum track by Chico Hamilton. There was also the influence that you can hear in music on Sesame Street. There are all sorts of showbiz-style things in The Muppet Show. Jim also worked a lot with Raymond Scott, who was a pioneer of electronic music. I don’t know if we ended up using much of his music in the end, but that was another big inspiration.
I love Raymond Scott. I have the Manhattan Research Collection. There are so many great tracks on that one. Portofino is incredible. It’s such a simple repetitive track.
SN: That was one of the scratch tracks in the film at one point, Portofino and there’s another Raymond Scott album because he used to do music for commercials. Jim is on the album because he did a commercial with him. Jim loved abstract art and abstract filmmaking at the time and anything experimental and tore down the boundaries that were holding things in.
So what has the reaction to this film been like for both of you?
PC: I was lucky enough to attend Cannes, which I’d never done on any other film that I’d done so far. So that was just a treat of course, but when you make a film, you want it to do well, you want people to tell you you’ve done a good job. I knew it was good, Sierra and I talked about it. We’d set out a goal to make a good film and we felt we’d achieved that.
SN: I got to see it in a few theaters with people, fans, critical fans of the Muppets wanting to see justice done to Jim Henson and hearing uproarious laughter so much so that you’re hoping they’re going to catch the next joke and that was satisfying. It seems that people have learned more about Jim now in a big way.
I think one of the things I always wanted to accomplish with this film was for people to see Jim Henson as an artist and a very multifaceted artist and talented creative person, you can’t bog down too much. It seems that I think people are learning quite a bit more about that and that makes me satisfied, really happy.
Jim Henson Idea Man is available to stream at Disney+
