Jim Henson, who lived from 1936 to 1990, was one of the greatest creative minds of the 20th century. He built a family, both human and fuzzy, that forever changed our ideas about counting and cooperation, spelling and city kids, puppetry and performance. With his wife Jane, puppeteer pals like Frank Oz, Dave Goelz, Jerry Nelson, Carroll Spinney, Jerry Juhl, Fran Brill and, eventually, his own kids, Henson made the silly sublime and the Muppety magical (and the other way around). 

It takes someone equally as steeped in the collaborative artistry of show business to tease out the mind of such a man, flaws and all. Oscar-winning director Ron Howard once appeared on Sesame Street with his Happy Days co-star Henry Winkler, promoting the benefits of teeth-brushing and the joys of counting. (Richie Cunningham tried his best, but it is just so much cooler to go from one-to-ten like the Fonz.) Making counting cool was a central tenet of the famed children’s show, now in its 52nd year, which was the break-out global showcase for Henson and his Muppets, who both got their start in regional television. Howard weaves priceless footage of the earliest Muppets moments into his new documentary Henson’s own experimental short films of the 1960s and early ’70s. 

Why are there so many songs about rainbows? Never mind that, why are there so many films about Muppets? There’s 1970’s The Muppets on Puppets, in which Henson and Rowlf the dog explain the art and history of puppetry; Of Muppets & Men, the 1981 story of the making of The Muppet Show; 1984’s Henson’s Place: The Man Behind the Muppets. In more recent years, documentaries have tracked the singular puppetry of artists like Carroll Spinney (I Am Big Bird) and the puppeteers and public education stars of Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street, not to mention DefunctTV’s excellent six-parter on Henson. While Frank Oz, notably, still awaits the doc treatment, the Muppets gang have never been shy about sharing the secrets of their craft with the world. 

The film’s tagline is “never stop creating”. With that in mind, Ron Howard ed me on Zoom for a chat about the movies and Muppets that have inspired both his own and Henson’s creativity throughout the years. 

(Naturally, we also talked four favorites. Howard’s, in no particular order: the “effortlessly stylish” The Graduate; Mad Max 2 and Raiders of the Lost Ark as a pair—“very often I turn the sound off and just watch to see how brilliantly these scenes were composed”; the “exhilarating moments of rebellion and triumph” in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; and Mr Smith Goes to Washington, which is “really about the possibility of corruption within the US government and our system, and as citizens, our need to recognize that and stand up and fight for it. I’ve always appreciated the bravery of that movie.”

The Wizard of Oz looms large in so many great filmmakers’ childhoods. We’ve recently had a conversation with James Cameron about how important that film is to him. And another Jim, Jim Henson, was no different. 
Ron Howard: Yes, yes.

There are homages to The Wizard of Oz in so many of the Muppet works he did, including Mel Blanc did the voice so I got to meet Mel Blanc and he did he did all the Warner Brothers characters for me in between set-ups. 

There’s another parallel between Wizard of Oz and Jim Henson and that is that today, Labyrinth is a beloved classic, and when it came out, it underperformed and it was a disappointment. It’s hard to imagine that that was the case with Wizard of Oz, a movie that absolutely holds up. I’ve seen it recently with my grandkids and it rivets you. It’s a tight, really tight, beautifully told piece of cinema.

But one of the things that I feel like, even on Sesame Street, is there’s always a wit and a little bit of social satire and we’re invited to laugh at ourselves. I think some of that exists in W.C. Fields stuff, you know? Like he can’t stand to be around so much goodness and yet it finally gets to him. Jim played it so brilliantly. So I think that one is a little closer to the Henson vibe, which depended so much on comedy bits, things that you’d take away that you would more so than Willow, which was a little bit more pure adventure.

I appreciate that you raise Jane Henson. I can’t imagine what a task it must have been to balance what we lifelong Muppet fans want to know and understand about Jim Henson, and the story of Jane and Jim’s artistic and marital partnership. Jane had five children, all of whom have gone into Muppetry in some form. But also it was her stitch. She brought the stitch to the partnership. She was right there at the beginning.
Thank you. It was important. Yeah. She contributed so much. It wouldn’t have happened without her. I think Jim was the first to acknowledge that. It really was the love of what you could do with these puppets from a storytelling standpoint that really did pull them together more than pure romance or that kind of chemistry. What was found was this shared ion and that led to marriage, and a long marriage, and five kids. But it was also the thing that ultimately pulled them apart. 

So to me, I felt like it was important in telling this story to not only celebrate the stories and the characters that we knew we already loved. Not only discover these other projects that Jim threw himself into and that in some ways informed the more high-profile works that still really resonate with us today, whether that’s the Muppets or Labyrinth or the work he did on Sesame Street or elsewhere. 

But I thought a real surprise—and again to create connection for the audience—was to really understand that while all this was going on, there was this other utterly relatable aspect, which is life, marriage, a family. Things that Jim cared about very much. None of these things were thrust upon him. This was part of his dream as well, just as much as living a creative, fulfilled professional life. So I was really happy for the family’s cooperation on both fronts. 

It was hard to get the Jane story into our movie because she was a reluctant interview subject and of course she’s not with us [Jane Henson died in 2013]. Slowly but surely we started finding more bits of moving images and great still photographs and some audio tapes that we could use. Thank God for digital restoration because we’re able to salvage some stuff that might not have been usable a couple of years ago and share it with audiences, so that Jane’s character as an individual and as a true factor in the story of these characters, I think it now rings true and rings through for audiences.

But I say “we” because of a great team making this film. On the editorial side, yes, the archivists, the cooperating with the Henson family archives, was so important. A really active group of producers who were right in there. It was one of those projects where everyone wants to give their all, just like when Jim was working. He didn’t bludgeon people into working 48 hours straight. They just followed him because they loved what they were doing and they loved him. I felt like that echoed through our project and nobody wanted to, you know, to overlook anything. 

If anything, the frustration, of course, was trying to somehow refine all that we were discovering and make it fit in a nice package. Because as we all acknowledged over and over again, Jim would never want this to be boring. He would want it to be funny. He’d want it to have energy. He’d want it to have pace. He’d want it to make its points and move on, because that was the kind of storyteller he was. He’d want to do it with energy, and color, and sound, and make it a fun experience for the audience along with everything else.

You’ve done that in large part by taking your inspiration from Jim’s early films, these incredible 1960s experimental films. You’ve taken The Cube and you’ve put your interviewees in the cube. You’ve taken Limbo: The Organized Mind and you’ve taken Time Piece and made that the frame within which everything exists. I found them extraordinary.
Me too. And there are more. He made a number of experimental films and he spent almost every weekend doing that. But when he wasn’t doing that, he was making home movies with his kids that looked like the counting shorts in Sesame Street. He was always, always experimenting. He was always creating. It was just his absolute calling in life. That sense of quirkiness and fun and experimentation certainly informed the way I wanted to approach our movie.

When we were doing our first interview with Frank Oz, who’s of course his collaborator for decades, we finished the interview, it was really great, and we had a little bit of time. He was shooting in that cube. I said, “Hey, Frank, if I put the camera up high, maybe we could do a stop-motion?” We hadn’t planned it really, but he said, “yeah, great.” We just very quickly roughed out the chair coming in and then Frank did it and knew just exactly how to do it and back up and turn back around and go sit down. We did it one time and it really set the tone for the kind of whimsy and visual fun we were going to have in and around telling the story of Jim Henson as an idea man and the creator of the Muppets.

And underneath it, you always have the bittersweet reality that he was never satisfied. He was never satisfied with himself. He never felt like he fully realized the potential of anything other than maybe The Muppet Show, which he left after five years when he could have gone on for another fifteen years. But he was too creatively restless for that. He’d solved that puzzle and he wanted to go on to the next. I’m so grateful for his personal and creative courage, ambition, and maybe impatience, along with curiosity. It’s just a desire to push himself and know what else he can offer people.

I mean, if I could offer anything at this moment, I would say “Men: call the doctor when you are feeling a bit ill”. We are talking actually on the anniversary of Jim’s funeral, which was May the 21st, 1990. There is that sense that he was too busy working to look after himself, which is just so tragic. And yet also, we’ve had more Muppets since Jim. We’re so lucky that he had this incredible crew of collaborators who continue in his spirit.
I agree with what you’re saying 100%. I know we’re talking about movies, but man, I hope people go back and revisit those Muppet Shows because I was blown away by how fast and funny and how relevant they are and how great the guests are on the show and just how sharp it is. 

Where else do you get a chorus line of dancing cows, honestly?
[Laughs] It was a delight. And again, so frustrating in of all the things that we had to leave out. There’s a lot to go back and rediscover: these experimental films, you know, these great Muppet episodes. I’d go back and find those kooky commercials too. They are a riot. We have a half a dozen of them or so in [the film], but I mean, it just goes on and on and they’re so irreverent.

The violence in them is insane! For those—including, shockingly, some of my colleagues—who have never seen a Muppet movie, which one would be your number one recommendation?
I would do them in order. I really would, because they do evolve. The first one is kind of breathtaking, but they do keep getting better and better. So I’d go in order. 

Richie Cunningham: is he more of a Kermit or more of a Scooter?
Kermit, Kermit, Kermit. Richie and I share something with Jim, which is trying to be the kind of reasonable ones in the midst of chaos. And of course that’s what Kermit was all about. Jim talks about him as a kind of an alter ego. Kermit was trying to get that Muppet Show made every week and it wasn’t always easy, so I think Richie, Ron, Jim Henson, you know, we all kind of relate to Kermit.

Richie and the Fonz—you and Henry—did appear on Sesame Street, the Fonz counting in a very cool way. I’m wondering if you ever got a chance to interact with the Muppets at that time?
Never did. No, never did. We were very disappointed that we were both busy. On the one hand, it was kind of handy that they just came to our set and we could do it. But by the same token, I know I would have loved to have been one of those guests at Sesame Street and it would have been a blast. 

I met Jim only once, very, very briefly backstage at a kind of a crazy live TV event where we were both appearing. At first I thought he was in a band. I just saw these guys coming in looking kind of cool and kind of like hippies. Then I asked who it was and they said, “Jim Henson”, and I said, “wow, the Muppets!” They started unloading the puppets and stuff out of the box. I went over and shook Jim’s hand very briefly. He was shy and quiet, but very kind. 

And he was right. They were capable. They were great. I mentioned it to him at one point and he said, “You know what? Hollywood’s too stupid to hire them. They’re smart and they’re ready to do it and they’re willing to work cheap. They’re speaking my language.” And that was all it took for him to recognize that he could not only give people an opportunity, but he’d benefit from it, which is the way he felt about all of us, giving us an opportunity to make a film. 

The other thing that I’m so grateful for was not only the learning curve, which was very steep on those films and incredibly applicable to movies of all varieties for the rest of our careers, I’m sure. I’m speaking for myself; I still think about lessons that I learned making that first movie. But he also taught a generation to keep the audience in mind, keep the entertainment value and the promise of whatever genre you’re working with in mind and deliver on that. But don’t make it a formula. You have to put your own voice into that. You can be creative and you can be personal and still have the scares, the laughs, the thrills, whatever it is that the movie is promising. He was very astute about that, and he did it in his own work as a director, which was excellent.