Jim Henson: Idea Man

Today on Art of the Cut, we speak with Emmy and ACE Eddie winner, Paul Crowder, ACE, and Sierra Neal about Ron Howard’s documentary, Jim Henson: Idea Man, which can be seen on Disney Plus.

Paul and Sierra have both been on Art of the Cut previously for their other documentaries with Ron Howard, Pavarotti, and The Beatles: Eight Days a Week. 

Paul rose to editing fame with the documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, which won the Audience Award and directing award at Sundance in 2001 and an Independent Spirit Award in 2002. He also had a long tenure with VH-1’s Behind the Music series. Paul is also a director and producer.

Sierra’s work includes the Guns N’ Roses: Live from New York documentary. And Ringo Starr’s Big Birthday Show. She was also an additional editor on the documentary, Carlos - about legendary guitarist Carlos Santana - which was recently featured on Art of the Cut.

Let’s talk about the way the documentary starts. It’s got this little pre-title “Idea Man” cold open montage. Could you talk about the construction of that or the evolution of it as you were building it or choosing how to open the documentary?

CROWDER: We watched all this Jim Henson footage. Sierra and I and Ron and the family went to the Jim Henson Studios, which was the old A & M Records, Charlie Chaplin’s old place on La Brea down in Hollywood. 

We got to watch these incredible old films of his, including “Timepiece,” and all these other pieces - movies that we didn’t know. What was very apparent was his music choices and the eclectic way he liked to put images to music. It was very jazzy, sort of a lot of jazz background or jazz feel especially on some of the experimental movies.

Sierra had compiled a whole bunch of really great music that would fit the Jim [Henson] world. When it came to that opening piece, we decided, well what should we do here?

We’re in The Cube. 

(The Cube is a minimalist set from a Henson experimental film that the documentary team reconstructed as an interview location.)

They’d done the interviews in The Cube. We had the first couple of interviews. What can we do to make the open? What if we built The Cube? That was the thinking.

So we took a still frame of a lock off of The Cube and I broke it up into pieces within the Avid and some in Photoshop and just brought all these squares in, found the right piece of music and just start building The Cubeand do it like Jim would do it. Images would just come in with the music.

“Do, do do, do, do.” [singing] It was really led by the bass guitar and then the final little flourish with a bit of percussion. We built it roughly in off-line and the graphics team cleaned it up and made it look great. I think Sierra, you had the idea of using the Idea Man voice, didn’t you?

NEAL: You had built The Cube and made an awesome kickin’ montage to remind everybody of the recognizable Muppet work, but also to pump people up in a way with that score. We had been trying for a while with different types of cold opens.

We had this really great montage, but it still needed something to set us on our way. We had seen - very early on - a piece by Jim Henson called Idea Man. It was something he used to perform on various variety shows back in the sixties.

There was a great bit of audio that Jim had recorded himself. Basically it’s plucked from a different piece of Jim’s, but we brought it back to life in a new way by reanimating the puppet and giving it sort of a Jim-from-beyond way to set the tone in the beginning and then set us off into the recognizable.

So it was sort of a weird cold open, more of an abstract way to go in into the montage and the building of The Cube and establishing and setting sending us off into the documentary.

CROWDER: We originally built it with a Frank Oz interview. Frank actually did the whole interview. We built The Cube and then Frank started talking and he said of Jim, “He was such a quiet person that his inner mind must be sparkling.” And that kicked us into the montage.

The montage was pretty much the way it is now in the film, but it was all full screen at the time. We were placing bits of it in The Cube, but we hadn’t developed it that much. We had these different Jim voices: “I’m Jim,” “hi, my name’s Jim Henson, I’m a puppeteer.”

We had all those ways in and it wasn’t until Sierra said, “What if we use this audio idea of “Hi, I’m an idea man.” Then we manipulated the footage that we had of the original puppet - which is just a white face on black screen.

We started using that and then what was really, really cool was that Brian Henson got the original puppet out from the Creature Shop. He rebuilt it.

For those who haven’t seen the movie, the face may not resemble a puppet. It’s a “stick figure” mouth and eyes that are articulated in space.

CROWDER: It’s a mouth and eyes, basically. They’re all on strings. So there’s a whole bunch of strings and the eyes and the mouth are all connected to strings and you move it all with your fingers. So there’s all these different movements. It’s incredible.

There’s a tiny bit of footage in the film of him actually doing it. Towards the end we sort of give away that’s how this puppet works. Brian (Jim’s son) then reanimated the puppet to the audio that we had edited of Jim’s voice, so it matched. That’s how it evolved.

It started off as “let’s build The Cube, let’s use this great piece of music, let’s let the bass drums lead the images.” That really set the tone for a lot of the stuff that we wanted to do. What was so apparent was that Jim was so meticulous. 

If you look at the piece of paper where he wrote his editing notes, he’s editing on a little film editor machines at home and he is writing down, “Okay, frame 283 is the cowbell. 276 is the snare drum hit. So he’s editing frame by frame that way, writing it all down!

We wanted to make sure that we paid homage to him by making sure all the percussive beats were really hitting bits and pieces. That’s how it evolved. It was over a process of time. I think it was a great way in because it just really draws you straight into Jim’s world in a really cool way.

I am shocked that that puppet was animated just for this documentary! How did you think “Oh that’s what we should do?”

CROWDER: Brian [Henson] suggested it, or one of the kids suggested it. For our first pass at the concept, we took original footage of the puppet and used Avid FluidMorph and TimeWarps to take different moments of the puppet on camera to sync it as best we could to the voice.

It was cheating pretty well. It looked pretty close, but then Brian said, “Well, what if I got the puppet out and we did it again and we filmed it?” And we said, “Yeah! Sure!”

Please!

NEAL: On this documentary, that’s the beauty of working with a family as prolifically creative as the Henson family. They saw an idea and they went with it. It was kind of a group effort.

CROWDER: Yeah, it’s fantastic to have them say, “Oh we can take it to the next level! We can make it better for you! Lemme just get the puppet out and I’ll rebuild it.” Then we sent them the audio that we wanted “spoken” by the puppet and they did take after take until they got it completely in sync, it was really amazing.

NEAL: The puppet itself is actually operated by two people: one person to do the eyes and one person to do the mouth. It’s really wild.

Talk about all the animation of graphic elements - like sketches or drawings. The sketches come alive! Talk to me about how that evolved. Did you start out where, “Okay, we’re just gonna cut the sketch in as a still and it’ll sit there for a while but we want to animate it so we’ll send that off to animation.” How did that work?

CROWDER: Yeah, that’s pretty much it. We have all these great sketches of gems, right? So we were able to scan those in, bring them in and do small little moves in the Avid. We actually had cards for the coat.

Ron came up one day and he said, “Wouldn’t it be great if we did our own stop-frame animation of the coat?”

Kermit being created from the mother’s coat?

CROWDER: Yeah. So that was something that we did. Then as they started building those things we thought, “Okay, we could do it for this. We could do it for the eyes of the robots that are getting built” and other places like basketball turning into Ralph, et cetera.

So we sort of embellished once we had the idea, “Oh we could lean on that here and lean on that there. Wouldn’t it be great to use more stop motion?” And the more it came in, the better it looked. We thought, “Let’s open it up a bit more so it’s got more time for it.”

The other thing was The Cube that we were in. The film, The Cube, in 1967, its plot is that it’s this place where weird things happen. So that’s what we were thinking: “Let’s make The Cube a place where anything can happen.” We thought about stop-motion.

They shot the Frank Oz interview first and he did some stop-motion and we used it at the beginning of the film where he pops in and we had Jim’s children do some stop motion stuff for their entries and we were gonna stop-motion everybody, but it became a little too much. But it worked right at the beginning for Frank. Then we did stuff where they disappear out the chair.

So we shot empty frames with the chair in it. They’re sitting and they would change angle. They’d shoot blank plates with the chair and then the subject would sit in the chair. So we were able to make them just pop and they just disappear now and put the animation from [the short film] Drums West and threw that over the top to make the little pop.

And then what the TV then appeared and then we could put something on the tv. So those things were all being developed by Sierra and I during the cut as we were going. And then we went and had the graphics people redo them and make it look really good. But I think the first piece we put together was the intro of the kids. At the time we only had Frank and the three children, maybe four.

That’s all we’ve got. So let’s build a kids bit because we have the kids. Let’s build the section that intros the kids. [Jim’s daughter] Cheryl says, “My mom and dad have four kids in five years. And I instantly thought: “Sesame Street! 1! 2! 3! 4!” and cut the kids things in: “Four siblings! One! Two! Then they had another child! 1-2-3-4-5!”

So we sort of set up using Sesame Street and intercutting Sesame Street with our images and their photographs and then popping them around The Cube and making them dance around The Cube and it just felt like this wonderful mesh of Jim’s Sesame Street and our film.

Sadly that scene ended up on the cutting room floor, but Sierra and I built this wonderful intro to all the kids talking about Jim as a puppet and his name was in the phone book as a puppeteer and he always considered himself a puppeteer.

And it was a really wonderful intro up until you know the next bit, but it informed the whole film the way that Sierra and I cut that together and that was the building block for everything else.

That’s when The Cube got built and we started doing the intro on the back of that, but it was really those two scenes really became the voice or the language for the film and how we could do this. “This could be great.”

So it all built from there, then when we sadly cut that scene, we thought, “Okay, when that used to be in the film, it set the film up so well we’ve gotta make sure that we do that now that it’s gone - replace that energy, replace those feelings.”

The whole idea from the beginning that Sierra and I approached it - and we talked to Ron and [Jim’s adult children] about it. And they were very much into the idea that we used the “Jim effect” to try and make this feel as much of a “Jim edit” as possible, so that was our lead.

Sierra and I just had a blast because there were no limits! You could try anything ‘cause Jim would do anything and if it didn’t work, it didn’t work, but you could say, “Let’s try it! Let’s put a bit of animation here! Let’s do this! Let’s have pictures fly around the wall and then change scenes that way!”

It felt very much like Jim was editing the movie. 

NEAL: That’s good to hear. That is definitely what we set out to do. And he WAS an editor. It wasn’t his main craft, but you learn in this film that Jim Henson was really an experimental filmmaker at his core, so in the 1960s obviously he was a young guy making his own movies and he’s editing his own stuff.

He loved animation and stop-motion animation and little tiny pieces of paper cut together to make an animated thing. In that screening that Paul talked about, we just saw one short film after the next that kind of blew our minds.

They were all so experimental, inventive, funny, energetic, fast-paced for the most part and interesting and different. We tried to sprinkle them throughout this documentary. You could see some of it when Paul was talking about little transitions we would use in different places.

At one point there’s a boxed-in sort of graphic animation where we were trying to show how Jim was feeling boxed in creatively by being a children’s entertainer. We used something from his films, a box animation.

All these hints and all the cues were in Jim’s style - in his musical choices, his editing style. We could really try anything and if it didn’t work, it didn’t work. But a lot of times we thought, “That’s cool! That works!”

CROWDER: It would work more often than not. What’s interesting about what, when we were watching Jim’s work, I’m thinking to myself, “This could have been edited last month!

This could have been edited in the last couple of years!” Then you realize, “Wait a minute, that’s Super-16mm, maybe Super8mm!” and it’s full of opticals! There were so many opticals that he did.

There were so many of his films that had these double images - multiple layers of images- which in the Avid today they’re easy - just put a superimpose on it and ’ta da!’ A bit more of this … 50% more, 20% more. He’s doing optical after optical fast edit after fast edit, single frame editing, double frame editing!

I loved it. Sierra and I are watching it thinking, “What great fun! What great style!” As editors we’re thinking, “Woo-hoo! We can have a blast with this!” But imagine what he went through to get that, compared to how easy it is for us to do the hours of painstaking stuff. He had every frame with every bit of audio written down. He’d counted the frames and “this is where this thing hits and…”

He had an amazing, amazing mind to do that with the tools at his fingertips. And we get to recreate and do things in his style with the tools we have at our fingertips. They’re a lot easier today to do stop-motion than it was then.

At one point I actually shot - for one of our test scenes - we took his 1963 home vacation movie and he had cutouts of his family, so I had my wife do cutouts for us.

She cut out four people that could be Jim’s family and could be Frank and the other guys coming in. Then, on my bar top I had a friend of mine set up a camera and I shot stop-frame, just ran the camera and then just moved him in one bit at a time and then did a stop-frame edit and threw it in the cut when we were introducing the team.

So we were doing stuff being really inspired by Jim in that same fashion, sometimes having to go back to the old-fashioned methods, ‘cause I couldn’t do it in After Effects. I just thought, “It’s much easier for me to just shoot it - do it there and then just cut it together.”

So we started getting into stop-frame and I’m just thinking of how hard that was just to digitize it and separate the frames and make ’em look like they’re moving right and getting the right amount of time. While I was doing it, I thought of how hard it was for Jim.

If you screw up one frame, when you’re editing back on an old film editor you’ve got take the tape off and you’ve ruined that frame. It was insane what he went through, but it was great fun to recreate.

Tell me a little bit about the structure of the storytelling because although you do start relatively in the beginning of his life, it does become nonlinear. What was the purpose of the nonlinearity? What was the creative decision where you decided you’re trying to follow an emotional path instead of a chronological path?

CROWDER: Sierra and I would take sections and build pods of this story beat and that story beat. We’d have everything built in moments. We broke the idea of the film into Acts, but we weren’t sure exactly where everything was gonna go and how it was gonna go.

The first scene used to be “Cube Build Intro the Kids” because they’re gonna talk a lot in this film, so let’s get them in and get that story out the way and we can have fun with it and here they come.

So we had all these great sections and then as the film was being built we started moving it around in little pieces. I mean the film’s fairly linear, but we allow ourselves to jump about.

We can do that because we have The Cube. “Anything can happen in the cube,” so that made that very easy. Once we had The Cube built, the first scene that ended up working for us, was the scene with Jim being photographed. Sierra saw it and was said, “This is great!”

NEAL: The Norman Seef footage [Seef is known for photos of rock stars and celebrities], which is that photography session footage. We were trying to find a way to “land in Jim” and the archive was so big, but there was not a plethora of interviews of Jim himself.

When Jim was being interviewed, he very rarely revealed a deeper side of himself. Dick Cavett, would interview Jim, but then wants to talk to Kermit and then Kermit comes into the interview and Kermit does the rest of the interview.

So you get THIS much of Jim in all these interviews. We were sort of lacking for personal moments with Jim talking to us for a period of time. We were living in his work and it was great, but I think Ron in particular was missing a little bit of that: the side of Jim Henson, the man that we all wanted to know about.

The Norman Seef footage was sort of hidden in the archive. We hadn’t seen it really. And it turned out to be a bit of an interview/photo shoot. He was asking him some pretty good questions and Jim was being himself. He was very comfortable.

It was in the 1980s at that point. He had had some success and he was excited about the projects that were happening and we got some good stuff out of that. So, because it ended up being an important interview, we cut back to it once or twice in the film when we go back to the 80s and we live in that for a little bit.

That was a piece that really helped pull it all together.

CROWDER: Jim doesn’t talk about being a kid. Jim doesn’t talk about that much in this interview and there’s nothing in that interview. Then suddenly this Orson Welles interview came up and there was some great moments in that where, he’s asking the questions and Jim’s saying awesome things so we can use that when he’s talking about his childhood.

That gets us back to his childhood. So, now we’ve gotta jump forward to this interview from the late seventies, early eighties. And that sort of gave us the impetus - because we had The Cube and bring the TV up - but we could jump forward to that moment. He could introduce Jim as a successful person.

Orson Welles could give us a bit of backstory. What’s great about it is that he introduces Frank and Jim, who are our two main voices for the film: the survivor of the era, and the closest person you could get to actually interviewing Jim that could talk about everything. So that really helped as well. It was this is great piece.

So that allowed us to jump forward there and then go back to his childhood again in the Jim world, all bets were off. Every time we did something - moved out the timeline and went forward and did this transition to get us there - we thought, “Yep, flying for me. Is it flying for you?” Everyone was into it and there was no pushback ever.

That’s one of the great things. We made so many changes and we moved things around a lot in the film to end up with a structure that we’re in. But there was never any pushback about anything we were doing, it was all received so positively. There were afterthoughts: “We could move that there. If we move that scene that helps us with this.”

Because we were in The Cube and we’d had that thought process. We didn’t have any rules to really set the storytelling or having to be linear.

And it’s always much better if it’s less like that when you’re telling it because it’s so predictable, but at the same time, in order to understand Jim’s arc a little more and his frustrations of trying to get the Muppet Show started and trying to do all these things and getting dragged into Sesame Street, it was important that it was linear for most of the time because you have to see what he’s up against.

He’s doing this! He’s doing that! He wants to do this, but now he does that,”  so we had to stay in  the timeline for a lot of that. But The Cube just gives you that place where you can jump forward, jump back and do whatever you need to.

Then we thought, “Well, we could project stuff on The Cube.” So then they rebuilt The Cube here in LA and they did a bunch of projections and just handed us more material to work with. That again, gave you another place to go, another way of transitioning from here to there, and we don’t have to stay linear.

Did the two of you have a wall of story cards that you were using to talk about structure or were the structural changes more watching something and thinking while you were watching the film, instead of looking at a wall where the structure is laid out?

CROWDER: It was in pieces, right Sierra? “We’re gonna work on this section.”

NEAL: We did have a story map that Mark [Monroe] and Dane Charbeneau put together. There was a timeline that we had in a document somewhere that we always referred back to. I often do cards on the wall, but I didn’t for this one.

I think Paul’s right, we sort of had these scenes or themes that we knew we had to hit like the marital dispute or Jane’s Declaration of Independence. We always knew we were gonna have to get there and we had built that scene. We just built a scene at a time as it made sense and started putting the pieces together - however it flowed and made made sense. We experimented with it along the way.

CROWDER: We would think of it linearly: we’ve got the Timepiece scene. This is the experimental movie scene, and it was a much, much longer scene about going to New York, going to watch movies. Frank and Jim would go to these films and sit in the theater all day watching film after film.

Like, Andy Warhol made a film that was just a shot of the Empire State Building for eight hours…

NEAL: …24 hours…

CROWDER:  …24 hours of the Empire State Building, just a lock off! That’s it! That’s the film! And Jim and Frank would sit and watch these things and Frank would say to Jim, “This is pretty bad, right?” A lot of these films were awful.

And Jim would say, “Yeah but that one’s good and that bit’s good.” And he’d get inspiration from these little pieces. So we’d have this big long scene about going to NY to watch experimental films. There were lots of elements that were great in it and that was built.

Now that’s a scene. We’ve got lots of stuff to pull from there. Sierra and I just had built these - like the Labyrinth scene - we’d figure “Okay, we’re gonna do the Muppets, how are we gonna do that? How do we intro Sesame Street?”

Editor Paul Crowder, ACE

We’ve just built all these little pods of moments of his life. We start putting them together. We start laying them out and it’s “how do we get from this scene to this scene? We’ve got The Cube or we could cut straight to that one quite easily” and then everything gets trimmed down.

Of course everything’s too long in the first cut. We’ve got a lovely two and a half hour cut, which is great and so much fun to watch, but we can’t keep it all, which is a sad thing. Then it was moving the parts. The real thing was that we had all this wonderful stuff, and we were telling all the stories of how everything got made, but we were missing the heart of it all.

We thought we were lacking Jim, but it was Ron who really kept focusing on Jane: “We’ve gotta get back to Jane. We’ve gotta understand Jane’s story because she’s absolutely everything to him.”

Once we started adding Jane and kept embellishing her story within all the stories, that’s when everything really started to come together and it drew you in as an audience member.

Suddenly you were really leaning in and she became such a massive anchor for the film. We had little interviews with her. It was the same situation.

There weren’t a lot of interviews, and two of the interviews were only done with Dictaphones, because they were only recorded for a magazine article, so the Dictaphone’s on a coffee table somewhere and they’re over here talking, and you can barely hear it.

But she said great stuff and she’s talking while making a cup of tea or whatever. She’s swallowing her words sometimes and just sort of matter-of-fact about the way she’s sort of bringing up these conversations.

But they were really important because she was saying some fantastic stuff. Luckily, right towards the end of production, AI got really good, and we were able to clean that audio up in a way I couldn’t believe ‘cause it was a struggle with some of it to actually hear it. Ron wanted more Jane. “Can we get Jane in here?” And that was the key to the film, I felt.

As an audience member, I felt very connected, and that was a very interesting part of the story to me. 

You mentioned Timepiece. I did not know that Jim was such an experimental filmmaker. Editing seems so important to that movie. Is it hard to edit something like that and try to maintain the original feel of the edit?

CROWDER: Yeah.

NEAL: For sure. It was. Jim was talking specifically about the style of editing that he used in that film. In fact, that film is kind of all about the editing, like you’re saying. And we knew that it was an important film in the story of Jim’s life.

So we knew that we weren’t just gonna show a couple of shots of it. We needed the audience to get into that film for a little while. So we knew it was gonna be a scene rather than a little quick moment where some other films got to be a shot.

We knew it was an important one in his career story. So it needed time to establish the editing style of it, and then of course for it to build and also get across the message of time running out.

So there were a couple different things you had to balance when putting that scene together: the editorial style, the beauty of it, and the fun of that film, ‘cause it’s funny, but it’s also about a man who’s running for his life ‘cause time is chasing him and he doesn’t have enough time to do all of these things. 

Here is this fast-paced film that the editing style was laid out right in front of us. So we talked about that scene quite a lot. It worked pretty well from the beginning.

I don’t remember having a million revisions on that scene. We had to just establish the style - the editorial style in the beginning and then follow it through and and give that message away. It was because it was important in the end in another level of the story that we were telling about Jim’s life, which was the fact that Jim’s older brother had died when he was very young and seeing death at this young age compelled Jim to feel like he was always racing against the clock.

So that film, Timepiece, is really very representative of his life in a lot of ways, and his drive in his career and his drive to never stop doing a million things at once. He would not sleep for two days. Jim would be constantly working. He would work through the night often. So that film really represents an important theme in Jim’s life that we wanted to get across.

CROWDER: Because of the start of the film. We were able to play a good chunk of it and then cut to another chunk, and it would still feel okay, we had to condense the film down. So it was just choosing the moments.

But when we chose the moment, then the next set of shots are all Jim’s. It wasn’t just us choosing a shot from this scene and another shot from there.

We left it up in strong pieces and let them play. Another thing that we did there, there’s a couple of subtle shots where Jim had the clock, and the clock would change, and he’d be superimposing another image with it, and it would change, change, change.

Then there was this one shot where there was just the clock and no face. I thought, “Well, what if we superimpose the interview head now?”

Lisa was talking, so I put Lisa’s face in the clock, and it’s really quick and subtle, but you just feel like you’re watching the film, but you see Lisa in there saying what she was saying, and then we cut to a bit more, and there’s another time where you can see Brian superimposed on one of the buildings in there.

So we were trying to manipulate the film a little bit as well for our purposes. But without taking anything away from the original media. It doesn’t feel like we’ve edited it. It was very important to keep the film alive in itself, but we can’t show the 15 or 20 minutes of the full film, so we have to get it down.

It was a bit longer when we first did it. We probably “over-egged the pudding” in how much of the film we were showing. So we did cut it down.

But you have so many great shots and it just feels so connected all the time with everything he was doing. Sierra, what was his word for the kind of editing he was doing?

NEAL: He calls it train-of-thought editing.

CROWDER: Yes. Train-of-thought editing.

NEAL: I’m thinking like it’s a free-jazz kind of thing. You think, “Oooh, what do I put here? Put this here, put this here.” Paul makes another cool point, which was just the merging of Jim’s editing with a little bit of our editing to kind of make it a little bit more fluid.

When we were living in Jim’s work, we stayed very true to his work, but here and there, a little sprinkle to bring you back into our film.!

CROWDER: Like Cheryl [Henson’s daughter] says, “If you want to know my dad, see Timepiece.” Behind Cheryl we’ve got the animation that’s in Timepiece - there’s all the little pieces of paper that are dancing. So we left those up, and they’re on The Cube behind her.

We separated the elements - Jim shot it in black so you can bring just the animated paper up. So we would do anything like that where we could embellish his work into our work and make it connect whenever we could.

Another way we were able to do that with Timepiece was just to take the elements and use them to our advantage, but give the audience as much of his film as we could. It was an Academy Award-nominated movie. Great piece of work.

As an audience member, I did not realize that that Timepiece movie or scene was going to lead to the story of the death of Jim’s brother. When you were editing it, did you realize that that’s where it was gonna be going? Or was it that you cut that scene together - the Timepiece scene - and you knew you had to get to the brother at some point, and then it felt like, “Oh, this will be perfect: Timepiece going into brother’s death.”

CROWDER: Our thesis is that Jim is in a race against time. We knew that was a thing that we were gonna be following, and we’d already had some soundbites that talked to that. So taking the Frank interview to get to that question of: “Why? Why? Why was he so obsessed with time?”

Frank had a couple of different answers and then he says that one thing about, “I think he was so obsessed because it came about through the death of his brother” and it just seemed the perfect place to put it.

Once you’ve done Timepiece, you’ve seen a guy that’s worrying about [death]. So, yeah, let’s go to the brother now. It tells us that this Timepiece movie has just informed us a lot about Jim’s personality and here’s why. It really was the perfect place to do that.

Then it was a little confusing in our first screenings because it felt like Jim’s brother had died then in 1967 when he made Timepiece, when in fact he died in 1956. So we made sure we got that information on the screen so the audience understood that. It was definitely a moment we knew we were gonna hit and that just felt like it was a natural place to go.

Talk about your relationship or your collaboration with the archival people who are finding footage from both inside and outside Henson’s library. There’s footage from all kinds of places that couldn’t have all been in Henson’s catalog.

NEAL: It wasn’t all, but it was a lot. Obviously, different things are owned by different people, but this was a unique project in that the Henson company has an archivist, a wonderful woman named Karen Falk. I think she’s been there for a number of years.

She basically overhauled their archive and did some major work to catalog everything but also do restorations and find little pieces of film - Sesame Street things or early things that maybe influenced Sesame Street.

But they had a lot of it. One of the biggest things was just trying to whittle that down and figure out how to tell the story with it. The other thing that touched on in your questions is that we use different archive in kind of random spots, right?

Something that doesn’t feel like it fits there kind of fits there because Jim had so much work, so many films. It was like a playground. So much of his early work in the 1960s - before he got famous - was having fun with his mates and his crew: “Okay, we’ve got these puppets.

We need to make a coffee commercial, but we gotta pitch it first to the executives, so why don’t we do a funny pitch tape? Why don’t we make it like a mockumentary?” 

A lot of the archival is from Jim’s work. There are interviews from various places that took time to find. The external part of the archival search happened slowly over time. ‘cause it took us a long time to go through the Jim Henson archives and then to realize, “Hey, we don’t really have that Jim that we’re looking for, or the Jane that’s part of the story that we’re looking for.”

Jane did an interview for the Jim Henson biography, so she was interviewed for that. So there are long audio tapes of Jane’s interviews, and that’s where something like that came from.

So it was just digging deeper and then farther: “Okay, we don’t have enough Jim’s talking, so are there more interviews out there?”

Paul, along the way, has really taught me to kind of never give up on finding archival and searching because there’s so much out there, and it takes time.

Often on films, you don’t have that time, so you need the cooperation of everybody on the team to know what we need, what to look for, and where we can keep going. That’s where, eventually, that Norman Seeff interview came up because we were really just looking for more bites from Jim.

When we found that, we thought, “Oh, this is beautiful! This is beautiful!” It reveals itself as you’re editing the film. You start to realize what would work and what would make it better along the way. So you just keep diving.

CROWDER: The Henson archive was huge. They accumulated everything that they could. So they’ve got all the Sesame Street episodes. They’ve got all the Muppet Shows. But just going through that alone - just the episodes is so much footage. Sierra did an incredible job going through and getting the selects sorted out.

But the archive just kept getting bigger and bigger. Then we found a German TV documentary of Sesame Street, like season two or three of Sesame Street, and this great German behind-the-scenes footage that had never really been seen. That stuff wasn’t in Street Gang.

What was great was we had something that we could use about Sesame Street that hadn’t been used already. A wonderful little find.

There were those moments of the archive that got bigger and better and really helped inform the film. There’s so much footage and so many photographs. At the same time, you’re also posing questions. What’s wonderful about having the family on your side - having Cheryl and Lisa and Heather and Brian - was that they know pretty much everything that does exist.

They’ve had these conversations, and you could say, “Is there another thing?” they could tell you, yes or no - what you have and what you haven’t. A lot of the time, the answer was, “Yeah, I think we might have that.” So now we’re on tenterhooks as they go look for it.

Then a little more time goes by and it shows up, and it’s great. It’s just what we wanted. It was deep in the archive, and they had to go get it. Photographs came in right towards the end, like the last couple of months!

We’d been doing all this historic stuff about the family and Jim being at school. All the family growing up and all the family moments. And suddenly, there was a whole bunch of photographs that came in that covered that whole 50s-60s-70s era.

When those showed up, it visually took the documentary up a complete notch in those historical parts and filled in some gaps that were a little wanting with the quality of the images. We had plenty of images to use, but these images were on point.

“There’s that moment!” and we could really, really tell those stories really well. You wanna try and put the audience as best you can visually in the moment. “We’re in the moments business,” as my good friend Andy Sheer used to tell me - it was like the second episode of Behind the Music that I’d done. He said that to me and I thought, “God! That’s so brilliant! That’s exactly what we’re doing,” isn’t it?

That’s what we’re always trying to do: get our audience to be in those moments, so whenever you can completely 100% join the dots visually to the story, that’s the hardest part of documentary making where you’ve got all these great stories - people are reminiscing about these great things, all this fantastic story when this incredible thing happened - but do you have any footage?

No. No one took a picture. We weren’t rolling cameras. It happened while we were out in the middle of nowhere. How do we tell the story? That’s what I love about this craft: finding ways to make it feel like you were there. We’ve put visuals together that have created a moment that didn’t exist and now we can tell the audience and share that.

That’s the power of picture, right? A single frame tells you so much.

Can either of you think of an example of that, where you’ve got a great story beat that you need to tell, and there’s just nothing? This is a great moment. There are no visuals. What do we do?

CROWDER: Jim at school was the hardest one. We had three photographs of him sort of up close and a shot of him. I think we had four pictures, five pictures - him meeting Jane at college running the class. He’s already doing puppets.

Then some photographs right towards the end of production showed up of him in class. A few of the classroom pictures came in very, very late. “Oh my god! There he is in the class now!”

It isn’t a cheat! We had some good behind-the-scenes stuff of him in Washington DC when they were doing the Sam French show that we were trying to cheat and a couple where he didn’t have the beard, and we could get some closeups of him with a puppet that we were using.

But then three or four photographs actually showed up. That’s the moment right there! Same with the family. When the family was breaking up - or potentially breaking up - and Jane was really doing everything to keep the family together, we had some nice family photos.

But suddenly there was a whole bunch of color stuff of them by the tree and in the yard and stuff that, that was right in that era rather than a little earlier or a little later that we were cheating for the moment. Those are the moments I can just think of offhand, off the top of my head.

Sierra, you might be able to remember more. Those were definitely photos that came in later that really pushed those scenes stronger.

It’s so interesting that there’s an evolution to covering those beats. You start with something that’s maybe not that great visually, but then eventually, something comes in.

CROWDER: When we watch the next version of the cut-down, what wonderful is Ron’s reaction to it? He’s seen this scene that he is very familiar with for quite a few months, and then you watch it the next time, and it’s like, “Wow! Where’d you get those pictures?” He’s all excited about it!

So that’s always a great thing as well when that stuff comes up, and you get to reveal to everybody, “Hey, these scenes just got better,” and you’ve not really said anything. Sierra and I are having fun with them. We get them in, and then everybody gets to see them in the cut and they say, “Oh my God! are those the pictures?

This makes the scene so much better.” You’d’ve thought this stuff could come in during the first batch of archive and suddenly somebody has discovered a box of photos somewhere and there you go! The film’s got an even better lease on life.

Sierra, let’s talk about the pacing inside of a tonal moment. So there are very crazy fast paced experimental film kind of moments, fun moments and then there’s darker, sadder family moments and difficult moments. As an editor I was aware that the pace of the editing was supporting the tone. Can you talk to me about that? Knowing that you’re in a certain tone of a story beat and that the editing needs to be different?

NEAL: We wanted to establish this fast-paced, energetic kind of frenetic editing that we wanted to start the film that we knew would be the style that represented Jim throughout the film, ‘cause it’s all about rushing against the clock.

Then there were these few moments in his life that were really important to his personal journey and the side of Jim that wasn’t career-oriented.

But we also had these points in his personal life - these quiet moments that were apparent. I know that the composer, David Fleming, picked up on that right away in our temp music. We had temped music in there, but he picked up on that early and decided to make the music also thematically very different in those different scenes. 

So that was a conscious effort as well because we had musical themes throughout the film that support that fast-paced energy kind of thing.

Then when his brother dies, when his wife starts to get upset that he is not spending any time at home and sort of disregarding her in the relationship - the Declaration of Independence scene as we call it - and other moments later in his career - maybe like when things weren’t going the way Jim wanted them to go in his career - “Hey, what do I do? I’m at a bit of a crossroads or I am hurt because my film wasn’t well received” or things like that.

It was clear that they had to be treated differently. We weren’t gonna make light of those scenes. We were just going to try to balance the extreme energy of Jim’s working life with certain quieter and more somber moments. There are a few deaths.

His friend dies - that he worked with for a really, really long time -  and how do we use The Cube as well in the same way because The Cube had been very exciting and flashy and quick and how do we still use this device that we had for these softer or more somber moments?

They had rebuilt the cube in LA at one point to shoot some more projections and to do some more creative things with it. At some point we tried actually projecting Jim’s work on the walls of the cube in full and filming that. We used some of Jim’s early home movies.

A lot of times you’ll see the clouds, you’ll see nature, you’ll see intimate, quiet moments with his children when they’re young kind of being flashed around the frames at some of these times. And we tried to use The Cube as best we could to show the more spiritual side of Jim.

They were more spiritual moments. Jim was actually a spiritual person but because Jim didn’t really talk about it very much, it was hard to elaborate on it. Frank talks about it a little bit. So we used that side of Jim, the spiritual side to kind of guide the editing in those scenes.

CROWDER: Like anything you work on, with the pacing of the scene, what’s the story that I’m telling? That’s the thing you’re always leaning to.

So we’re taking a turn here. If it’s the death scene, if it’s a spiritual scene or whatever it is: use the music, bring the music down, change the pace of the film here, so then, what you get on the back of those scenes is that when you pick the pace back up and get the energy boost in the storytelling.

The music picks up, the image is changing, and the editing’s got faster, so that helps you give us the juxtaposition of Jim’s world, of Jim’s life where he’s always at it.

Then these moments where reality is setting in, and he’s having to deal with real life, I think those are the times where we were bringing the pacing down. And it was very important that you do that. 

It was something I learned early on in when I was doing Dogtown and Z Boys that I built all these scenes where everything was so frenetic and fast. And when we watched the first cut, it was like, “Stop it a minute. It was like a visceral overload.

I knew while making that, “God, you gotta have a break so you can get back because it’s just too much.” That was very much what I learned. In storytelling, it’s really important that the audience itself gets a chance to take a breath and sit back and sort of relax and just take things in a little bit more comfortably rather than bombarding them with information and photographs and and stuff. 

But that was very much Jim’s life. That was very much Jim’s style, the way he liked to make things. They were all very energetic. But it’s very important that you have that balance so the audience can take a bit of a breath and that those moments play better, play stronger.

There’s the pace of the individual scenes, but then it’s also the transitions and the pace of the whole movie or the tradition between the scenes. One of the great ones that I loved was the “Muppet Success Montage,” which is very fast and very energetic and very fun. And that goes right into the slowness of the “It’s Not Easy Being Green” scene. I love the dynamics of that. Did you know that was gonna happen all along or was that one of those things where you thought, “You know what? We just had a big fast moment and this “Not Easy Being Green” scene is slow. Let’s stick them together!” How did that happen?

CROWDER:  Sierra built that scene out the gate, but I think it’s one of those things where we need to get “Green” in and it just naturally turns that way.

Once you hit the song and you start throwing the music in, it leads you down that road. It was just something that naturally came together.

Rita Moreno being interviewed in The Cube.

NEAL: We knew we had to play that scene in the context of the Muppet Show. That’s actually not true, because early on we did have the Sesame Street version, the very first version, of “Not Easy Being Green.” There are multiple performances of that song over the years.

The first one was on an early Sesame Street and it was much more simple. It was Kermit just on a stage singing very quietly. And it made sense in the Muppet Show scene as I think just a natural progression of things.

Rita Moreno was sort of holding down where we were in the story at that point, and she really led us into “Being Green” with what she had to say about it. She was a lovely interview to use there. It just felt natural.

The Muppet Show scene was gonna be so much fun and funny and big and it’s gonna be the meat of this documentary in a lot of ways, ‘cause it’s what people definitely want to see and are excited to relive - the Muppet Show - and laugh and enjoy it all.

In the movie they talk about how much it was a lot of work and a tough grind for them. It sort of built an energy and success and there’s a rise along the way. After you give the audience so much to chew on, you need to just breathe for a little while.

And it worked to go into “Being Green” at the end of the Muppet Show because it represented - now that I’m thinking about it - there’s a montage right after “Being Green.” There’s like the big Muppet show scene and Rita Moreno doing “Fever” and then “Being Green” and then it picks up again after that.

It’s the dynamic that is what was needed because we really took people on a ride through the Muppet Show as we were seeing the Muppet Show.

Then “Being Green” is such a special song that we knew people are going to…

CROWDER:  …they’re gonna demand hearing it…

…be expecting it.

NEAL: Exactly. So it has to come at the right time. So you were feeling good after you watched the Muppet Show. You got to know all the characters and then really realize that throughout Jim’s work - even something as funny and silly as the Muppet Show - there is this undercurrent of humanity and caring and generosity and understanding.

That was in all of Jim’s work throughout, it’s maybe not always out in the forefront like it is in “Being Green,” but it’s really always there. There’s a touch of humanity in just about every episode of everything that he’s done. So you needed a breath.

CROWDER:  Obviously, naturally, the way the song is, it’s gonna be a slower moment because it starts with the piano and comes in quietly, but who to use? It’s this wonderful song called “Green” that’s actually telling you so much more, talking about color and everything and inclusivity and all of that.

But what I think happens in these movies is that you interview people, and you don’t know what you’re gonna get from the interview. You don’t know any of the content that’s actually gonna come in those moments.

But then you get an interview like Rita where she delivers it in such a beautiful way. It lent to the moment so much it made that transition. She started to really take you there in the way she was telling it. So it’s something you couldn’t predict.

If you had Frank talking about it, it’d be a very different energy. Is one of the kids talking about it? Very different energy. Rita’s energy was just so perfect for the moment that it just embellished it even more. Sierra, I think it was your idea to put the colors on the wall to turn it green…

NEAL: That was Ron.

CROWDER: Ron, sorry!

NEAL: Ron always wanted to…

CROWDER: No, it was the editors! It’s always the editor! (Laughter)

NEAL:  It also makes sense, right? “Let’s put green on the walls.”

CROWDER: The more we put on the walls with The Cube, the more we wanted it. “Let’s put more stuff on The Cube! Let’s put more stuff on The Cube!” So we started leaning into that. Obviously with “Being Green,” it seemed the obvious way to go. I like what we did there.

I want to talk about finding moments of emotional truth that symbolize a moment. I’m thinking of the story beat about the critical failure of Labyrinth There’s a great shot of Jim as that’s being verbalized that is obviously not Jim listening to critics, but it certainly FELT like that was emotionally true to that moment. Can you talk about finding that and deciding to put that in at that point?

CROWDER:  There was a whole scene of behind-the-scenes footage - I don’t remember about making what - but they’re in a meeting, and the camera’s just concentrating on Jim, and Jim’s probably done an 18-hour day already.

He’s tired and the camera’s caught his mind somewhere. Whatever he’s thinking, he’s looking down, and he’s serious, and he is just staring, and it was perfect. It was the perfect image for that - rather than a photograph or something.

Being able to go to live action footage like that and put you in the moment, that’s just going through the archive. It’s a great job from Sierra, finding the shot, finding the archive and placing that in the timeline. “This works.”

Then there’s another bit where they cut away for a second - someone walks across the camera - there’s another couple of shots, and then it’s back to him, and he is thinking still. So you’ve got two or three shots where it really feels like he’s reading the crap reviews for Labyrinth, and he’s having a real moment. 

To be able to find those moments and to remember them when you’re looking at random archival is amazing.

NEAL: We keep making categories as we go: happy Jim, sad Jim, working Jim, home Jim, family Jim, playing Jim.

Are they in bins? How are these categories organized?

NEAL: Select sequences. So as we keep digging, you figure out the story as you’re going along. Like with what we were talking about earlier, needing coverage and not having coverage. But you also have lots of reels of behind the scenes of Labyrinth.

And here he is with Frank and Frank is saying something. Maybe that Frank and Jim shot could work here? The more times you go back to those bins or those sequences and scrub through them and look at them again, the more familiar you are with them.

So then you’re editing, and you see something that could really work for you, and you try it out, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.

CROWDER: “There’s that shot of Jim! Which selects was it in?” Then you gotta go through them all. “Oh yeah, it was this one. It’s not in Happy Jim. I thought that would be in Happy Gym. Okay, must be in this Jim, must be in playful Jim.”  

One of the things I like to do is I have a bin called Hip Pocket, which is just like, “Here’s a great moment. I don’t know where this goes, but that’s an incredible shot. That’s a funny scene. That’s a great voice.” And I just put it in my Hip Pocket bin.

Then, “Let me check the Hip Pocket and see what’s in there. Maybe there’s something in there that can just work right here.” 

I have to say that the amount of work Sierra did in pulling selects in the early part of this film - because we were working on Idea Man for a long time - and before Sierra and I really got into the edit, Sierra spent at least nine months, maybe a year, I’m not sure, going through everything and making these incredible bins of selects.

Hours and hours of selects of this, selects of that. And here are all these best Sesame Street scenes and these are the good Muppet Show scenes. We had so much stuff to look through and go through that when we had these moments, we needed something, just hit the select bin and there it was. You’d find something very quickly.

So it was incredible diligent work from our research team, but essentially all Sierra building those sequences. So we had that to go to and it worked so well for us.

This is one of the most exciting and most fun edits I’ve had for a very, very long time, and an edit that I’m going to step back from and say, “Wow! I could watch that again!”

We sat with the film for so long. I’m happy to watch it when we went through the screenings and the film just flies by it. It just really makes you think, “Wow, we did this!” It impresses me to watch it.

I’m extremely proud of this. And Sarah did such an incredible job with everything. We made such a great team. We worked so well together. It’s been just about five years now, six years we’ve been working together. It’s just gotten better and better, and we have such a good understanding. It’s almost like we’re jazz musicians.

We can trade fours! That’s what drummers do… four bars for me, four bars from you. We work in that fashion. I’ll work on the sequence and then I’ll go work on another sequence. Sierra will take my sequence and say, “Oh, I found this shot for this bit and I found this shot, and what if we did this?”

And it comes back to me, and then I’ll do a bit more to it and go back to her to do a bit more. It was like a really wonderful collaboration in that fashion where we were building scenes and then embellishing each other’s scenes. It was just this wonderful jazz rhythm: musicians jamming, really fun, fun edit. I’m just so proud of it, and Sierra’s just incredible.

Sierra, your last Trading Four. Do you want to finish off the riff?

NEAL: All of that and so much more. I agree with everything Paul says and much more beyond it. It was a wonderful, creative, artistic experience. I think everybody on the team that we worked with would probably say the same. We all got to stretch our creative limbs for this one, and we were never shot down and we were always encouraged and supported. I think that we just tried to be true to the legacy of Jim Henson, and it was wonderful.

Thank you so much for both of your time talking about this really interesting documentary. It’s fantastic. I hope everybody gets a chance to watch it

CROWDER: Thanks, Steve. 

NEAL: Thank you.