Karen Falk - Imagination Illustrated: The Jim Henson Journal

Everyone knows that Jim Henson created the Muppets, and that he performed the most famous Muppet of all, Kermit the Frog. Many people also know about his other popular television productions, such as Fraggle Rock, and his work on Sesame Street. And his devoted fans are aware of the groundbreaking fantasy films The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, into which he poured so much imagination and craft.

What no one really understands is how much other creative stuff was going on in my father's mind. Jim spent almost all of his waking hours in some form of creative activity, which was as natural for him as smiling and walking are for other people. What he produced was only a fraction of all the ideas that he had, and what we generally see today is only a fraction of what he produced. He packed so many projects into a single year that it was hard for anyone to keep up with him, and it was even harder for him to remember exactly what had happened when. Thus his keeping of the little red book.

My father used the book to remember family milestones, such as what year we went to Hawaii, or bought the station wagon, or when the baby started school, but he also wanted to remember how many commercial campaigns he did in a year, and when each puppeteer came to work for the Muppets. He wanted to remember when the family got a new dog as well as when the Valentine's Day special with Mia Farrow was shot. He kept all of those dates in a simple chronology, mixing family and projects indiscriminately. It shows how blurry the boundaries were in his mind between his creative and family life, and these juxtapositions are interesting on a very personal level. For instance, by reading his chronology, I discovered that I was born five years to the day after his show Sam and Friends premiered. When I was six, he flew home from performing in Anaheim with Jimmy Dean for my birthday party. And in both 1976 and 1977 he celebrated my birthday on the ship QE2 on his way to England for The Muppet Show. He also documented each and every time that I visited him after I went to college. He was a devoted father, and his journal is full of references to special family trips and one on one time spent with each of his five children.

While my father was not a diarist and he was not much of a letter writer, he did think it was important to keep records. He began to have the company preserve important, as well as seemingly unimportant, works of art, design, and planning. As he got older, he became aware of the significance of his own work, and he and my mother Jane Henson took care to maintain these files of photography and art, including not just his own art but the beautiful work of designers Michael Frith and Brian Froud, the charming character designs by puppet builders Don Sahlin, Bonnie Erickson, and the creative work of many others.

It is from these materials that the incredible Karen Falk has created a proper archive and drawn from it to illustrate my father's journal excerpts, as presented here for the first time. She has unearthed rare tidbits of unproduced material, as well as quintessential items in the evolution of the famous Muppets. She has found thematic threads that connect projects many years apart, as well as kernels of ideas that germinated major productions. The great profusion of images, titles, and characters that she has used to illustrate my father's journal is a wonderful way to capture Jims very busynesshis wildly creative mind. Because creativity is a process, it is also rewarding to focus on it more than the finished projects. In this book, you are able to see snapshots of my father's creative process, flashes of his inspirations and his memories of the milestones that were the highlights of his personal and professional life.

His was a life worth celebrating, and we are thrilled to share it with you.

Lisa Henson

INTRODUCTION

ON JUNE 7, 1965, Jim Henson, who would become celebrated the world over as the creator of the Muppets, sat down with a small, red cloth-covered book and began to document his first decade of professional accomplishments and personal highlights. A modest act at the time, this unique journal would eventually chronicle a creative odyssey that spanned almost forty years and five continents, and touched millions of lives.

The title page from Jims journal.

At the age of twenty-eight, Jim had already garnered significant success with his own local Washington, DC television show, numerous appearances on national variety shows, and hundreds of commercials. He had dozens of projects in development and had connected with a myriad of talented people in the worlds of entertainment, puppetry, advertising, and animation. One of the concepts he was pursuing at the time was a film depicting the "Organized Brain," exploring how ideas and information are collected, and, more importantly, how they are filed away in the subconscious. Jims journal was, in effect, an effort to organize his thoughts by writing them down, freeing up space in his crowded mind and making room to pursue new ideas while preserving access to the experiences, dates, and people collected along the way.

On hiatus from regular Rowlf the Dog appearances on The Jimmy Dean Show, Jims hectic schedule was slightly lighter heading into those summer months, perhaps giving him a little more time at home to enjoy his children, including his recently born fourth child, John Paul, and his new Great Dane puppy, Troy, and to go back through his calendars and desk diaries to make the entries in his red book. Referring to himself in the third person, he noted down what had happened up until that point (labeling it "Ancient History"), as though reflecting on it all from an outside perspective. Moving forward, he recorded anything that he felt was worth noting, be it a television production or a childs graduation. In single-line entries, Jim described the range and variety of his work, the web of relationships he developed, the innovations he pursued, and the recognition he received in the ensuing years.

Jim made the entries in batches and developed a rhythm. According to his youngest daughter Heather, each January, referencing the previous years appointment books, Jim logged his activities and milestones into his journal. While most of the entries, which run from 1954 through 1988, were made in a timely fashion, Jim made sure to fill in missing information later when he was too busy for his annual ritual. There are a few discrepancies between dates in the book and dates as recorded on other documents and press clippings, possibly because of lapses in memory, but more likely because a scheduled event on Jims calendar was moved to a different date but not revised on paper.

Jim in his New York office, mid-1960s.