About Me

If one was a builder/performer of Muppet-style puppets in the 1970s and, after nine years of intensive study, wanted to go to an exclusive ‘graduate school’, “The Muppet Show” was the place to be.  While very particular in choosing his core performers, Jim was at a place in his life where he wanted to gather the ‘apprentices’ to absorb his ‘mastery’, and I was an ideal student.  

March 24th, 1978 was my first day working with The Muppets in London on the Alice Cooper episode of “The Muppet Show”.  My earliest responsibilities were to stand-in with other performer’s characters when they had multiple characters in the same shot or to fill out group scenes, not as a so-called “understudy”, but as a double.  That’s ironic since I was truly ‘studying under’ each of them in a manner that has not happened since with no intention on anyone’s part that I would ever assume their unique characters.  

Working alongside veteran performers in that capacity, I considered it a requirement to learn each of their very individual styles directly from them so that  once the voices were dubbed their characters would be indistinguishable from what they would have done. 

Being at that place, at that time in history, was a unique experience that simply doesn’t exist anywhere today.

A month later we were on our way to Los Angeles to shoot “The Muppet Movie”.  We were too young to rent an apartment in California so David Lazer arranged for the company to rent on our behalf.  I did Kermit’s hand’s on his banjo for “Rainbow Connection” and Rowlf’s hand’s on the piano for “I Hope That Somethin’ Better Comes Along”.  My primary role in the film was as a stand-in for Frank Oz when he had multiple characters within the same scene.

After having performed Miss Piggy’s dog, “Foo Foo” and numerous anonymous characters for musical numbers and doubled for the core performer’s characters, Jim chose to allow me to take a tattered rat puppet and have it become my first original character, “Rizzo the Rat”.  Along with Jane Gootnick, I redesigned and rebuilt an updated puppet with a more puppeteer friendly interior and Rizzo slowly began to show up in the ensemble.

Having virtually no  background  as an actor at that point, it was a while before I was able to comfortably combine manipulation skills with any real depth of character.  Rizzo is where I ‘cut my teeth’.

As I recall. one of the first scenes we shot for the film upon arrival in the U.K. was when the Muppets approach the exterior of The Mallory Gallery.  Doing an overnight shoot seemed reasonable because of the timezone change.  For one of the group shots on the lawn of Knebworth House in Hertfordshire, I was puppeteering Rowlf the Dog. But, as fate would have it, I had contracted a terrible flu with a fever.  I felt horrible, and my recollection of the winter evening’s shooting was lying on a furniture pad on the cold wet ground, rain misting down, for hours, feverish and wrapped up in Rowlf’s furry blanket of a body for added warmth.

During the early 1980’s using puppetry as the means to convey other-worldly beings and creatures was new and state of the art,

and I think that no film of the era does a better job of that than “The Dark Crystal”. 

We knew as we were shooting that this was a first in the industry, an all puppet cast of characters that were meant to be living, breathing creatures.  My own approach was to observe the subtle details of organic human and animal movement to economize the ‘Muppet-style’ of puppet manipulation. 

Sitting at a sidewalk cafe in Hampstead I spent hours masking the bottom halves of passersby to really analyze what a human form looks like from the waist up when it’s walking or running.  My discovery was that, unlike our more abstract ‘Muppet’ way of indicating footsteps on non-existent solid ground, there is almost no movement.

This was the beginning of a style of “no movement without a reason” puppetry for me that is still how I approach the craft.

The Mystic Valley set was built on a massive soundstage in Elstree.  One cold London morning when I arrived on set, Jim asked me to find my way up into the cat walk near the ceiling of the stage, get comfortable, and lower down a monofilament line that would be attached to one of the Mystic’s arms.  I was to give the arm a “little life” by gently moving it with this incredibly long piece of fishing line.

My guess is that the slender wooden cat walk was at least four stories above the stage floor where the shooting would take place.  It was so far above the action below that I could hardly hear anything from the ground, just a sort of muffled hum of activity.  Also, being the highest point inside the soundstage, all the heat from the lights below made it very cozy way up there on a cold day while everyone below was shivering wearing their ‘wooly jumpers’.

Being ever vigilant and efficient in service of the film, I made my nest high above the ground about an hour before the crew would actually be ready to role cameras, and since it was much warmer up there, I laid back on the catwalk and dozed.

Another small detail about the catwalk was that it was generally off limits to anyone other than authorized crew because, while it had a handrail, it had completely open sides between that rail and the walk way, itself…

When they eventually rang the loud bell to indicate that we are ready for rehearsal, I did what anyone might do upon waking – I began to roll over as though getting out of bed in the morning – only instead of my slippers there was a forty foot drop!  

I came within a breath of rolling right off the edge of the catwalk…Though it would have been my last, what an entrance that would have made to the scene below!

Jim said that it generally took people about five years to learn how he did things, and Fraggle Rock started within my 5th year with his company.  By then, I was ready for stronger characters with depth and backstory, and Wembley Fraggle was born out of my heart and soul.

Fraggle was a magical time, the perfect amalgam of the ‘right’ people at the right time. Long, sometimes grueling, hours made bearable by rock solid commitment, camaraderie, and collaboration between producers, writers, cast and crew. It is, by far, my favorite project I ever was a part of within the ‘Muppet’ world.

More than ‘once in a lifetime’, it was a ‘once in all time’ event that will not happen again.

Over the years, Dave and I instigated many silly things to do to pass the time that were our inside jokes, things we would do to make each other laugh during long production days.  One of those was a face we made that involved tightening the muscles in the center of the face around the upper nose and middle brow. 

I called it my ‘Clint Eastwood’ face.

We said that as weird as we looked making this face, it would be a perfectly normal face if we, in fact, actually looked like that.  We would try to have conversations while holding this odd looking face without cracking up…I almost never could.

It wasn’t an easy face to make, and this was the day when we coaxed the whole cast working that day to do it.

Also, that summer we shot “The Muppets Take Manhattan” while on a hiatus from “Fraggle”, and Rizzo the Rat came into his own for me as a well-rounded character.  We found a newly renovated furnished apartment on E.67th Street, discovered HBO and Häagen-Dazs, and did battle with sneaky cockroaches…”newly renovated” has nothing to do with the squatters…

One of my favorite performances Jim ever asked me to do was that of the Caterpillar in ‘Dreamchild’.  It was very important to me at the time for this menacing, unkind character to be as believable a living, breathing entity as possible within the constraints of what the puppet was capable. 

I read off-lines as myself opposite the amazing Coral Browne as she shot her close ups for the scene.  How exhilarating it was to look into her eyes and play opposite her.  The Caterpillar continued my own obsession with the subtleties of what makes us believe a thing is alive.

Incidentally, the Caterpillar’s arms and hands were the real human arms and hands of Sadie Corre, the smallest of the Transylvanians in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

The Mock Turtle was a sort of costume mounted to the set.  I was encased inside its shell.  Underneath me sealed inside large styrofoam block sets were puppeteers, including my wife, Melissa, running the various facial features of the creature.  Our half serious joke was that if there was a fire,

we could never have gotten out.