Another Henson in the Mix (A Fraggle Update)

I just had another productive meeting with the Henson folks, and this time I got to sit down with Brian Henson, son of Jim and director for many of the movies and shows since his passing. Brian had a lot of nice things to say about my script and schooled me on some fascinating details of how to shoot puppets on film. There are a lot of tricks you may not even think about. There was a lot of talk about the evils of CGI Fraggles and how dangerous that could be for a good old fashioned Muppet movie. Brian said that even the Doozer technology is still good enough to hold up on the big screen, and we may even use the same puppet rigs from the series. “Nothing photographs like a real puppet onscreen, and nothing has the same energy,” he said. Amen to that.

Talking with Lisa and Brian Henson, it occurred to me again how cool my job is. It never gets old to sit down with the people who MADE my childhood. I mean, when I bring up Labyrinth or The Great Muppet Caper, Brian talks about anecdotes first hand… because he was THERE. He’d say, “Oh yeah, when we did Hoggle…” and I’d realize the wealth of fantastic experiences I am tapping into.


We had a good roundtable discussion about outstanding concerns. New to the mix were some notes from Harvey Weinstein himself. Many of these discussions revolve around how to work music into the film, what kind of music, how much music, and when does it make sense for people to break into song in a modern movie? 


Breaking into song is a tricky thing to do. Do it too much and it becomes a silly parody of old Hollywood musicals, do it to little and you just get a bunch of music video montages to sell a soundtrack. Fraggles sing, that’s a fact. It’s just figuring out how they should sing among US, the cynical humans living in our realistic world. Personally, I think the collision of those two realities will be the fun of it.

As before, the Henson / Weinstein camps are compiling their specific notes into one document, and then I will go back into the writing room with these notes to generate a new draft. It is everyone’s hope and expectation that this next draft will be the one that pushes us into production. Everyone agrees that we’re close. This may mean shooting as early as the beginning of next year. Fingers crossed!
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