August 30th sees the Netflix premiere of The Dark Crystal: Age Of Resistance, Louis Leterrier’s prequel to Jim Henson’s 1982 cult classic film. Henson was on top of the world at the time — The Muppet Show had just gone off the air after five increasingly successful seasons, and two movies, The Muppet Movie and The Great Muppet Caper, were critical and commercial successes. His next project, though, would take a very different and deeply strange approach towards storytelling.
The Dark Crystal was a wild, dark fantasia unlike anything moviegoers had seen from Henson. Taking place on the world of Thra, it followed an elf-like creature called Jen, a Gelfling tasked with returning a shard to a shattered crystal before the planet’s three suns align. Every inch of the film is lush, weird, and wildly uncommercial, and it struggled at the box office against the juggernaut of E.T. In hindsight, it remains one of Henson’s most unique and personal works, and rewards deeper examination. Despite the puppet master’s incredible commercial success, the flick barely got made at all. Let’s dive deep into the production of The Dark Crystal and where its ideas came from.
The Shrouded Past
Henson’s first steps towards The Dark Crystal came in the mid 1970s. While the majority of his work to that date had been for children on Sesame Street, the puppeteer had long wanted to create content for adult audiences as well. Talent agent Bernie Brillstein introduced Henson to another one of his clients, TV producer Lorne Michaels. Michaels was putting together the initial cast for what would become Saturday Night Live, and the two started bouncing ideas back and forth for how Henson could be involved with the show.
Working with longtime collaborator Frank Oz, Henson developed “The Land of Gorch,” a weekly segment for the show’s 1975 season that chronicled the misadventures of a grotesque family of birdlike creatures living in a swampy crater. Unlike his more innocent work, these monsters were vile, selfish, rude and very adult. There were several strikes against it from the start, though — union rules meant that only SNL‘s writers could pen scripts and stories for the puppets, not Henson and his crew. None of the show’s staff enjoyed the assignment, and it only lasted a single season.
The experience was useful for Henson and his team, however, introducing them to the unique pressures of filming a network TV program each week. He’d use it to fuel The Muppet Show, which premiered the next year on British network ATV before returning to American airwaves in first-run syndication. That show would be a runaway success, and by 1978 it was the most popular program in the world, airing in 108 countries and drawing 235 million viewers a week.
A few years later, Henson and his daughter Cheryl were flying to London from New York City when a snowstorm hit and the pair were trapped at JFK Airport. Jim took the time to write out the basic plot of a fantasy story he was calling “The Crystal” in his Red Book, the hardbound journal that he took everywhere with him. By the time he reached England, he had a complete outline of the film and its world. But it would be a little while before he had the clout to make it a reality, as well as input from a fantasy artist previously best known for working with some guy called William Shakespeare.
A Magic Pen
Brian Froud was a British fantasy artist with a rich, ethereal style that seemed unmoored from any restrictions. Early in his career, he worked on illustrated editions of plays like A Midsummer Night’s Dream as he found his footing. In 1977, he released The Land of Froud, and the next year would see his first mainstream success with Fairies, a collection of lush paintings accompanying British folktales retold by writer Alan Lee. Henson saw a Brian Froud painting on the cover of a book and immediately recognized a kindred spirit.
In 1977, Henson brough Froud out to the Muppet workshop in Elstree to show him how the magic was made. Froud enjoyed the experience, but was drawn to an unexpected item in the archives: the Land of Gorch puppets, with all of their crusty, oddball protuberances and unsettling designs. The pair started working together on “The Crystal” in 1978, batting ideas back and forth in a series of Manhattan meetings. Jim was heavily inspired by Seth Speaks, a collection of messages allegedly transmitted by an “energy personality” named Seth to Dorothy Roberts. The Seth Material was hugely popular in the decade and Henson gave copies to many of his collaborators.
Over time, the basic structure and cast of The Dark Crystal came together, with input from Frank Oz and other long-time collaborators. It would tell the tale of a fallen world heading for collapse unless one unlikely hero could restore equilibrium to two warring, inhuman races. A bold, ambitious dark fantasy, it was wildly different from anything the Muppet man had ever accomplished.
He started pitching it as something that had never been done before: the first live-action feature film without a single human being on screen. Froud’s compelling designs for Thra’s warring races and strange animals were potent, but Paramount balked at the proposed $15 million price tag — this was at a time where Disney animated films cost around $1 million to produce.
The Shard
Henson finally got funding from British TV production company ITC to make the film. He’d worked with them before on The Muppet Show, and also after the first Muppet movie was a success he was able to bundle the sequel with The Dark Crystal. Unfortunately, two major theatrical missteps in 1980 put the company on the back foot, as Village People disco showcase Can’t Stop The Music and pricey adventure Raise The Titanic! both bombed at the box office. After The Dark Crystal wrapped filming, the company was sold, merged and eventually put under the leadership of Australian entrepreneur Robert Holmes à Court.
Early test screenings in Washington D.C. and Detroit, Michigan didn’t help matters. Audiences who went in expecting the classic cuddly Muppets they knew and loved were unsettled and repulsed by Henson and Froud’s alien worlds. Many walked out before the film was over, and it wasn’t long before The Dark Crystal seemed radioactive to Hollywood distributors.
That didn’t dissuade Henson, who took the film back to the editing bay. He made some major changes to the product, including redubbing the Skeksis’ alien language into English and adding more exposition and explanation. That didn’t impress à Court, who deemed it too weird to promote heavily.
And that’s where Henson’s maverick nature got the better of him. Convinced that The Dark Crystal had more potential than anybody saw, he combined his assets to come up with enough cash to buy the film back from ITC and release it himself. It cost him $15 million, but ITC had put in $25 million, so in some ways you could consider that a good deal. He then contracted with Universal Studios to open the film on December 17th.
It was by no means a sure thing, and at the time Henson’s son John was terrified that it would mean financial ruin for the entire family. Thankfully, even though it wasn’t a blockbuster success on the level of the previous two Muppet movies, The Dark Crystal would gross $40 million by the end of its nine week theatrical run, allowing Henson to earn back his investment and stay afloat. He would use some of the profits to purchase the rights to the Muppets from ITC as well.
A New World 
The Dark Crystal had always been a passion project for Henson, and it came at a particularly active time in his life. His studio was producing Fraggle Rock for HBO, preparing the animated Muppet Babies series for saturday morning television, and consulting on a number of other projects for films and commercials. Earning his money back gave him the creative freedom to follow more adult impulses for a while.
Froud and Henson would collaborate again on 1986’s Labyrinth, a more conventional fantasy starring David Bowie as the wicked Goblin King. This film would feature a screenplay by Monty Python’s Terry Jones, along with contributions from George Lucas, Laura Phillips, Elaine May and Henson itself. With a $25 million budget, comparable to The Dark Crystal, and a major rock star anchoring the cast, people expected it to be an even bigger hit. Unfortunately, middling reviews and competition from box office smashes like Top Gun led it to earn under $13 million theatrically.
Three years later, Henson would sell his company to Disney, freeing him to pursue creative pursuits without struggling over financing. Unfortunately, he suddenly passed away in 1990. He left behind a number of unfinished projects, including a prospective Dark Crystal sequel he was developing with writer David Odell. Brilliant animation director Genndy Tartakovsky was attached to the project in 2009, but after a number of false starts and delays, it was shelved and eventually released as a comic book series.
The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance returns us to Thra for a prequel series that Leterrier has been working on getting made since 2012. The show, which follows a trio of Gelflings as they foment revolt against the Skeksis, was produced entirely with puppetry like the original film, only using CGI to digitally erase traces of the human puppeteers. Brian Froud returned to design new characters alongside his son Toby, and the voice cast includes a ton of names, including Eddie Izzard, Lena Headey, Simon Pegg and Mark Hamill.
Everything we’ve read indicates that Leterrier and his team are doing the series out of one thing: love for the original, in all its weird, risky, uncommercial glory. It premieres on Netflix on August 30.
Watch The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance on Netflix
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Source: https://www.geek.com/movies/how-jim-henson-risked-it-all-to-make-the-dark-crystal-1801691/?source
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The Article Was Written/Published By: K. Thor Jensen
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