PLUME: What was your participation in Jim’s short film, Timepiece?

OZ: Well, it was Jim’s movie. He and Jerry Juhl and Don Sahlin and Jerry Nelson and I and others helped out. We were really helping Jim make his little bizarre movie where we didn’t know what the f*** it was. We just trusted and loved Jim. It was 10 minutes and like 168 scenes or something. It was very groundbreaking with the fast-cutting. Jim was a visionary, and he used that vision during that movie in particular to new ends.

It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Short Film. It was quite wonderful, but while we were doing it, we didn’t know what the hell it was. Jim would scrape enough money up through commercials and we would go out shooting on weekends with Ted Nemeth, who had an old 35mm rackover camera. We’d rent costumes and hire friends and for a year we were doing that every other weekend or when Jim had the money.

PLUME: So, in every sense, it was an independent film…

OZ: Oh, f***in’-a. Totally.

PLUME: I didn’t know this, but I was told recently that your first directing jobs were some of the short filmed segments on “Sesame Street”.

OZ: Well, I don’t think that you could call that directing. In fact, the only one I ever did myself was a bizarre thing with this ball for the number 3 where I built an entire, kind of bizarre wire sculpture and shot it over many months. Looking back on it, I’m thinking “My God, why the f*** was I doing all of that work?”

But it was fun to do. I wouldn’t call that directing. I was in a gallery doing wire sculpture and one of my pieces sold, so that’s where that came from. It was something where I could control my own little world, but it wasn’t directing. It was creating and then just kind of calling the shots.

PLUME: How would you describe the creative atmosphere of the Henson company in the 60’s, and Sesame in the early years?

OZ: Play through guidance. Jim would never teach, he would always just gently guide while we were playing. It was playing around and having a great deal of fun while working extraordinarily hard. It’s the hardest work I’ve ever done.

PLUME: Leavened by the sense of play?

OZ: The work was play. That’s what we learned from Jim. No matter what Jim did… If it was a Cloverland Cow commercial, which we knew we were not very excited about and he knew it wasn’t an exciting thing to do, he would make it exciting. He would make whatever work there was exciting and fun. He just would. So it wasn’t leavened by fun, it was fun.

We would put our energies into work, no matter what it was, it was fun. And it was tough. Very tough.

PLUME: Around this time in the early 70’s is when Jim began pitching the concept of a Muppet show. What was that like?

OZ: It was more than pitching. We went around from ad agency to ad agency, network to network, auditioning in front of people who would always say, “Aww gee, Harry’s got to see this” and then we’d come back for Harry.

We would take these black boxes all around New York. Me and Jerry Juhl and Don Sahlin and Jim lugging those damn black boxes all around New York, and nobody wanted the show. They would also come to the studio and look at the show, but they would always say, “Bill should see this,” because they obviously didn’t have the authority to say yes.

PLUME: So basically they got a free lunch show with no intention of greenlighting it?

OZ: No, I suppose they had interest in it, but it was pretty f***ing bizarre. It was a bizarre thing with these bizarre puppets that were not for children. They just didn’t get it. We were doing all of these appearances on The Tonight Show and with Julie Andrews and Bob Hope, and Perry Como. I believe they saw that we had entertainment value as an act, but as a show? Who knew?

PLUME: Many accounts describe Jim as feeling pigeonholed as a children’s act by Sesame Street…

OZ: Yeah. Jim always flowed with the river. He never fought very hard against it. So when Sesame Street came, it was not what he wanted to do, but he realized that there was great value in it as a means of expression and certainly an opportunity to be more financially secure so he could do some of the things that were more artistic and experiment a little bit: like The Dark Crystal and even some of the fairy tales we did like Muppet Musicians of Bremen, where he experimented with new types of puppets – half mask/half puppet. He was always experimenting.

His background was more avant-garde. His background was production design. When he got famous for Sesame Street, it was wonderful, it was great, he loved it and he thought there was real value there, but he didn’t want to just be pigeonholed, he wanted to go back and be the film director that he wanted to be.

He was very into R&D. Whenever he got money for anything, he would always put part of it back into R&D. Always research and development. Always. Other people, ideas for shows, ideas for techniques, ideas for puppets, ideas for special effects – he would always do R&D.

Like anything, you get successful in anything then the audience only wants that one thing. I remember doing Rowlf the Dog on Sesame Street for about a season-and-a-half, and Jim was trying to get other puppets on the show, other Muppets. I remember him bringing Kermit, who was totally unknown at that time. Rowlf the Dog was the big star across the country with The Jimmy Dean Show. So he brought Kermit in to the rehearsals, and they all looked at him and went, “I don’t think so.” They just didn’t take him.

But when you get successful, whether it’s Rowlf the Dog or Gilda Radner, who I talked to about this, doing Emily Littella – they pigeonhole you as that one thing and they don’t let you go off and do other things. It doesn’t mean you have to stay in one place. He did get a little pigeonholed, but that didn’t stop him. He always went further.

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