BEFORE: If you look back through my Rock & Doc Block this year, you may spot a recurring theme, connecting the subjects Bob Ross, Jacques Cousteau, Julia Child and now the stars of Sesame Street - they're all PBS mainstays from decades past. I think Sesame Street airs on HBO now, but that hardly matters - it's been a PBS kind of summer for me, since I also discovered the series "American Masters", which aired the Sammy Davis Jr. doc. and also the Rita Moreno one. HBO provided its share of material, also, by airing tonight's doc and also "Adrienne", "Jagged", "George Carlin's American Dream", "Becoming Mike Nichols", "Mr. Saturday Night", "Listening to Kenny G" and "The Super Bob Einstein Movie". But as we've learned, all things must come to an end, so after tonight just four docs remain in the chain, but I think I'm going out with a bang. Tomorrow night, it's another concert film, and I really haven't watched enough of those.
Dizzy Gillespie carries over from "Listening to Kenny G".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story" (Movie #3,231), "Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey" (Movie #3,232)
THE PLOT: Take a stroll down Sesame Street and witness the birth of the most impactful children's series in TV history. From the iconic furry characters to the songs you know by heart, learn how a gang of visionary creators changed our world.
AFTER: I feel I've sort of come full circle, in my doc chain and in my life - one of the first docs this year was a film about Rick James, and very early on in my career, I was a P.A. on a Rick James music video. (I know, I talk about it a lot, but it's one of the coolest moments in my life that I can reference...). While working for the same company, back in a land called the 1980's, I had the opportunity to work on a couple segments for "Sesame Street", pieces that CTW wanted to look like music videos. One was called "Between", featuring a singer named Jeff Red, and you can catch that one on YouTube, I think. I remember having to go to a prop house and choose a bed that most resembled a slice of bread, because one had to transition in post to the other. I can still remember the lyrics: "When there's cheese in the middle of two slices of bread, it's between, between. And when you slip inside the sheets of your comfy bed, you're between, between." That's just never going to go away, I'll be singing it when I'm 80 and in a nursing home, probably.
The other video was called "Adventure", designed to teach kids the meaning of that word, and it starred the very popular group En Vogue, plus a couple of the Muppets, like Count von Count, Grover and Elmo. This was before Elmo blew up bigger than the other characters and kind of went solo. (Yeah, this one's on YouTube, too, take a look if you want to peek into my past...) Anyway, while the women of En Vogue are on their adventures in Count's spooky castle, the director wanted the backgrounds to look like comic books, so the production company borrowed some actual comic books from me, to zoom into and create that style. I remember making the director sign something that said if anything happened to the comics, then the company would buy me replacements, I was sort of a dick about it. I remember also working on a shoot for a superhero-type version of Big Bird, only he was blue, and I don't know if Sesame Street ever did anything with that footage.
Which kind of makes me wonder, why the hell didn't I try to get a job at the Children's Television Workshop? I was young (21) and dumb, I guess, I had contacts there but I didn't hit anybody up for a job, that could have turned into a career. I might still be working there now, what a nice gig that might have been, and I'm trying to remember what prevented me from making moves in that direction. I guess because I was trying to be an adult and distance myself from childlike things, and I figured if I had to work on a children's show, I'd go bonkers or something. My whole career in film and animation production, I've avoided children's shows, because really, just shoot me. So I charted my own course, moved on to work for a commercial animation agent, then an independent animator, then a couple of movie theaters. But I'm sidelined right now, and so naturally I'm wondering what I did wrong, or if my life could have been better if I'd made different choices.
But here's the thing, I also remember the CTW people seeming a bit uptight, like they took the education aspect of the show very seriously. Each season of "Sesame Street" had a bible with the learning goals for each show, the lessons they wanted kids to learn, and if you've watch the show, you know they're also picky about the way the letters and numbers are presented - no serifs on the letters, for example, and the Q and the 9 have to be written on the screen a certain way, NO EXCEPTIONS, and so maybe I would have gone completely bonkers if I worked there. I guess I'll always wonder - a lot of guest stars have been on the show in the last 30 years, so maybe I missed out on collecting some cool stories about working on those shoots - instead I work at special movie screenings now and encounter celebrities that way, but maybe I'd have a bit more money in my bank account if I'd had a solid union job at CTW. I just wish I knew if the universe was trying to tell me something, and if it was, did I miss it?
Here's why the documentary is so tricky for me, though - I don't always like those "making of" segments that they used to add to DVDs as bonus features. Maybe it's because I already know how films and TV are made, and so that stuff just doesn't interest me. I already know how puppetry works, and I'm not that impressed by it, not even knowing where the puppeteer's hand goes in Big Bird's head, so one of his wings never moves as a result. Who cares how the sausage is made? Not me. But I'll admit it was nice to see Jim Henson and Frank Oz working Bert & Ernie together, and to realize how much of their personalities came through in those characters.
I already knew about Joan Ganz Cooney, she spoke at my college graduation ceremony, but I'll admit I didn't know much about the contributions of Jon Stone, who came up with the idea for the NYC street-like set and directed many episodes of the show. Like many other people, I watched "Sesame Street" regularly when I was a kid, and I got caught up in its illusory nature. I didn't get the joke about the show being "sponsored" by specific letters and numbers until I was older, and realized that "J" or "8" were taking the place of Ivory Soap or Folger's coffee, which adults probably found hilarious, right?
Also, I knew all the characters by their stage names, and didn't realize until many years later that those were actors who had different names in real life. To me they were Maria and Bob and Gordon and Luis, and I honestly didn't think much about any other reality. Perhaps when I realized that the "Mad Painter" character looked an awful lot like Mr. Bentley on the sitcom "The Jeffersons" did I start to understand what actors were, and that they could play different people on different programs. And tonight I re-learned that there were really TWO different people who played Gordon, Matt Robinson and Roscoe Orman - they sort of hint that there's a story there, the first Gordon was maybe some kind of activist, and though he helped create the first black Muppet, Roosevelt Franklin, that character fell out of favor because it was perceived as a bit of a negative stereotype. I've just looked up the first Gordon on Wikipedia, and learned there have really been FOUR actors playing Gordon over the years. My childhood is a lie? Anyway, it seems there was a changing of the guard in 2016, all of the characters I knew as a kid retired or aged out of the program. Still, that's a solid gig, if you can play a character for 35 or 40 years, like actors do on some soap operas.
Meanwhile, everyone from Raul Julia, Lily Tomlin, Andrea Martin, and Kristin Chenoweth to Charlotte Rae, Bill Irwin, Ruth Buzzi and Michael Jeter played recurring characters, and if you go back to the earlier days, people like Mel Brooks and Betty White often did the voice-overs for the animated segments - which have been directed by a lot of people I've known in real life, like Mo Willems, Jen Oxley and John Dilworth, so what the heck was I so afraid of, that I chose not to work on Sesame Street? I should have my head examined. Oh, well, I've got my pride, at least.
I don't usually say this, but I wish they'd played more clips from the show, but I guess this doc is really intended to show more of the back-story, the methodology of the creators of the show, rather than rehashing what's been seen on the screen. I'm kind of over the Muppets, anyway, they've all changed since they got bought out by Disney, just like your favorite band started to suck once they got that big multi-album recording contract, am I right? Just like Anthony Bourdain when he signed the deal for his THIRD travel show with CNN. Let's face it, nothing's as good as you remember it being when you were younger. Just me? And on top of that, we learn that Jim Henson got divorced because he was spending too much time working with the Muppets and not enough time with his kids. This is another common theme in this year's documentaries, just as Wolfgang Puck's son had to learn cooking, and Jacques Coustea's sons had to learn scuba diving, Henson's had to learn puppetry so they could spend more time with their father. That's kind of sad, I think.
Also starring Frank Biondo, Linda Bove, Fran Brill (last seen in "Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey"), Joan Ganz Cooney (ditto), Emilio Delgado (ditto), Bob McGrath (ditto), Roscoe Orman (ditto), Martin P. Robinson (ditto), Caroll Spinney (ditto), Christopher Cerf, Sam Gibbon, Bob Hatch, Brian Henson, Lisa Henson, Sharon Lerner, Loretta Long, Dick Maitland, Sonia Manzano (last seen in "Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It"), Lloyd Morrisett Jr., Jeff Moss, Edward L. Palmer, Holly Robinson Peete (last seen in "21 Jump Street"), Nick Raposo, Dolores Robinson, Matt Robinson, Dulcy Singer, Norman Stiles,
with archive footage of Muhammad Ali (last seen in "The Super Bob Einstein Movie"), Paul Benedict (last seen in "After the Sunset"), Cab Calloway (last seen in "Sammy Davis Jr.: I've Gotta Be Me"), Northern Calloway, Johnny Carson (also carrying over from "Listening to Kenny G"), Johnny Cash (last seen in "Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind"), James Taylor (ditto), Dick Cavett (last seen in "Julia"), Fred Rogers (ditto), David D. Connell, Evelyn Davis, Danny Epstein, David Hartman, Florence Henderson (last seen in "Dean Martin: King of Cool"), Jane Henson, Jim Henson (last seen in "Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey"), Richard Hunt (ditto), Will Lee (ditto), Jerry Nelson (ditto), Lena Horne (last seen in "Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice"), Jesse Jackson (last seen in "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project"), Peter Jennings (ditto), James Earl Jones (last seen in "Coming 2 America"), Jerry Juhl, Madeline Kahn (last seen in "Mel Brooks Unwrapped"), B.B. King (last seen in "WBCN and the American Revolution"), Martin Luther King (also last seen in "Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It"), Emily Perl Kingsley, Eda LeShan, Gerald S. Lesse, Shari Lewis, Kermit Love, Loretta Lynn (last seen in "Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President"), Bob McRaney, Pat Nixon (last seen in "Sammy Davis Jr..: I've Gotta Be Me"), Richard Nixon (last seen in "The Kid Stays in the Picture"), Dinah Shore (ditto), Chet O'Brien, Odetta (last seen in "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan"), Frank Oz (last seen in "Knives Out"), Jack Paar (last seen in "Betty White: First Lady of Television"), Joe Raposo, Alaina Reed, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Lisa Simon, Paul Simon (last seen in "Becoming Mike Nichols"), Buffalo Bob Smith, Emily Squires, Jon Stone, Ed Sullivan (last seen in "Lucy and Desi"), Orson Welles (last seen in "Wolfgang"), Stevie Wonder (last seen in "Under the Volcano")
RATING: 6 out of 10 quickly-consumed cookies
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