"DISNEY didn’t become the world’s largest entertainment company by guessing what people want. Sure, it trusts its creative instincts. But the Magic Kingdom also employs squadrons of black-ops researchers to poke, prod and pry. What psychological hooks should be built into a children’s television show? What colors are most likely to move princess dolls off store shelves?
So imagine how Disney reacted when the time came to create a new Muppet as part of a big-screen, last-ditch effort to resuscitate the 1970s-era TV franchise. One of the producers of its new film “The Muppets,” David Hoberman, who is also a past president of Walt Disney Studios, could easily envision the company delivering an 18-wheeler full of market research with conclusions like: must be cute and fuzzy (to interest moms), spunky and skateboard toting (to hook boys) and square shaped (for easy stacking in toy store displays).
It didn’t happen. Disney — Mr. Hoberman and other members of the movie’s senior creative team said, speaking in separate interviews — was remarkably hands off about Walter, the Muppet at the center of that new film. The studio’s instructions: “Just make a good movie,” Mr. Hoberman said. “It’s pretty amazing that teams of people from consumer products didn’t descend. If they had, God knows where we would have landed.”
Nicholas Stoller, who helped write the screenplay for “The Muppets,” backed him up. “There was shockingly little interference,” Mr. Stoller said. “It turned out to be a pretty strange movie in a totally awesome way.”
Audiences will have to decide awesome for themselves, but strange is true enough. In an obsessive re-creation of the oddball antics that made “The Muppet Show” beloved to a generation of TV viewers, the new movie features dancing chickens, a rapping villain (played by Chris Cooper) and a barbershop quartet that harmonizes Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Disney thinks “The Muppets,” which opens on Wednesday and cost under $50 million to make, has blockbuster potential. But it’s anyone’s guess whether puppets can resonate in the Pixar era. (To quote one of Kermit’s catchphrases, “Don’t count your tadpoles until they’ve hatched.”)
What is certain: “The Muppets” — as underscored by how Walter came to life — is a rare example of the corporate committee getting out of its own way and letting the creative folks take the lead. (Previous efforts to revive the Muppets were built more around consumer products than compelling content.)
There were moments, of course, when Disney tried attaching synergistic baggage to “The Muppets,” said Jason Segel, who also wrote and stars in the film. “Somebody asked in one meeting, in all seriousness, what part of the script would make the best theme-park ride,” he said. But Disney executives, perhaps partly because they were distracted by a painful studio restructuring at the time, did not manhandle the film, allowing it to be weird, witty — “Muppety” in Mr. Segal’s words — and even a bit risqué (as evidenced by a close encounter between Miss Piggy’s pelvis and Jack Black’s face).
“The Muppets” also does not tiptoe around the elephant in the room, which is the dilapidated state of the entire franchise. It’s a sore point for Disney, which has struggled to figure out what to do with the family of felt misfits created by Jim Henson. Once international superstars, Henson’s Muppets have not had a major box-office hit in 32 years. The last five Muppets pictures garnered less in total domestic ticket sales than “Toy Story 3” collected in its first five days. As Kermit, contemplating a comeback in his lonely“Sunset Boulevard”-style mansion, sings in the new movie, “Would anybody watch or even care, or did something break we can’t repair?”
The film, directed by James Bobin, a movie first-timer whose TV credits include the HBO series “Flight of the Conchords,” follows a small-town couple (Amy Adams and Mr. Segel) as they bring young Walter, who doesn’t realize he’s a Muppet himself, to Los Angeles to visit Kermit’s old studio. After discovering that an evil oil tycoon is going to tear it down, Walter helps find Kermit and crew — Fozzie is cracking bad jokes in Reno, Nev.; the bespectacled Scooter works at Google — for a variety-show fund-raiser.
The film trots out Henson’s most famous creations, including Gonzo, the Swedish Chef, Animal, Beaker and those balcony blowhards, Statler and Waldorf. But Walter is very much the star. He’s a shy, squeaky-voiced little guy whose lack of self-confidence manifests itself in crumpled shoulders and long stares at the floor. But bring Walter within 500 feet of a Muppet and he lights up and starts vibrating with excitement, if he doesn’t faint first.
So if Disney didn’t present any focus-group-tested blueprints for creating a new Muppet, just how did the creative team go about it?
In the script Walter was described as the adopted younger brother of Mr. Segel’s character. Walter isn’t a little kid — he’s about 30 — but looks like one. “We wanted him to be out of place in the human world, so we knew he needed to be small,” Mr. Stoller said. The writers did not elaborate on his looks beyond saying Walter had the feel of “an old dishrag” and wore a blue suit, said Paul Andrejco, president of the Puppet Heap Workshop, the Hoboken, N.J., fabrication studio that made Walter.
Mr. Andrejco said he started sketching various Walters — skinny, plump, more human, more animal — ultimately presenting 14 different iterations to producers. Once the team decided on a basic image, there were discussions about texture and color. “We looked at 25 different possibilities, ranging from pink and scruffy to orange-y speckly to flat gray,” Mr. Andrejco said. Would he have ears? What about a nose? Bushy eyebrows or narrow?
“Walter couldn’t be a joke,” said Todd Lieberman, a producer. “At the end of the movie you want to shed a tear for him when he finds his place.”
The finished Walter, Mr. Andrejco said, is remarkably similar to Kermit, at least in functionality. His face, an orange color reminiscent of Ernie from “Sesame Street, was designed to be extra flexible to express a range of emotions. Walter didn’t end up with a nose but he did get brown, unbrushed hair. A prototype took about a week for Puppet Heap to make, and then construction on the actual Walter (and some stunt doubles) took about a month.
The next step was casting. Auditions for a puppeteer were conducted much the way they might be for an actor: asking a variety of people to come in and read on camera. Six puppeteers were seriously considered, and in the end the role went to Peter Linz, a soft-spoken, 44-year-old father of three from Katonah, N.Y., with extensive “Sesame Street” experience.
But producers put Mr. Linz through the mill first. He came to their attention during a read-through of the script. Mr. Linz was there to assist Eric Jacobson, a Muppets veteran who performs multiple characters, including Miss Piggy and Sam the Eagle. At the end of that day Mr. Linz was downcast. “I didn’t think I was in consideration,” he said, adding that his plan was to fly himself to Los Angeles and sleep on a friend’s sofa with the hope of getting extra work. “Maybe I could do Fozzie’s right hand or a background penguin or something,” he said.
Then he got a call to audition for Walter. “I did fine, but it was something of a nightmare from a puppeteer’s standpoint,” Mr. Linz said. “The guy who auditioned before me was a profuse sweater — I mean, just profuse — and so Walter was soaking wet and cold when I got him.”
Producers still weren’t convinced that Mr. Linz was their man. “They called and said nobody had given them exactly what they wanted, but that they wanted me to fly to Los Angeles to try again,” Mr. Linz said. “They told me to think about Michael Cera — that if he was a puppeteer he would already have the job.” (Mr. Cera, for the uninitiated, is the quiet and awkward actor from “Juno” and “Superbad.”)
At a Los Angeles hotel Mr. Linz spent 20 minutes improvising with Mr. Segel and then performed five scenes from the movie. Because “The Muppets” is a musical, Mr. Linz and Mr. Segel were asked to sing some cheesy karaoke duets together.
“They had us do ‘Love Will Keep Us Together’ by the Captain & Tennille,” Mr. Linz said. “I mean, how awesome is that?”
Cool. Walter was different.
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