09/30/2021
Intro - I guess we should start at the beginning…
How did I get the idea to build giant puppets? Very simply, I saw the magnificent creations from France’s Royal De-Luxe and Le Machine Street Theatre Companies and thought, ‘I’d like one of those, please…’
The fact that I couldn’t find anyone willing to build one and GIVE it to me, forced my hand. I’d have to build my own. The fact that this was entirely outside of my skill-set was a minor complication.
I’ve always had a dual interest in animation and puppetry. From my misspent youth, you’d be hard pressed to find me without a movie camera or a puppet in my hand - often, both. When it came time to choose a career path - there was only one programme that interested me, The Classical Animation course at Sheridan College. Since there were no courses about puppetry available anywhere in Canada at the time, animation it was.
To be honest, I was a mediocre student. While I was “Mr. Animation” in my high school, out in the real world of college, my work was nothing spectacular. But my strength was ideas. Some of them were actually pretty good ideas. One class assignment (a full semester) was to create an animated TV commercial. While my classmates worked diligently on their productions, I knocked off a Monty Python-style cut-out animated epic entitled “Elvis: Dead in Concert”. The production took five mornings and I skipped the rest of the semester. My teachers hated it, but I got a passing mark. To top it off, it was chosen to open the “Canadian Animation Retrospective” at the 1981 Festival of Festivals, the precursor to Toronto’s TIFF Film Festival.
On graduation, I found work as a junior artist at a boutique studio making animated commercials and short educational films. The work was fun, the pay was crap, but the management and crew were great and the 80’s were an exciting time to be a young artist in Toronto.
Around this time, Jim Henson & Co., came to Toronto to film “Fraggle Rock”. They held an open audition for Muppeteers. I signed up for an audition - and with two months until the day, I spent every spare moment building a puppet that I knew would ‘WOW’ them. I finished “Groucho” about three days before the audition. He looked great, but I didn’t have time to work out the bugs or rehearse with him.
On the day of the audition, I arrived at the hall, opened the bag - and everyone gasped. The puppet looked fantastic. But my lack of preparation and/or rehearsal became quickly apparent. I flubbed the audition - badly. The crowning moment came when Richard Hunt, who played Scooter, Statler, Janice, Beaker and Sweetums on The Muppet Show put his arm around my shoulders. He said (in a funny Bronx accent), “Steve. All you had to do was practice for 20 minutes a day with a sock on your hand in front of a mirror. If you had practiced for 20 minutes a day with a sock on your hand in front of a mirror, we both know that right now, you’d be a Muppeteer. But you didn’t, so here’s the door…”
It was a cruel, yet hilarious lesson. That was the end of my puppet career for the next 15 years…
