THE HAPPYTIME MURDERS
Strange as it seems, the red-band vibe of The Happytime Murders is not far from what The Jim Henson Company has been doing since the very beginning – with Jim starting his puppet show on late night TV in the ’60s and moving to SNL in 1975 before going kid-friendly with The Muppet Show in Britain. By the time Brian started helping his dad out, the Hensons were pushing the boundaries of puppetry with darker, more serious fare such as The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, while the Muppets kept on getting tamer.
“When I first read the script, probably about 14 years ago now, I said this is too R-rated, it’s just not what we do,” remembers Henson, pinning the origins of The Happytime Murders to the same year he sold the rights to the Muppets to Disney. “Then I started Puppet Up!, which was a live improv comedy that’s very R-rated, and I realised we’d found a new voice. It’s viciously funny, and I thought this is the next place to take Henson-style puppetry, or a place to take them. I decided I wanted to do something that really lets the puppeteers let rip, and that’s when I re-read the script.” Set in a real version of LA inhabited by humans and puppets, the story follows grizzled detective Phil Philips – the first puppet cop on the force – as he tries to solve the murders of a bunch of washed-up TV stars with his human partner, Edwards, played by McCarthy. The Happytime gang were big about 20 years ago on a children’s variety show (sound familiar?), and someone has been knocking them off. Puppets, it turns out, are second-class citizens – good at singing and dancing but not at much else. If they’re lucky, they get a job as an entertainer. If they’re not, they’re destined for a life on the pole and an ugly sugar addiction.
“We didn’t push that as far as we could,” laughs Henson, comparing his world to Who Framed Roger Rabbit but still keen to stress the social conscience that sits behind the script. “At one point we had small doors and small stairs for puppets – but in the end we thought, let’s go with the idea that puppets are so much the ‘havenots’ in this world, the best they can do is to try and exist in a world that was created for humans – and then complain about it all the time.”
Humans have it a lot easier, taking the better jobs and getting to see over the steering wheel without a booster seat, but Detective Edwards is still scraping along the bottom of life after getting herself hooked on class-A maple syrup. “Edwards and Phil have a challenging relationship because we’re both damaged goods,” says McCarthy, chatting between takes but barely able to stop laughing the whole time. “I have a terrible addiction to sugar, which is like heroin for puppets. It’s ruining my life and I blame Phil for it. But then he saved my life by putting a puppet liver in me… It’s all very complicated.”
For Henson, casting McCarthy was an easy decision – rewriting the male lead for her when she started taking an interest – but for McCarthy, it wasn’t even something she had to think
'OUR HUMOR COMES FROM A VERY DIRTY PLACE. THAT'S WHAT I WANTED TO BOTTLE' Brian Henson
about. “By the time I got to page two of the script, I walked over to my husband and said, ‘I think I’m in.’ He’s like, ‘You’ve only been reading it for 13 seconds!’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but there’s a big street scene in gritty LA and they’re playing I’m Your Puppet by Marvin Gaye…’ He told me to go away and read the rest. I came back after two more pages and I was like, ‘Seriously, I think I’m in.’”
Taking a producer credit alongside her husband, Ben Falcone, McCarthy took a pass at the script to flesh out her own lines but admits it was the concept that sold her from the start. “I knew they were real! Everything I thought of as a kid was right!” she laughs. “There’s always the thing when you watch The Muppets or Sesame Street and you have that little inkling of what happens when the lights go off. When they walk out the back door, do they go into the real world and have a life? This is like peeking behind that curtain.”
Joined by Maya Rudolph as Phil’s secretary, Joel McHale as an angry Fed and Banks as a stripper who gets intimately involved with a few puppet Johns (“It’s very… soft,” grins Banks. “Velvety. It feels a bit like this tablecloth”), everyone on set is quick to point out that the real star of the movie is Phil.
Watching Phil – played by veteran puppeteer Bill Barretta (best known for Rowlf the Dog, Swedish Chef, Pepé the Prawn and Earl from Dinosaurs, among many, many others) – work is a strange experience. Never breaking character, he walks around the set attached to Barretta’s top half, talking to the cast, discussing his lines, chatting with the catering guys.
“The puppeteer never presents, they always stay in it. If they forget their lines, the puppet forgets and the puppet apologises, not the puppeteer,” explains McCarthy, still in awe of her
'IT'S AMAZING HOW SMART THESE PUPPETEERS ARE - THEY IMPROVISE CONSTANTLY' Melissa MccartHy
co-star. “Bill is so good, I just can’t imagine anyone else doing this. He won’t talk about it, but Phil is basically his grandfather. It’s such a personal character and he’s so much the heart of this film. When Phil’s upset – which doesn’t make any sense because his face can barely move – everybody feels it. That’s Bill Barretta. He’s a weird wizard at what he does.”
“He looks at me like he knows me,” adds Rudolph, gazing over at Phil/Bill like an old friend. “I haven’t been at work for two weeks and I really missed him.” Watching the puppeteers work, it’s easy to see why everyone is so besotted. Even surrounded by a cast of respected comedians, Barretta and his fellow puppeteers (including Drew Massey, Victor Yerrid, Julianne Buescher and Kevin ‘Elmo’ Clash) are the funniest people in the room by a mile.
“It’s irritating and amazing how smart these guys are,” says McCarthy, “All of them improvise constantly. You can throw anything at them and they’re always two steps ahead. Drew plays several things in this – and every time he does a take it’s completely, completely different. I’m like, ‘Is this written down? Because I really worked on this script and I think you might just be saying stuff!’ But each pass was super-specific and really funny and so, so much better than whatever I could have come up with. I basically just got more jealous with each take.”
CREATING A SCENE
Watching McCarthy and Banks navigate a raised stage only a few feet wide, interacting almost entirely with someone else’s raised right hand, you almost feel sorry for them – until you look over into the pit full of sweaty puppeteers crammed into armpits, secreted inside fake sofas, and laying on the floor dressed in erasable green lycra.
Wanting to push the medium as far as he could, Henson was keen to puppeteer everything in the film – including the copious amounts of full-body shots that are usually avoided by a well-placed table-high-level camera. “It allows the audience to see a little bit more of the puppets, and to see them doing things that they’re not used to seeing them do,” says Henson.
Walking us into the on-site workshop, he introduces his real cast – 125 purpose-built puppets that are all in various stages of repair and refit by a team of production assistants all slaving over piles of fluff and felt and one big Jiffy bag labelled “Phil’s sex teeth”. Between the sewing machines and animatronic joints sits a rag-tag museum of Henson’s offcuts – trays full of plastic eyeballs, a cardboard box full of “assorted chickens”, a tote bag full of weasels, and shelves stacked to the ceiling with hamburgers, cows, crabs, vultures, cats, hookers, cops, sailors, armadillos and pigs.
“Some of these guys came from Puppet Up!, and a lot of them are background puppets from older shows that never had their time in the spotlight,” says Amy Smith, production manager of the Henson creature shop in Burbank. “Then there are six different Phils that all do slightly different things. There’s a Phil that was made just for the Jacuzzi fight scene.” Don’t ask…
Avoiding CGI wherever possible, Henson’s team used some of the same old-school tricks that they’ve been perfecting since the ’70s. “Jim invented a way to push the window open a little bit further but keep the intimacy of the puppet,” says longtime production supervisor Scott Johnson, squeezing an old plastic water bottle attached to a rubber tube to make a decrepit old stripper take a drag on an e-cigarette. “Look at the famous bicycle scene in The Muppet Movie for instance – there’s always a half-body Kermit in the foreground, and a full body animatronic Kermit in the long shot. When he went around in a circle we had hand-puppets and RC puppets switching places, back and forth, behind the camera at each pass. Brian was actually pulling one of those bikes for his dad at the time. He was on his school holidays!”
Now a year older than his father was when he died, Brian’s whole life has been spent learning, perfecting and pushing the art of puppetry. Watching him work, it’s impossible to imagine anyone else directing The Happytime Murders. “Puppetry is the art of infusing a personality and a life and a sense of background into… [looks around] that water bottle.” Picking up the bottle, he somehow makes it come alive as he walks it around the table.
“That’s what we do. It takes you out of your subjective self and puts you in a more objective place. Puppetry has always done that and that’s what’s so great about it – you’re entertaining the child, the innocent child inside all of us. When a puppet comes on screen you make no assumptions about them. You wait, and you learn, like a child does. And that is why puppetry has been around for so long and it will be forever. That, and the fact that there’s no way I could do the stuff we’re doing in this movie with humans…”
The happyTime murders opens on 27 augusT.