Show Business: The Muppets Make the Big Move

• Share

Even now they are closing in on Tinsel Town

The scene: An amiable frog enters the El Sleezo Café and perches at the bar. A thug who looks amazingly like a malevolent Kojak starts eyeballing him. The creature, a popeyed Candide named Kermit the Frog, had just hopped in for a quick one en route to Hollywood, but now Madeline Kahn, slinking alongside him, coos: "Buy me a drink, sailor?" Soon Kermit the Frog finds himself arguing with Telly Savalas about warts. Behind them a sinister crew of rogues are tearing up the place. This is clearly no club for an honest frog; the menu even features french fried frog's legs.

Weird kiddie cinema? An outtake from National Lampoon's Animal House? Nothing of the sort. It's just the Muppets, the world's most popular television stars, making their first movie—an $8 million comedy called simply The Muppet Movie. The film is a "road" epic about the puppet gang's perilous trek from the Deep South to Hollywood.

They have plenty of help from some very well known human friends. "My kids gave me a proposition I couldn't resist—do it or else," says Telly Savalas of his cameo as the barroom brawler who is intolerant of warts. Other humanoid notables in the cast are Orson Welles, Bob Hope, Richard Pryor and Dom DeLuise. But to the Muppets' 235 million worldwide fans, the real heros of all this silliness are sensitive Kermit the Frog; his friend Fozzie, the stumbling bear; Miss Piggy, the porcine blonde caught achingly between show-biz ambition and true love; and a star-struck turkey, Gonzo the Great.

"There's a void in the motion picture world for ... whatever this is," smiles the movie's Executive Producer Martin Starger, U.S. representative of British Producer Sir Lew Grade. Just what it will be is hard to pin down: maybe something like Punch and Judy done according to Mad Magazine.

The movie is being shot in Georgia and California without any animated effects. Beyond the clever scenes and imaginative facial sculpting, its success depends on a proud and well-paid crew of 20 invisible performers who are the real actors. The Muppeteers must crouch uncomfortably below the set's surface with their Muppet-covered arms stretched painfully skyward, as they stare into reverse-image video monitors to see what their arms and fingers are doing. "Think of dancing, which is a physical extension of internal feelings," explains Muppeteer Jerry Nelson, 44. "In a smaller way, pushing creative energy through your arm into the puppet is the same thing."

The human actors are mildly envious. "Those puppets get acting moments that most actors never have," observes Austin Pendleton who plays the movie's softhearted villain. Director James (Kid Blue) Frawley has already suspended disbelief. Says he: "My work with Kermit the Frog is as specific as it would be with Bobby Redford."