Humanity sneaks its way into a making-of
Most “making-of” documentaries are basically a waste. They’re superficial, uninformative, and used mostly for promotion. Unless you’re an obsessed fan, just watch the movie.
However, Inside the Labyrinth - about the making of that 1986 Jim Henson film that my generation still worships so much - contains one burst of human insight amongst all the chatter about how they got the puppets to move, the scene with Kermit that got cut, and David Bowie’s impressive package.
In Labyrinth, David Bowie plays a villian in a castle who wears tight pants and contact juggles crystal balls. As he conspires, he twirls big glass balls in his hands with such pure baby-kidnapping evil in his heart that it makes my veins run cold. But according to Inside the Labyrinth, David Bowie doesn’t actually know how to contact juggle.
The man responsible for that was famous juggler Michael Moschen. But rather than have him come out and stand in front of David Bowie to put on a diverting juggling show for the whole family at various points throughout the film, Henson chose to hide Moschen behind Bowie, so it looked like devious muppet king Bowie was doing the juggling.
As we see in the making-of doc, this meant that Moschen was crouching behind Bowie with his arm poking out from Bowie’s side - an awkward position that hurt his control and made it impossible for him to see. To make the alien hand less obvious, they had Bowie’s character wear a glove on his juggling hand, which made Moschen’s job even harder. Multiple takes were ruined by Moschen “dropping the ball” so to speak. Literally.
The humanity moment comes when we see a shot of this once proud juggling expert squatting blindly in a submissive position behind Bowie. We don’t see his juggling, but we hear the sound of glass balls hitting the ground; he’s messed up once again. Moschen grunts, scrunches up his eyes, and forces out a pained “sorry” as his inelegant transformation from genius juggler with a lifetime of experience to failure and mediocrity is captured on film forever.
Nice that they left that in.
6 years ago