Brian Jay Jones Quotes

• “Please watch out for each other and love and forgive everybody. It's a good life, enjoy it.' - Jim”

  Brian Jay Jones

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• “When I was young," wrote Jim, "my ambition was to be one of the people who makes a difference in this world. My hope still is to leave this world a little bit better for my being here."
  
  And he did.”

  Brian Jay Jones

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• “When Jim left the planet so suddenly, all of us who loved him, worked with him, were inspired by him, gathered in New York City. We were like dandelion seeds clinging to the stem and to each other. And on May 16th, [the day Jim died] the wind began to blow. There’s no stem any more. We’re all floating on the breeze. And it’s scary and exhilarating, and there’s nothing we can do about it. But gradually, we’ll all drift to the ground and plant ourselves. And no matter what we grow into, it’ll be influenced by Jim. We’re Jim’s seeds. And it’s not only those of us who knew him. Everyone who was touched by his work is a Jim-seed.”

  Brian Jay Jones

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• “Jim Henson's body was gone, and yet that powerful presence-that undefinable 'something' that compelled men to seek his appreciation and approval, and that women found somehow irresistible-would always remain. Anyone who had ever smiled as Ernie tried to play a rhyming game with Bert, or laughed as Kermit had chased Fozzie off the stage, arms flailing, had felt it. Anyone who had ever wished they could explore a Fraggle hole, save the world with a crystal shard, or dance with a charismatic goblin king had been touched by it.”

  Brian Jay Jones

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• “The attitude you have as a parent is what your kids will learn from more than what you tell them,” Jim said later. “They don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.”

  Brian Jay Jones

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• “a whole generation has grown up without fairy tales.”

  Brian Jay Jones

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• “Lucas wasn’t paying for a movie; he was buying his own creative freedom.”

  Brian Jay Jones

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• “One viewer - a Mr. Dionne from California... fired off an angry, rambling letter, complaining haughtily that "the most disciplined attention I could give [The Cube] was a belch from the grave of Marcus Aurelius, occasioned, I might add, by the dead weight of its own dust caving in on itself." Two weeks later came Jim's one-sentence response:
  
  Dear Mr. Dionne:
  What the fuck are you talking about?
  Yours truly,
  JIM HENSON”

  Brian Jay Jones

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• “Perhaps more important, it also showed that you could get away with being a little dangerous, provocative, or just plain deep if you did it with a smile on your face and remembered that entertainment always came first. When done right, it’s possible to be silly and subversive at the same time.”

  Brian Jay Jones

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• “Ultimately, said Lucas, adopting the tones of the radical hippie many supposed him to be, “we learned one rule that came out of the ’60s: Acquire the means of production”

  Brian Jay Jones

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• “If you take a character and you call him a frog … you immediately give the audience a handle. You’re assisting the audience to understand; you’re giving them a bridge or an access. And if you don’t give them that, if you keep it more abstract, it’s almost more pure. It’s a cooler thing. It’s a difference of sort of warmth and cool.”

  Brian Jay Jones

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• “It is our responsibility to keep telling these tales--to tell them in a way that they teach and entertain and give meaning to our lives,' he [Jim] said later. 'This is not merely an obligation, it's something we must do because we love doing it.”

  Brian Jay Jones

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• “The same year, Hasbro—which had soaked up Kenner years earlier—reactivated its option to produce action figures and issued a new line of Star Wars toys under the imprint “The Power of the Force.” A manager at FAO Schwarz in New York was surprised to see that there were more adults than children buying the new line of toys—a”

  Brian Jay Jones

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• “Lucas began filming THX 1138 on Monday, September 22, 1969, shooting from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. in the still unfinished Bay Area Rapid Transit system.”

  Brian Jay Jones

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• “Next, Lucas began inserting his names and places into a short narrative, not much more than a story fragment, called “The Journal of the Whills.” He envisioned borrowing a storytelling device from the old Disney cartoons, showing a storybook—in this case the Journal of the Whills—“falling”

  Brian Jay Jones

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• “Lucas had narrowed his lead threesome down to two competing groups: in one was Walken, Will Seltzer, and Terri Nunn, a trio Lucas described as “a little more serious, a little more realistic”; in the other, Ford, Hamill, and Fisher, a group Lucas called “a little more fun, more goofy.”

  Brian Jay Jones

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• “UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

  Brian Jay Jones

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• “The young Lucas may have been ambivalent about movies, but there was one entertainment, in fact one place, he was very passionate about. “I loved Disneyland,” Lucas said—and so, it seemed, did George Lucas Sr., who flew the entire family to southern California to be there for the park’s opening day in July 1955.81”

  Brian Jay Jones

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• “At Lucas’s request, ILM had altered the cantina confrontation between Han Solo and the bounty hunter Greedo—which had ended with Han gunning the hapless Greedo down—to instead show Greedo squeezing off a shot first, thus turning Han’s previously aggressive blast into what Lucas saw as simply self-defense. Fans”

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• “This guy was like a sailor who had studied the compass and found that there was a fifth direction in which one could sail."
  (Jerry Juhl on being offered a job with Muppets, Inc.)”

  Brian Jay Jones

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• “Jim was shaken by the impending death of his grandfather—he had, after all, been partly named for him—but Jim would do as he always did in the face of grief: he would build and create. Foraging for any suitable materials, Jim settled on his mother’s old felt coat, and as he leaned over the table in the Hensons’ living room he sewed a simple puppet body, with a slightly pointed face, out of the faded turquoise material. For eyes, he simply glued two halves of a Ping-Pong ball—with slashed circles carefully inked in black on each—to the top of the head. That was it. From the simplest of materials—and, perhaps appropriately, from a determination to bring a bit of order from darkness—Kermit was born.”

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• “If The Muppet Show had a basketball team, the score would always be Frog 99, Chaos 98."
  (Jerry Juhl on the crazy workload of The Muppet Show)”

  Brian Jay Jones

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• “Lucas recalled. “I went for the merchandising because it was one of the few things left that we hadn’t discussed.”60 But Lucas also shrewdly recognized that Fox and other studios had underestimated—and, in many cases, wasted—merchandising opportunities to market their films. “We”

  Brian Jay Jones

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• “When done right, it's possible to be silly and subversive at the same time.”

  Brian Jay Jones

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• “During the first week of filming, it began raining in Tunisia’s Nefta Valley for the first time in seven years and didn’t stop for four days. Equipment and vehicles bogged down in the mud, requiring assistance from the Tunisian army to pull everything out of the muck. It was often cold in the morning and blazing hot by afternoon, and Lucas would begin most days in his brown coat, hands shoved deep in the pockets as he peered through the eyepiece of the camera; as the sun rose higher in the sky, he would shrug off his coat, put on his sunglasses, and direct his actors in a checked work shirt, with a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. When it wasn’t raining, high winds tore up the sets, ripping apart the sandcrawler and blowing one set, as a crew member put it, “halfway to Algeria.”7”

  Brian Jay Jones

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