In the opening minutes of I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story, a puppeteer walks onto the set of Sesame Street. He wears a small TV monitor harnessed to his chest. The legs of his bright orange pants, held up by suspenders, terminate in big, soft bird feet. He lifts his arms, and a staffer lowers a thick feathery costume over his head. Caroll Spinney disappears inside the body of Big Bird.
Two seconds later, the puppet comes to life. Big Bird’s eyes can’t focus, exactly, yet they seem to. He lifts his head and looks around. “Oh!” he says to the staffer. “Good morning.”
It’s one of many beautiful moments in the film, which the Academy of Music in Northampton screened on Feb. 12. I had already seen I Am Big Bird, but I couldn’t help but go again — this time bringing along my mother, who introduced me to Sesame Street in the first place.
She and I weren’t the only audience members captivated by Spinney’s artful puppetry. For 90 minutes, film directors Dave LaMattina and Chad N. Walker had us rapt. When Spinney and his wife Debbie recount how he first asked her out, viewers laughed out loud. When Big Bird gets the chance to go to space, but doesn’t, and that trip turns out to be the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, the room gasped. When the Big Bird puppet gets defaced by ROTC students during a campus visit, someone behind me angrily whispered, “punks!”
After the screening, Caroll and Debbie Spinney appeared onstage — to a standing ovation — and answered some audience questions.
“Caroll,” asked moderator Steve Sanderson, “What would you say to artists, be they puppeteers, poets, or painters, who are struggling to make a living?”
Spinney responded: “I’d say that you get a lot of rejection, because people don’t know where you’re at. But gradually, if you hold out, sooner or later someone notices and says, look at that. Do you see what’s really in there? In other words, don’t give up easily.”
And what about that Big Bird costume? What’s really in there?
Spinney originated the Big Bird character in 1969, and he has been the puppeteer in that suit for nearly every episode since, as well as in many live appearances around the world. In advance of the film screening, I spoke with Spinney about his forty-six years of avian adventures — and of the childhood calling that told him how to get to Sesame Street.
Hunter Styles: The documentary has been getting great reviews since it came out last May. How long did it take for the film to come together, and whose idea was it?
Caroll Spinney: It took about five years. The filmmakers approached Sesame Street, got them interested, and they had the chance to do some filming on set. Also, my wife Debbie surprised them by mentioning that she and I have forty years of film archives, dating back to 1954.
That old footage in the film is all yours?
Those fuzzy 8mm films clips — those are mine. When I was twenty, in the Air Force, I got a refund from the government for 150 dollars, so I bought a Bell and Howell wind-up camera. I had always wanted one. I used it for years.
Your career was taking off well before Sesame Street. Can you catch us up on your life prior to your meeting Jim Henson, after you got back from your service in Germany?
When I got back, I bought a 1954 Chevy station wagon. You could almost stand up inside it. I drove through thirty states, ended up in Hollywood, and got an interview with the animation department at Disney. I was hired to be an animator, but I didn’t take the job — the pay was only fifty-six dollars a week — so I went to Boston instead, finished art school, and bluffed my way into some work. I had a comic strip in a weekly paper. But it wasn’t until 1960 that I managed to get onto Bozo’s Big Top in Boston. Then I went to a puppet festival at the University of Utah in 1962. That’s where I met Jim Henson and got the job I have now.
In August, Sesame Street finalized a deal to move from PBS to HBO, where it will air for at least five seasons. Does that change impact the work you do on the show?
Not really. I’m so pleased that HBO came along. We still get to film in the same place in New York, but HBO is taking over all production costs, which is something we needed badly. The show was really struggling to survive. There were fewer government grants. Toy sales were helping, but not enough. We used to make 100 episodes a year, but we were down to twenty-six. With HBO, we’ll be doing thirty-six episodes.
Frankly, I don’t want to do many more episodes than that. I’m eighty-two now. I was thirty-five when I took the job. I’m the oldest one working for the show aside from [actor] Bob McGrath, who only comes in a couple of days a year. I don’t puppet as much anymore, but I still do the voices. Sometimes I’m away when they film, so I loop in the voices to match the puppetry. I just did that yesterday for Oscar the Grouch. It’s still so much fun to do.
But you still perform too, right?
Yes. Still doing it. People ask me why I don’t retire. I can’t think of what to say except how do you walk away from playing Big Bird?
Are there ways that you make Big Bird your own that no one else can ever replicate? Or do you think the character can be fully learned by someone else?
Well, Kermit the Frog isn’t exactly the same now as he was when Jim [Henson] was alive. On the day Jim hired me, he told me, “We won’t always be here, and we need to keep the characters alive by teaching the others to do these puppets.” So I have a stand-in, who also does Kermit the Frog for the Muppet Show with Disney.
Jim Henson passed away twenty-five years ago. Have your thoughts or feelings about him changed since he’s been gone?
No. He had five children, and he indoctrinated them with all elements of his work. They’ve done puppetry. They’re really good artists, like my kids. The germ of talent is passed on.
Your mother was an artist, and she helped you build your first puppet theater when you were a child. There’s a wonderful moment early in the film where you say, “She didn’t realize that she was giving me my career.”
Yes, I was nine years old when she gave me my first set of puppets. That’s why I try to encourage parents when they tell me about their child’s creativity. I’ve been mentoring a boy in Connecticut who first wrote to me when he was five years old — to me, not to Big Bird — because he wanted to work with puppets. He’s now nineteen, and he’s been getting a lot of great jobs. His parents have always done the right thing and supported his interest.
Why is it important that Sesame Street live on? Can it do something that no other show can do?
Sesame Street is like no other show. It always has been. We were such a blazing success right from the start that CBS, ABC, and NBC all tried to create their own versions of a special show for kids. None of those shows lasted. Now we’re in our forty-sixth year, and my contract takes me up through fifty.
We spent the whole past year doing screenings and talk-backs, and I’ve enjoyed meeting so many people who realize what this show has meant as an educational tool for children. The true fans are the ones who come to the screenings and Q&As. We get some very deep, intelligent questions about the show.
One of the best scenes in the documentary is an animated sequence that explains the inside of the Big Bird suit. Have technological improvements over the past four decades changed your job in there?
I’ve had that monitor I wear inside the suit — we call it the “electronic bra” — since the second year of the show. At that point, my work went from a two to a ten, because I could finally see what I was doing. We’d tried making a little eye hole in front, but the feathers would always blow across it. Once I had that monitor, I had a clear view, even though it’s a tiny picture — just an inch and a half across.
Now it’s all digital. The analog TV screens I wore thirty-five years ago, they don’t make them anymore. There’s no wire trailing from Big Bird anymore. The job’s not good if you’re claustrophobic, but I love the acting work. When I bring these characters to life, they become real to me.
That includes Oscar, whom you also control. Do you have a different relationship with Oscar than you do with Big Bird?
We’re different types. Oscar doesn’t think like I do. He’s told jokes I didn’t know I knew. I’m not sure he likes me very much. Big Bird, on the other hand, is truly nice. They’re yin and yang.
If I make Oscar look at me, I find it intimidating. His eyes are very piercing. He can grimace. He can look surprised. He’s the most expressive puppet I’ve ever seen.
It seems his design has barely changed at all over the years. Big Bird more so — he began as a sort of country yokel character but, as the film tells it, you quickly adjusted his behavior to make him more child-like.
Yes, he’s changed in certain ways. The Big Bird head I use now is the one from the very first show, but it gets refeathered every year. He’s covered in turkey feathers, you know. When we started he had 3,000 feathers on his body. Now he has 6,000. Early on, they had to hire a turkey farm to produce the feathers. The farm kept about seventy-five turkeys alive for an extra year so that their feathers would be big enough to use.
He just gradually gets better and better. I look a lot older now, but he’s still six years old. I don’t know how he does it.•
Contact Hunter Styles at hstyles@valleyadvocate.com.
