It's not that I'm a control freak. It's just that I have high-standards for my own work, and I expect the same level of quality from those I work with, and if I think someone I'm working with isn't going to reach that bar, I get anxious. I butt in and start to do things myself and look over their shoulder constantly. I need to get better at that, but what can I say? I think I do good work.
But there's this anecdote in the Brian Jay Jones' biography of Jim Henson that I think about a lot in these moments. It's about when Jim Henson and songwriter Paul Williams were planning out the music for The Muppet Movie, the 1979 film that would be Kermit's first shot at the big screen. At this point in his career, Jim Henson had already had an uber-successful stint as a TV ads maker, helped get Sesame Street off the ground, and was in the middle of shooting his third season of The Muppet Show, which turned Jim's characters into household names. However, the Muppet crew had yet to break into cinema yet, and The Muppet Movie was their first (and if unsuccessful, probably only) chance to do it.
To write the music for the film, Jim called in Paul Williams, an accomplished songwriter who Jim previously hired to write music for the TV special Emmet Otter's Jugband Christmas. When Paul and fellow songwriter Kenny Ascher accepted the assignment, Paul asked Jim, "You want to hear the songs as we're writing them?"
Jim responded, "No. I'll hear them in the studio. I know I'm gonna love them."
Paul and Kenny went on to write a tremendous soundtrack for the film, including "Rainbow Connect" that stands as one of the greatest songs in American film history.
There's something so touching and charming about the way Jim carried himself in that interaction. Jim would have had every right to be a psychotic control freak over this project considering it was his characters and his brand and perhaps his only shot at making a successful feature film with those characters and that brand. But instead he placed his trust in the brilliance of his collaborators. He hired people that he trusted would do great work, and once those people agreed to the job, he gave them total control. And the results were incredible.
I think we can often be surprised at how great of work some people can do if we just give them the freedom to do it without people constantly looking over their shoulder. People like Steve Jobs have led us to conflate being a genius with being a control freak, but that doesn't have to be the case. More often than not, I think a genius is remembered as a genius because he or she gave so much freedom to the brilliant people around them and got tremendous output as a result.
Sometimes you just have to "hear it in the studio."
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