'Being Elmo' Tells Muppeteer's Story with Heart and Style

The winner of this year's Sundance Special Jury Prize for Documentary Feature was the unabashedly uplifting Being Elmo: A Puppeteers Journey--the story of Kevin Clash, the puppeteer behind Sesame Street's lovable red Muppet. It's a heartwarming, personal and highly emotional movie with universal appeal. Interestingly enough, it's not at all the film director Constance Marks intended to make.

What Marks set out to make over six years ago was a cinema verité piece: a slice-of-life film that would show Kevin at work on the show. But after three years of filming and editing, she realized it just wasn't working. It wasn't until co-director and editor Philip Shane came on in 2008, that they began to unearth the secret to making the award-winning film.

Kevin Clash performing for local children in Baltimore in 1975.

"I told Connie [Marks] that when I tell people about this movie, the first thing that I say to them is that Kevin was this poor African-American kid from a poor neighborhood in Baltimore and he was a genius," Shane recalls. "And I said, it's Kevin's life that's a story. It has a chronology, it has a lot of ups and downs. He aspired to huge things. It couldn't have been easy for a kid making puppets. She agreed and we essentially changed it. It's still a documentary, but it became a totally different genre. It went from being verité-based to becoming a biographical film based on interviews and archival material."

To record the interviews, Marks and Shane relied on a makeshift "Interrotron," the device made famous by Errol Morris that lets a documentary interviewee look straight into the camera while still being able to see the interviewer. Modified by Shane's friend Ken Druckerman, the version Marks and Shane used allows the producer and subject to look at each other through a mirror. In part, the technique helps establish the connection the audience feels with Kevin as he tells his story.

As for the archival footage, there's none more powerful than a segment that shows an actual teenaged Kevin meeting Muppet-maker Kermit Love for the first time. The material is from a TV show called The Big Blue Marble, which ran from 1974 to 1983 and focused on the extraordinary lives of young people. Marks came across it on a VHS tape early on in the process and immediately knew that it was a "goldmine." But by the time she had figured out exactly what portion of the footage she wanted to use, tracking down the rights proved to be a Herculean task.

"When we went back to license it," Marks says, "the company had folded. The man had died. There was no trace of anyone."

Adds producer Corinne LaPook, "We both were working on it for about two years, like detectives trying to find [who held the rights]."

Director Constance Marks with Kevin and Elmo.

By the time LaPook got on the phone with the right person, it was too late. Just weeks prior, they had thrown away all the masters of the show saying, as LaPook puts it, "'We didn't have any use for them.'" The production finally got the rights, but the only copy they had of the footage was the one VHS, which Marks notes was at least without timecode.

"I think the minute Connie realized this was the only VHS in the world, she transferred it immediately on to Digibeta," Shane says, maintaining that the original tape was about as high quality as it's possible for a VHS to be. Color correction for the whole film, which also included archival footage on all sorts of other media, including mini-DVs and more, was done by Evan Anthony at Framerunner.

Editing was done on Final Cut Pro. Shane, Justin Weinstein, Constantine Limperis and assistant editor Roger Matthews all worked on it at various points since 2008. When the film got accepted at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Shane claims it was the "roughest cut imaginable: huge black holes, photo cards that would say 'photo of Jim Henson to come' and we didn't know if there really was a photo coming or not! We never left our keyboards at a certain point."

Elmo skiing at the Sundance Film Festival.

With looming deadlines, Shane and Weinstein were working on various parts of the film at the same time, emailing finished sequences back and forth and communicating via Skype and iChat. "We worked completely remotely as a lot of people do these days," Shane says. "The funny thing is we're both in Brooklyn. But just because we're in two different neighborhoods, we could be on the other side of the world. It doesn't matter. That's the amazing thing that Final Cut is so good at."

Being Elmo was shot on a Sony HVRZ1U, along with some B-roll filmed on Shane's then-fresh-out-of-the-box iPhone 4. It is playing in select theaters throughout the fall.