From GQ, in 2016:
The best thing about Michael Caine is his laugh, which is a warm, loud “heh heh heh.” The second-best thing about Michael Caine is The Muppet Christmas Carol, the greatest puppet-based holiday film of all time. Caine sings. Caine does a restrained jig. Caine wears an old-timey dressing gown… Michael Caine loves it just as much as you do…
Michael Caine: To start, my daughter, who is the mother of my grandchildren, was then seven, and she had never seen me in a movie. I had never made a movie that a 7-year-old can see. And so a man mentioned the Muppets and I said, “That’s it! I’ll do that!” And it’s A Christmas Carol, it’s a fabulous tale! You’ll be old Scrooge, it’ll be marvelous! And it was absolutely perfect at that time for what I wanted. I could make it, and my daughter could see it. That’s why I did it. And it was lovely…
When you’re talking to Kermit, where do you look? Do you look him in the eye?
Yes. You look him straight in the eye. It’s like talking to a real actor. And the guy is just down below, buried in the floor. And it’s very funny when you see [the puppeteers] rehearsing, because they’re in the corner, and they haven’t got the dolls on their arms, and they’re just talking to each other with their hands. It’s very funny. One of the best things about it is that puppeteers, compared to actors, are much nicer, gentler, kinder people. They’re really the loveliest of people. I’d never worked with a cast where every single person was lovely. You always get a couple of actors who think too much of themselves. But these were all kind, gentle, loving people and I had the best time…
NYMag‘s culture blog Vulture, in 2017:
“You know you’re an alcoholic when you misplace a decade,” says songwriter Paul Williams. “And, essentially, the ’80s were gone for me.”…
Two months after Williams got sober, Jim Henson died.
“We already knew that Jim wanted the Muppets to live beyond him, because that’s why he was selling to Disney,” says Dave Goelz, a veteran Muppeteer best known as the Great Gonzo. “The question for us was: Were we up to it? Did we want to try it? And we all felt that it was our life’s work — it wasn’t just a job — so we decided to try.”
Rather than making yet another movie about the backstage antics of this zany menagerie, the team decided to cast the Muppets in roles from a classic book: Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Jerry Juhl, head writer on The Muppet Show, wrote a screenplay that surrounded Dickens’s own prose and a human Ebenezer Scrooge — played by Michael Caine — with Kermit as Bob Cratchit, Miss Piggy as Mrs. Cratchit, and Gonzo as the narrating Dickens himself. The result was a charmingly faithful adaptation of the famous redemption story, with a never-better Caine playing Scrooge utterly straight, treating his Muppet co-stars as if they were, as he said at the time, “the Royal Shakespeare Company.”…
“When I got sober, the career I thought I had was pretty much gone,” says Williams. “I just fell in love with recovery, I felt like that’s all I wanted to do, and I didn’t know if I was ever going to write music again. And then I was asked to write the songs for The Muppet Christmas Carol. Every now and then, the universe will line up to do something at the right time in your life.”
“I was longing to live life in a totally new way, one day at a time, trusting that what I needed was within me to get things done. And I’m sitting down to write these songs, and I’m writing about Scrooge: a man who’s learning to live life in a whole new way, who’s having a spiritual awakening [laughs]. It’s like, okay now, this is my inventory of dealing with where I am in my own life.”…
“I put my name on the songs because I sit down and I write them,” says Williams. “But the fact is that my claim to the material, my claim to the end product is diluted by my gratefulness for whatever power is a part of the process. Muppet Christmas Carol became a bridge back to songwriting. The gap that I had to leap, I think, in many ways, was my own ego — that these are my ideas and I’m writing them, and I began to see that, you know what? You have unseen collaborators who show up again and again and again, and as long as I’m willing to share that information and stay grateful for their participation, hopefully they’ll keep showing up.”
“If there is an unnamed collaborator on the work that I did on The Muppet Christmas Carol,” he added, “I assume it would have to be Jim Henson.”
steppy
The best part of this post was to read to myself the Michael Caine interview in Michael Caine voice. You know the voice. You know what it sounds like. Merry Christmas, jackals!
Mousebumples
I think I saw a few of these articles today, actually, and we’re about halfway through Muppet Christmas Carol now. Streaming on Hulu! (and Disney+, I think)
❤️ Muppets, and Michael Caine.
eclare
@Mousebumples:
I’ll have to check it out! I’ve never seen the movie, and I have Hulu. Thanks!
Alison Rose
I’m about to engage in my modified version of Jewish Christmas: frozen egg rolls from Whole Foods and Barbie on HBO Max.
BellyCat
To make a movie that your seven year old can see you in is the highest bar imaginable. Very touching film project on many levels.
eclare
@Alison Rose:
Egg rolls are Chinese, they count.
Alison Rose
@eclare: Um…I’m aware, LOL. By “modified” I meant that I wasn’t at an actual Chinese restaurant or movie theater.
Splitting Image
I avoided the Muppet Christmas Carol when it first came out because I was still sad about Jim Henson passing away. His voice had been a part of my life since I started watching Sesame Street at 2 years old or so. I’m glad the other puppeteers kept on working.
To this day I don’t think anything makes me happy as the Muppets.
geg6
@Alison Rose:
Enjoy Barbie! I loved it! 🩷
zhena gogolia
@geg6: It’s fun. I’m a little ashamed that my favorite parts are the Ken parts.
mrmoshpotato
Rear Window just started on TCM.
eclare
@Alison Rose:
Gotcha. Enjoy Barbie.
eclare
@zhena gogolia:
Ryan Gosling was impressive. I don’t think I’ve seen him in anything else, or if I have I don’t remember.
Eta> Just checked IMDB. This is the first movie that I have seen him in.
zhena gogolia
@eclare: I’ve only seen The Notebook. He’s much better in this.
TaMara
That fact that Michael Caine played Scrooge totally straight and believed in his fellow actors, is what makes this movie a classic. He understood the assignment, for sure.
And Ryan Gosling was the best part of the Barbie movie – the fantasy ballet was fantastic. Oh, and Billie Eilish’s song.
frosty
@zhena gogolia: The Ken parts were great … no, they were “So cool.”
Ryan Gosling for the Oscar!!!
My other favorite part of the movie? Barbie’s last line.
moonbat
Thanks for highlighting this version of that oft-told Christmas tale, AL. I was trying to decide today who my favorite Scrooge of all time was and Michael Caine has to be up there in the top three.
Raoul Paste
The Muppet Christmas. Carol really does hold up well. Thanks A.L., for a sweet and worthy Christmas story
strange visitor (from another planet)
my father’s favorite movie was zulu which iirc, was michael caine’s first feature, and my mom had a giant hardon for sean connery, so i’ve seen the man who would be king many, many times. caine and connery are having a blast making that movie. imo, it’s always a better film when the actors are enjoying their experience (you get better work), but though (as they all say) he’s playing scrooge completely straight, there’s a gleam in his eye and a bit of a smirk he can’t contain in a few moments that shows how much fun he’s having during the making of the muppet’s a christmas carol.
Hob
@TaMara: There’s a Twitter quip I’ve seen reposted lately that irritates me unreasonably, where the premise is that the director of The Muppet Christmas Carol is telling Caine to just relax and have fun with it because it’s a puppet movie but Caine decides for some reason to be super serious. To me that’s a reading that could only come from someone who doesn’t understand comedy, or at least doesn’t have a clue what it’s like to do comedy or to be part of any kind of collaborative performance. Caine wasn’t doing some weird thing of his own that the filmmakers didn’t understand; he gave the performance he gave because he’s a pro and because that’s what the project was all about— as you said, he understood the assignment— and also because he loved it. It really bugs me that so many people don’t seem to get what “deadpan” is at all, and require someone to do the equivalent of a “see what I did there???” before they’ll believe that it was on purpose.
Splitting Image
@Hob:
You wonder if any of these people have ever seen Airplane! Nielsen, Graves, Stack, and Bridges were all hired because they could deadpan their way through the movie no matter how silly it got.
Going further back, it was said of Laurel and Hardy that they always approached their acting as though they were performing a Shakespearean tragedy. That’s why their movies are still funny today. Chaplin and Keaton, too. All of the greats understood this.
strange visitor (from another planet)
@Splitting Image: “do you like gladiator movies, son?”
brantl
I pretty much love anything done by the Muppets, and Jim Henson. I think Michael Cain is now an honorary Muppet.
kalakal
One of the loveliest stories I know about actors taking parts because of their kids is about the sadly missed Raul Julia.
His last part, which he knew would be his last part as he was terminally ill, was as the baddie in Street Fighter and he was asked why he took as his final work a part in a video game adaption rather than something “classier” to be remembered by.
He replied that his kids adored the game, were fanatical about it, as were all the friends. His parting gift to his children was they could go to school, hang out with their friends with all of them knowing that their dad was the major character in their favourite movie
O. Felix Culpa
The Muppet Christmas Carol has been a family Christmas afternoon tradition since my (now mid-thirties) sons were little. It always seemed to me that Michael Caine was having a good time. Thank you, AL, for the backstory!
P.S. Christopher Plummer in The Man Who Invented Christmas is a hoot as Scrooge and probably the best thing about that movie.
Miss Bianca
@Splitting Image: Me too. I watch Muppet Christmas Carol every year and it always makes me cry (and laugh, of course). It’s my favorite adaptation by far.
Just got done watching it a couple days ago, in fact – twice, the second time around with Brian Henson’s commentary, which is well worth the time to listen to it!
@Hob: And if you listen to the above-mentioned commentary, you’ll hear that that story isn’t true – Henson totally respected Caine’s choices and mentions that his performance is great BECAUSE he takes it so seriously.
(Also, that Caine loved getting a chance to sing in the movie, which he had apparently never done before!)