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Anyhow, good story of the Outliers variety of a fascinatingly inspiring figure. He grows up in a Beatle-like situation, where yeah, the neighborhood wasn't particularly good, but the home was stable and supporting. Somehow (1) he becomes obsessed with puppeteering at a very young age and makes it through school without getting the snot beat out of him, gets taken under his wing by one of Henson's senior designers (named "Kermit," interestingly enough), and breaks into an absolutely white world with no formal theater or deign training.
As one of the younger guys in his field, the art form is dying on his watch. He gets plum roles with TV shows like Captain Kangaroo and Big Blue Marble and The Giant Space Coaster before his 21st birthday, but you know, we're in the early years of computer graphics, and puppetry doesn't hold the same magic for kids that it did for him, and all three of these shows die on shift.
But he's got his friends in Henson's camp, so he gets a job on "the street" --- Sesame Street, the cornerstone of the industry. But they're a family that's been together for decades, and the new guy has to take the crumbs, getting assigned fringe and experimental characters that only get a handful of forgotten appearances. This little red Grover relative puppet has been appearing, and he's performed by another guy with a horse voice and an almost vulgar crassness. The operator knows it's not working and he comes back to the shop one day, throws Elmo in Clash's lap and says "See what you can do with this."
Looking for the angle to make his statement, he takes Elmo home with him, talks to him, tries different voices, and shows up Monday morning having turned him into the naif's naif --- so innocently full of love that he makes Big Bird look like a burned out cynic.
He creates something bigger than himself and, as the movie tells it, everyone who met him along the way knew he would. And I guess they really did, because there's a lot of file footage, of him learning his trade as a kid, him sneaking away from his class trip to New York to visit Kermit's studio on Great Jones in the Village --- stuff like that which I can't imagine my family or friends having the presence of mind to document on Super-8 if I was a young genius.
But how would I know?
Anyway, Clash is really a big deal no matter how Elmo'd out you may be. My main part is what's not there. There's more about him learning puppet making than about learning performing. There's a failed marriage in there that implications suggest was stressed to the breaking point by the demands of Elmo being an international celebrity and Clash insisting on being the only performer. And you know, there's the occasionally developed but not fully addressed theme of Clash being challenged with the suggestion that this not an authentic way for a black man of today to express himself.
But you spend two minutes with the man and you're going to say, "This is one authentic guy, Elmo or no."
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