Henson and Juhl’s Tale of Sand: from unmade film to illustrated screenplay and graphic novel
In the interval between the production of the successful short films Time Piece (1965) and The Cube (1969), Jim Henson and Jerry Juhl devoted themselves to writing the screenplay of Tale of Sand, with the aim of adapting it into a feature-length film one day. Jim Henson eventually became more famous for Sesame Street and Muppet Babies, Juhl also got involved in other projects, so their manuscript remained forgotten for several years and the film was never produced. Working as archival director and historian at the Jim Henson Company, in 2010 Karen Falk found the original screenplay file lost in the company’s archives. With the permission of the company and supervision of Henson’s daughter Lisa, the text was published in two versions: first, as an award-winning graphic novel in 2011, and three years later as an illustrated screenplay, both with illustrations by Ramon K. Pérez.
The purpose of this study is first to propose an examination of the graphic novel as an adaptation of the original film screenplay, a process that involves inter- and intramedial elements and processes. Second, it also proposes the discussion of the role of Pérez’s screenplay mediating the original one and the graphic novel adaptation. In this sense, some questions that arise are: What relations are established by the drawings in the illustrated screenplay and those in the graphic novel? What is the role of the illustrated screenplay in the adaptive project of Tale of Sand? What is the literary status of the original screenplay?
Unmade, Unfinished, Unseen: Shadow Histories of Cinema and Television 