Puppeteer Pulls Strings of His Future

Allan Trautman has a job that stretches into the 21st century yet spans the millennia. He’s a puppeteer who works with the Jim Henson Creature Shop in Burbank, among others, on the latest animatronic creatures popular today on film and TV.

Trautman, 42, was the lead puppeteer and performance coordinator for “Doctor Dolittle,” Eddie Murphy’s upcoming film. He is also an occasional Muppet performer, using traditional hand puppets, and is a regular on the WB Network TV series “Unhappily Ever After,” where he performs as a puppet character called Mr. Floppy.

This traditional job pays modern wages--an experienced puppeteer in the Screen Actors Guild can make up to $300,000 a year with steady TV or movie work and residuals from earlier shows, Trautman says. Day rates are higher than $500, and SAG weekly minimums for a TV episode are $1,942.

“We work as full, on-camera performers, which is as it should be, since we are on-camera actors,” Trautman says.

Trautman stumbled onto puppeteering while earning a bachelor’s degree in physics and drama at Washington University in St. Louis in the early 1970s. He auditioned without any previous experience and landed a gig in 60 episodes of a TV puppet show called “The Letter People,” which eventually ran on PBS.

“I had never even held a puppet in my hand before, but they were looking for someone who could do voices, and I discovered I was good at it,” he explains.

Trautman moved to Los Angeles in 1976 to earn a master’s degree in acting at the California Institute of the Arts, still planning on a career as a traditional film and theater actor. Then in 1981, he heard that Sid and Marty Krofft--famous for the Saturday morning children’s shows “H.R. PufnStuf” and “Lidsville,” were starting a puppet school to find and train puppeteers.

Again, he auditioned and got in. It cost $25 for materials, lasted one summer and taught Trautman the basics. He stayed with the Kroffts through 1985, learning from legendary puppeteers.

Trautman hooked up with Henson in 1990 at a two-week intensive workshop where puppeteers were being auditioned for a show called “Dinosaurs.”

There he learned animatronics, in which puppets with motors in their heads are manipulated by puppeteers using computer commands and joysticks that enable the puppeteer to simulate the movements of a puppet’s mouth and provide complex facial expressions and subtle degrees of movement.

It took him a whole season to become proficient at the high-tech equipment. He cautions would-be puppeteers to master traditional techniques before trying computers, because the best high-tech puppeteers are those who know how to bring life to inanimate objects the old-fashioned way.

The profession is mainly freelance, with 12-hour days common during shows and lots of hanging out in dressing rooms. Trautman explains high-tech puppetry and answers questions at his Web site (https://www.smartlink.net/~trautman).

Tim Blaney, who helped found the SAG Puppeteers Caucus in 1989, says the number of SAG puppeteers has more than doubled in the last eight years. The group began with 30 to 50 puppeteers and now has more than 100 working in Los Angeles and New York, where Blaney says shops are always looking for skilled puppeteers.

David Holt, creative supervisor of the Jim Henson Creature Shop, says the field is growing steadily at 5% to 10% a year for technically skilled puppeteers.

“Eight years ago, our puppeteers worked almost exclusively for us. Now we have to fight to keep them from other companies.”

His advice to those who would go into the field: Build your own puppets first and play with them, enroll in workshops, join a puppet troupe, build up your knowledge and then begin auditioning for shows.

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Freelance writer Denise Hamilton can be reached at garza@netvoyage.net