Pull Some Strings: Simple Mischief Studio’s married puppeteers helped bring IF’S fantastical creatures to life

Photo by Justin J Wee

When you ask a five-year-old what they want to be when they grow up, the standard answer is something like firefighter, astronaut, or zookeeper. When I was that age, I wanted to be an archeologist (my parents were going to accompany me to every dig and cook all my meals, obviously). That dream, like most pre-grade school career dreams, didn’t last long.

Spencer Lott, however, always knew exactly what he wanted to do. “I found a paper from kindergarten that said ‘I want to be the next Jim Henson,’ with a green scribble that I think was supposed to be Kermit,” Lott says.

Amazingly, Lott, who grew up in Lawrence before moving to New York to pursue his dreams, never wavered. His passion for puppetry eventually led to work with The Jim Henson Company as a teenager and Kansas City’s legendary Mesner Puppet Theater. It’s continued to blossom into a fruitful career any kindergartner would envy. Lott is a Sesame Street puppeteer—He puppets and voices the character of Samuel. He creates and operates puppets for film, TV, and theater—Grown-ups may have encountered his puppeteering on the Apple TV+ series Hello, Tomorrow!

Shortly after COVID, Lott and his wife—artist and social worker Grace Townley, herself a Kansas City-area native—co-founded Simple Mischief Studio—a shop that develops and builds puppets for a variety of clients. Together Lott and Townley have designed, built, and performed puppets for everything from KU theater productions, to Phish’s epic 2023 Madison Square Garden New Year’s concert, to the movie A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Their latest adventure is the John Krasinski family film IF, out this month, for which they created practical references for the film’s computer-generated imaginary friend characters.

“We love telling odd, offbeat stories,” Townley says. “He’s a muppet, I’m a social worker. We balance each other out.”

The pair’s work varies from cartoonish to cuddly, absurd to elaborate, but it always has roots in championing handmade craftsmanship. “In our own work, the handmade aspect is really important,” Townley says. “It’s about it being made by a human, and I think that’s huge right now.”

Lott notes that simplicity is important to their work, too. “Simple is deceptively hard, trying to distill characters down to their simplest element,” he says.

Of course, Townley adds, that’s not all they’re interested in. “I think we like simple, with a touch of mischief,” she says.

Photo by Justin J Wee

A Visit to the Neighborhood

Unlike Lott, Townley’s journey into puppetry didn’t begin until adulthood.

“I always loved making art and also loved working with older adults, and I went into social work in college,” Townley says. “I got a master’s in social work to work with older adults, and did my art after hours.”

On the side, Townley also helped Lott on his own projects. That began to change, however, with A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood—a film inspired by the real-life friendship between children’s entertainer/noted pop culture saint Fred Rogers and journalist Tom Junod. The movie marked Lott and Townley’s first official collaboration together, during a time when Townley was between jobs. Townley and Lott created show-accurate versions of the iconic puppets from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood—King Friday, Daniel Striped Tiger, Henrietta Pussycat, and others—or the film’s performers to use in re-creations of the show’s Land of Make Believe.

“We worked full-time together for the first time. We got to go to the Fred Rogers archive and immersed ourselves in the Mister Rogers world,” Townley says. “It was my first time working full-time as an artist and it was amazing. I felt so energized every morning, and excited to get started.”

Lott says the set reflected the values of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood: Under director Marielle Heller’s leadership, it was a nurturing place to work.

“Film sets are notoriously not kind places, but this set was,” Lott says. “It was surreal. We were making puppets to fit Tom Hanks’ hand, and teaching him how to puppeteer. I also did some doubling for his character in the close-up shots.”

The project made a great first on-the-books project for Lott and Townley in more ways than one: Fred Rogers was Townley’s godfather.

“My dad is a writer and interviewed Fred several times. They became close friends, and we stayed in touch writing letters and doing phone calls,” Townley says. “I was a shy kid, so when we had a phone call I was intimidated, but then Fred would start talking like Daniel Tiger, and it would open me up.”

When the 2018 documentary on Rogers’ Won’t You Be My Neighbor was first announced, Townley and her parents revisited a box of Rogers’ letters they’d kept over the years. Following the documentary’s release, while Lott and Townley were visiting the Fred Rogers Archive to prepare for production on A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, the Townley family’s correspondence came up again in an unexpected way.

“The archivist said to Grace, ‘Your last name is so familiar. I think we have your family’s file,’ and they had a whole box of correspondence,” Lott says. “Fred was notorious for saving every letter and postcard, so the archive had all the letters the Townleys had sent, Grace’s notes to him when she was a six-year-old, and random thoughts she shared with him. It was professional and personal together.”

“It was unbelievable,” Townley says. “It was full circle and very meaningful.”

The experience was the catalyst for the couple to create Simple Mischief Studio, which carries the influence of both Lott’s love of puppetry and Townley’s social work background.

“The way social work influences our work is baked in from the beginning,” Lott says. “There are other companies you can go to to give you big superheroes, but we’re trying to celebrate uncommon heroes that we can champion. Those are the stories we love the most.”

Townley agrees, adding, “I think it grounds the work and gives a little more depth to what we’re doing, especially in the storytelling aspect.”

Making Imaginary Friends

Courtesy of Spencer Lott

Lott and Townley’s collaborative dynamic is part of why they were brought on board to IF, by fellow puppeteer and maker Eric Wright—founder of the New York City-based shop Puppet Kitchen.

“I’ve always admired Grace and Spencer’s work because aside from being really skilled at what they do, just being really excellent puppeteers, designers, and writers, they also do what they do with a lot of heart,” Wright says. “Working with them as people is such a delight.”

Written and directed by John Krasinski, IF is about a young girl named Bea (Cailey Fleming) who discovers she can see imaginary friends ‘IFs,’ and goes on a magical journey to reconnect forgotten ‘IFs’ with their grown-up kids. You won’t see any puppets on the screen—The imaginary friend characters are all CGI. However, if Lott, Townley, Wright, and their collaborators are successful, you’ll see the fruit of their labor in the movie’s human performances.

“We built references for the characters that production used for sizing, spacing, texture references, and for acting and eyelines,” Lott says. “You often think about a tennis ball and a stick in movies like this (with CGI characters added in post-production), but we got to build versions of a lot of the characters that gave people something to act against.”

Wright says this kind of work represents a growing trend in studio filmmaking that combines puppetry and visual effects. “It’s exciting to me because it’s not exactly puppetry, in that we aren’t capturing a performance, but we’re using the power of puppetry to create a set where everyone can get on board with who that character is,” he says.

“It really comes through, not just in the performances of the other actors onscreen who now have something they can relate to and play with, but the rest of the production can say ‘Oh that’s what we’re talking about, that’s how to light them, that’s the size of them.’”

The film’s CGI characters had already been designed, but Lott says he and Townley could still offer limited input.

“We were able to suggest materials, colors, and techniques to bring the characters to life,” he says. “John Krasinski was super receptive and excited every time we pitched something, and excited to see them being made.”

Wright says he’s happy to see practical character design coming back into play for film and TV production—both from a creative and efficiency standpoint. “The magic of puppetry is how it changes how someone interacts with an object,” he says. “It doesn’t just impact the actors, it has an impact on everyone on set. That’s important to get a great production. I think it saves time and gets everyone on board more quickly.”

To Lott, puppet proxies and stand-in effects work represent the future of many jobs in the puppeteering industry. He cites Disney’s live-action remakes of The Jungle Book and The Little Mermaid as examples of productions that successfully used the technique of using puppets on set for actors’ eyelines and enhancing the human actors’ performances.

“Puppets can do some things really well, and VFX can do some other things really well. Our favorite kinds of movies are the ones that use both,” he says.

Prairie Fairies, Picture Books, and Beyond

Courtesy of the Daily Mail

Lott and Townley now live and work in the Kansas City area, having relocated from New York with their now four-and-a-half-year-old daughter shortly after the pandemic. The pair say it’s helped them balance their creative ambitions with a reasonable cost of living.

“When COVID hit, it was time for us to make a shift in location,” Townley says. “Part of why we did that was that it gave us the financial flexibility for me to quit my job and help run Simple Mischief.”

Lott adds that the network they built while living in New York helped them develop a base for finding work, but living in the Midwest gives them financial freedom to really explore. “It’s given us a lot of creative freedom and the ability to take risks. Things we just couldn’t do hustling in the city.”

That work has also helped the couple collaborate with other local luminaries. They helped with fabrication for the recently-opened Rabbit hOle in the northland, and are currently developing a project with pie maker extraordinaire Erin Jeanne McDowell called Prairie Fairy Kitchen. Lott describes it as The Magic School Bus meets Nickelodeon’s The Tiny Chef Show.

“Erin told us some kids actually request The Book on Pie as a bedtime story because they like looking at the pictures. Like, ‘Here’s an example of streusel.’ It really does feel like a fantastical fairy tale. You want to live in those pies,” Lott says of McDowell’s best-selling baking book. “We wondered, what’s it like to live inside a pie? It grew from there, and we dreamed up a world where a deer could come up to her window and request something like a boysenberry pie.” The pair hope that Missouri’s recently passed filming incentives can help them shoot the project locally.

Lott and Townley are also using Simple Mischief Studio to branch out into a non-puppet-related venture: picture books.

“We’ve always loved picture books, and even started collecting even before we had kids,” Townley says. “We were big fans of (author and illustrators) Oliver Jeffers and Jon Klassen even before our kid came along, and we’ve been thinking about writing them for a while.”

Speaking of their daughter, now that she’s almost the age Lott was when he decided on his future career, Lott says she’s become a valuable in-house resource. “It’s perfect, because we’re making stuff for kids right now, and she can give us real-time feedback,” he says with a smile.