Phillip Huber is considered by many to be the world's finest marionette artist. He's received the Puppeteers of America President's Award for sustained contribution to puppetry. He shares this award with Muppets-creator Jim Henson, Burr Tillstrom ("Kukla, Fran, and Ollie"), Frank Oz (Yoda, Fozzie Bear, Miss Piggy), and Bil Baird (who did the puppet scene in The Sound of Music), among many other greats.

Since puppetry is a folk art, several conflicting stories of its history exist. String puppetry is a centuries-old tradition, with artifacts found in the Orient as early as 1000 B.C. It spread to Persia, Greece, and eventually Western Europe. The French term "marionette" was first heard in the Middle Ages, literally meaning "little Marys," as the Virgin Mary was often the main character in plays performed in churches at the time. It wasn't until the 1920s that commercially made marionettes were sold.

But the art of puppetry has languished on the fringes of show business since its heyday in earlier centuries. There have been intermittent stars but the majority of puppeteers work in tiny venues unnoticed by a mass audience. And while Being John Malkovich brought international acclaim to Huber and puppetry in general, being a puppeteer was also the central joke of the film. "You play with dolls," says one of the characters dismissively to Craig, a puppeteer played by John Cusack.

That's what all the kids said when Huber was putting on shows in his basement theater in Dixon, Illinois. When he was 5, his mother gave him his first marionette, a Howdy Doody puppet. He taught himself how to build and manipulate puppets by reading books from the library. He watched "The Howdy Doody Show" and "Kukla, Fran, and Ollie." He took dance classes, which gave him an artistic understanding of how the human body operates. By the time he turned 12, Huber was putting on shows for local women's luncheons, family reunions, and mother-daughter banquets.

During this time, he had no idea that Dixon, Illinois, had produced not one, but two puppet devotees. Dave Herzog's father owned the department store where Huber's mother worked, and the two boys became friends. "We were the outcasts," says Herzog, who now sits on the board of consultants for the Puppeteers of America, and has a full-time career in puppetry. Two boys with a flair for the arts and a fascination with "dolls" didn't fly too well in a small town where sports were everything. Still, in Huber's basement puppet theater, the pair experimented with costuming, lighting, and set design. Huber first made an Abe Lincoln puppet for a class project. "He was a very quick study," Herzog remembers. "By 17 he was really performing at a professional level."

Directly after graduating from Principia College, Huber scored an apprenticeship at the Tony Urbano Company, which has produced, among other things, the aliens for the film Men in Black. After the eight-year apprenticeship, Huber worked with Jim Henson on a Muppet Christmas special.

But Huber's real passion was for marionettes. During high school, he and Herzog had flown to Salt Lake City for the National Puppet Festival and dropped their jaws when they saw the work of noted vaudeville puppeteer Frank Paris. When Huber formed the Huber Marionettes with partner and manager David Alexander, he adopted Paris' cabaret-style. At first he got humble gigs in shopping malls, and then started marketing himself to cruise ships, which Huber calls "the vaudeville of today."

It was a successful venture from the start, but lasted only a couple of months. During a move from one house to another at the beginning of 1983, all of his puppets were stolen from his car. "I had to start all over. It took me an entire year to rebuild my act." Fortunately, friends were able to get him some freelance work to tide him over. Once working again, his career chugged back up to the five-star cruise lines.

Then came the backstage visit that every performer dreams about. After a show at the Magic Castle, a magicians' society housed in Hollywood, Jim McCauley, the talent scout for "The Tonight Show," approached Huber and invited him to perform on the show. His answer surprised everyone.

"I couldn't do it because I had a contract with a cruise line. My friends were appalled–'You can't turn down "The Tonight Show!"' But Jim respected my professionalism. A year later another spot came open, and he insisted that the show allot me enough airtime. I missed getting to be on with Johnny Carson, but I still got on with Leno."

Several years later, another scheduling conflict almost cost Huber his chance to work on Malkovich. Director Spike Jonze offered Huber the position three weeks before filming began in the early spring of 1999, but the marionettist wouldn't break his contracts. A few months later, though, Jonze had tried other puppeteers and still didn't have what he needed. He came back to Huber, whose schedule had opened up.

"I knew I was the right person for this job," says Huber, who was anxious to do the movie as a way to promote his underdog art. Making the movie also had a profound impact on his own work. "All the problem-solving on the set made me look at my own puppets and ask myself, 'Why haven't I fixed that?' 'Or why haven't I thought of doing that?' " It was a learning experience for everyone involved.

"I'm so appreciative of what he did with the movie," scriptwriter Charlie Kaufman says of Huber. "He really grounded it."

"Have you come here because of Being John Malkovich?" a woman leans over and asks me in a conspiratorial whisper. We're seated in the tiny Santa Monica Magic and Puppet Center, waiting for Huber to take the unadorned stage. She and her husband seem to be grinning at themselves for their boldness in trying out a puppet show.

During the course of my conversation with them, I use the term "puppeteer" to describe Huber's occupation. The man stops me in mid-sentence. "But you wouldn't really call this guy a puppeteer, right?" he protests. "I mean puppeteers, you know, they..." and he makes a little quacking sign with his hand. I try to explain to him that Huber is a marionette artist, and that marionettes are a form of puppet, and therefore Huber is a puppeteer.

"Yeah, a marionette artist," he repeats, much more satisfied with this term.

The lights go down, and "They're Playing Our Song" kicks off the show. A pre-taped announcer barks, "Louisa! On the flying trapeze!" Louisa, dressed in a yellow sequined unitard and a smug smile, gracefully tip-toes onto the stage, tosses off her cape, and approaches the trapeze. With one hand Huber sets the trapeze in motion and with the other he composes Louisa's swinging splits and flips and dangling stunts. During the whole show–complete with a tap-dancing George M. Cohan, a fumbling high-wire walker, and a violin-playing Manuel D'Exterity, and about ten others intent on entertaining–I try to keep my eyes on Huber's hands and face to make sense of these technical feats. But his focus is consistently on the marionette, which draws my eyes back down to the action, too.

The show closes with a kitsch-clincher: Liza Minnelli singing "City Lights" while stripping down to her billowing red jumpsuit. The cabaret-style humor has not been lost on this sophisticated audience. "I create a very innocent world with my act," Huber admits. "I think people appreciate that. And I can't help that some of my Midwestern corniness comes out."

After the show, Huber leads a question-and-answer session. One person asks, "Which is your favorite puppet?" to which he responds Shirley U'Jest, a portly jazz singer based on Nell Carter. Another wants to know if he ever gets carried away on stage. Huber proceeds to dispel the myth of puppeteers living in imaginary worlds of their own: "I recognize puppets as a highly calibrated instrument, a tool of my trade. I don't talk to them in the dressing room; I don't carry on conversations with them in my workshop."

Despite the fact that audiences love his performances, Huber has some reservations about the future of his trade. "Marionette puppetry is a dying art," Huber says. "Kids today don't have the attention span for learning it," says Huber. "They don't have the patience." And patience is what's required. It takes about 400 hours to carve a new puppet by hand. When Huber makes a new marionette (he works with about 20) he begins with music. He'll hear a piece of music and picture a personality and see choreography in his head. When the marionettes have more facial animation–for instance his opera singer Priscilla Pipes (which he built in high school and still uses today) whose eyes cross, or the yodeling Otto Halfminder, with an Adam's apple that goes up and down–the building takes longer. "You make your puppet with the moves in mind that you want it to perform. When it's done, you play with it and see what it can do. You adapt your routine to the puppet."

In a back room of Huber's garage in Pasadena, Tupperware containers full of fabric, sequins, fur, and hair stock the shelves. Some sketches for old puppets are piled on a drafting desk. A small library of puppetry journals and manila envelopes, which he tells me hold more sketches, fill a few other shelves. In the garage itself, pegboards line the wall behind his workbench with carving tools. Black trunks, filled with rumpled marionettes, line another wall. I approach his newest creation, a contortionist, lying lifeless on the workbench. Huber follows me over and picks it up by the head, and suddenly everything slows down.

The naked, wooden contortionist stands as a human would stand. Its head tilts forward, and the shoulders and chest lift upward. The lower abdomen, divided into several jointed segments, curves the body forward until it sits upright. The puppet shifts its weight over its feet and pulls up into a standing position. Then the head nods in my direction, graciously acknowledging my presence. Huber's hand holds the head, orchestrating the movements, but something else seems to be going on. There is a connection between creation and creator that transcends manipulation, surpasses artistry. With just the touch of his hand, he has brought the doll to life.