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In between, he spent years in local kids' TV playing kooky characters and performing with a variety of puppets. 'And I figured if I could ever get on a TV show with a character that I enjoyed doing, it might even get famous. 'Somehow, I was shy enough to not care about being seen,' he explains. He had seen a puppet show when he was 5 and was hooked by what seemed a perfect way to express himself. Growing up in Waltham, Massachusetts, he was a shrimpy kid with big ears, a girl's name and a love of what the other boys derided as dolls. They had a lot to wade through all right - a chronicle of a ground-breaking series, a one-of-a-kind artist who helped make it triumphant, and the storybook marriage that kept him inspired. 'When you saw the carloads of photographs and movies leaving our house with the filmmakers,' says Debra Spinney, 'you knew it would take them forever to look through all that stuff.'

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It draws on a wealth of material from Sesame Workshop, as well as the personal archive built over a lifetime by Spinney, an early adopter of 8mm movies and, in the 1970s, the earliest personal video. The film, produced by producers Dave LaMattina, Chad Walker and Clay Frost, has been in the works for five years. But Big Bird and Oscar are cool to people.'

In a recent joint interview with Debra, his onetime colleague and his wife of nearly 40 years, Spinney, sporting shaggy silver locks, a trim beard and a self-effacing manner, calls the film 'kind of flattering, 'cause I was never cool.

'Well, I'd rather see it come out while I'm alive.' The documentary will be available starting Tuesday on iTunes and video-on-demand and arrives in theaters nationally May 15. Now Caroll Spinney drops his fine-feathered obscurity (and emerges from his garbage-can fortress as Oscar the Grouch) for an enchanting film portrait, 'I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story,' which celebrates this 'Sesame Street' puppet master who, at age 81, continues to breathe life into a pair of the world's best-loved personalities. NEW YORK - He has lent body and soul to a certain 8-foot-tall 6-year-old for nearly half a century, all the while hidden from sight.

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