There are certain things it’s difficult to picture Michael Jackson doing, like driving a car. One of the best scenes in an early script draft of “Michael,” the upcoming biopic, describes the future King of Pop weaving through traffic on a Los Angeles freeway en route to the studio. It’s 1979 and he’s 20 years old, alone in his cluttered Mercedes, singing a new song to himself — “I Can’t Help It,” the plaintive, off-kilter ballad that would become the B-side to his disco classic “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough.” The car, endearingly messy, is cluttered with notepads; inspirational messages on the dashboard manifest the sublime career stretch that is just on the horizon. He is in the midst of recording his solo masterpiece “Off the Wall,” whose cover would capture his look at the time: darker and less delicately featured, with an era-appropriate Afro — impossibly young, though already a show-business veteran of 15 years. I can’t help it, if I wanted to. … A perfect chorus, perfectly delivered. Dropping the “even” made it stick.
In her own memoir, his mother, Katherine Jackson, tells another story about Michael driving, claiming he wound up in jail after being pulled over by a cop who somehow didn’t recognize him and thought his Rolls-Royce looked “like a stolen car.” The anecdote would seem perfect fodder for a biopic. But it did not find its way into that early draft of “Michael” — perhaps because of its obscurity, perhaps because of how it would inevitably remind viewers of Jackson’s future brushes with the law.
“I wish I could separate the artist from the man,” John Logan, the screenwriter of “Michael,” once said of Alfred Hitchcock, another of his subjects. But Hollywood musical biopics are constructed to do the opposite of separating art from its flawed human creators. A sanctioned biopic of a musician requires approval of the estate and the catalog owners — Jackson’s executors are among the producers of “Michael” — and is thus a carefully managed showcase of hits performed in maximally visceral fashion, with concert-quality sound and visuals. But it’s also an opportunity to bind the songs to a satisfying story arc, in which the protagonist’s personal struggle deepens our appreciation of their I.P. — sorry, art — whether it’s Ray Charles’s addiction, Bob Dylan’s romantic and political agita, Bruce Springsteen’s depression or Freddie Mercury’s sexuality. New fans leave the theater feeling connected not simply to the soundtrack but also to a definitive interpretation of the life of its maker.
Michael Jackson, in this context, presents unique challenges. Consider the nearly irreconcilable poles of his public persona. On the one hand, he is among the greatest American artists of the past half-century, a global icon so outsize that his cultural reach is closer in spirit to a fictional character: Spider-Man, Luke Skywalker, Mickey Mouse. On the other hand, accusations of one of the worst crimes imaginable, the sexual abuse of children, have shrouded his legacy since the early 1990s. Jackson and his estate have always insisted on his innocence, and he was acquitted by a jury in 2005 in his sole criminal trial. Still, in reputationally disastrous interviews around that time, Jackson repeatedly defended his habit of sleeping in the same bedroom with other people’s children: “Why can’t you share your bed?” he asked the journalist Martin Bashir in a 2003 television special while holding hands with 13-year-old Gavin Arvizo, who would later accuse him of abuse.
Since Jackson’s death, in 2009, others have come forward. A lawsuit by Wade Robson and James Safechuck, who claim Jackson groomed and sexually abused them as children, is scheduled to finally reach a courtroom this fall. Details surrounding another group of Jackson accusers, the Cascio siblings, recently emerged after a dispute over a roughly $11 million settlement, reached in 2020, became public; the case, in which the Cascios are seeking a new settlement, is ongoing. Jackson’s estate vigorously denies that any abuse occurred. In a statement, Martin Singer, a lawyer for the estate, called the lawsuit a “desperate money grab,” adding that one of the siblings is being sued for civil extortion and that “the family staunchly defended Michael Jackson for more than 25 years, attesting to his innocence of inappropriate conduct.” Howard King, a lawyer for the siblings, says that the estate has “falsely claimed the Cascios lied about being molested,” noting that “the Cascios have provided more than 10 hours of detailed, sworn video testimony” of their molestation by Jackson.
Enormous sums of money are staked to Jackson’s dueling legacies. In addition to the suit by the four Cascio siblings, there is a lawsuit by Robson and Safechuck, the subjects of the 2019 HBO documentary “Leaving Neverland,” which targets two of his production companies for facilitating their abuse. (Robson and Safechuck’s lawyer did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) In a profile last December of John Branca, one of the estate’s executors, The Financial Times noted that advertisers in the United States stopped using Jackson’s music after the release of “Leaving Neverland.” Branca told the paper that the estate considered producing its own documentary in the wake of “Leaving Neverland” before settling on a biopic as the more effective vehicle to bolster the brand. (Branca declined to comment for this article.)
In 2022, Graham King, a producer of the 2018 biopic of the band Queen, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” announced that he would be making “Michael” with Branca and his co-executor, John McClain, for Lionsgate. Antoine Fuqua, known for “Training Day” and the “Equalizer” franchise, was tapped to direct. Jaafar Jackson, Michael’s nephew, would star, alongside Colman Domingo and Nia Long as his parents and Miles Teller as Branca.
But the film has had an unusually troubled production history. Its original script, a copy of which I obtained, went to great lengths to exonerate Jackson, portraying him as the victim of a shakedown by the family of the first child to come forward, Jordan Chandler. Larry Feldman, who negotiated a multimillion-dollar settlement for Chandler in 1994, told me the terms of the agreement meant that “neither side was allowed to do anything about publicizing or communicating what occurred, except to the extent that the Chandler family was allowed to talk to the police and testify under oath.” When I described scenes in the early draft exonerating Jackson and discrediting the Chandlers, Feldman laughed and said he had no knowledge of the contents of the script. But, he said, “that’s exactly what they couldn’t do.”
A spokesman for Lionsgate confirmed that substantial footage had to be scrapped because it violated the Chandler settlement, adding that “the unusual circumstances gave us the opportunity to shoot more material for what is effectively a Part 1 — the making of a king — while preserving the opportunity to tell more story in a subsequent film or films.” The film’s release date was bumped back a full year, to April 2026, and “Michael” now stops during the Bad tour in 1988, years before the first allegations; Michael’s father, Joe, by most accounts a physically abusive taskmaster, takes on the despotic Ike Turner role, setting the stage for Michael’s triumphant liberation. Confidence in the film remains high; King’s previous biopic, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” grossed nearly $1 billion worldwide.
It’s hard to know what Jackson himself would have made of a biopic, even a highly authorized one. One night during the Jackson brothers’ Victory Tour, in 1984, as reported in People magazine, he met Bruce Springsteen backstage in Philadelphia. They talked shop: concert lengths, writing on the road, the song Springsteen wrote for the Pointer Sisters. A photograph ran of the two superstars beaming at each other, with Jackson in a pink button-down and Springsteen with a red bandanna tied around his neck.
“Do you talk to people during your concerts?” Jackson asked. “I read that you do.”
“Yeah, I tell stories,” Springsteen said. “People like that, I’ve learned. They like to hear your voice do something besides singing. They go wild when you just … talk.”
“Oh, I could never do that,” Jackson said. “It feels like people are learning something about you they shouldn’t know.”
A granular view of just how skillfully the Jackson estate has transformed Jackson’s troubled legacy into a lucrative, well-insulated machine comes from an unlikely source: a yearslong case in tax court over the estate’s value at the time of Jackson’s death in 2009. The I.R.S. initially claimed that the estate owed half a billion dollars in unpaid taxes because future earnings had been woefully underestimated. The estate found itself arguing, perversely, that Jackson’s reputation at the time of his death had rendered him a deeply troubled asset. As Judge Mark V. Holmes detailed in his 271-page ruling, the turnaround that followed Jackson’s death was largely engineered by Branca, Jackson’s longtime lawyer and one of the most prominent attorneys in the music business.
When Jackson died at age 50, he was in the midst of rehearsals for a planned series of 50 concerts at London’s O2 Arena, shows meant to counter his degraded public image with a reminder of why he had once been so beloved. The dates sold out nearly instantly, but the promoter, AEG Live, could not secure corporate sponsorship. Even the company tapped to produce merchandise for the shows, Bravado International, remained unconvinced that Jackson would follow through — he had not embarked on a full-scale tour since 1996 — refusing to sign an agreement until the concert run began. As for any Jackson-branded merchandise unrelated to the specific concert dates, the chief executive of Bravado at the time, Tom Bennett, testified at the tax trial that he would not have made such a deal for “any meaningful money,” given that there was absolutely “no demand.”
Years of scandal and financial mismanagement had left Jackson isolated and at least $450 million in debt, as Holmes laid out. After Jackson’s 2005 criminal acquittal, Bank of America sold its $140 million of Jackson loans to Fortress Capital, an asset management fund that took on distressed debt; in 2008, Fortress seemed poised to foreclose on Neverland until the Jackson family arranged a side deal with Colony Capital, a private equity firm.
In 2009, Jackson finally brought back a manager from his ’80s heyday: Frank DiLeo, such a cigar-chomping caricature of a shady show-business type that Martin Scorsese cast him as a gangster in “Goodfellas” after meeting him while directing the video for Jackson’s “Bad.” According to Branca’s trial testimony, DiLeo persuaded Jackson to bring Branca — who had worked with the star, off and on, since 1980, but whom he hadn’t seen in three years — back into the fold.
The draft script for “Michael” has Jackson peppering Branca with questions at their first meeting in 1980. Could he make him bigger than Elvis, the Beatles, even his rival, Prince? Branca promises he’ll make Jackson bigger than “anyone, ever.” During Jackson’s commercial peak in the ’80s, Branca renegotiated his contract to gain ownership of his master recordings and, in Branca’s telling at the trial, persuaded Jackson to release the now-classic “Thriller” video over the objection of his deeply religious mother. (Branca told Jackson he could add a disclaimer, as Bela Lugosi had done on his Dracula films, prompting a revealing exchange at the tax trial when the lawyer questioning him remarked, “You know, I’ve never seen a disclaimer on Bela Lugosi’s films.” Branca replied, “Well, neither have I.”) A few years later Jackson was the best man at Branca’s wedding, bringing his tuxedoed chimp Bubbles as his plus-one.
At the reunion meeting brokered by DiLeo in 2009, Branca and Jackson signed a new contract, just eight days before Jackson’s death. “Jackson had put together a new and much more competent team of advisers just in time,” Holmes wrote. “They did not know precisely how much debt there was or what assets might be available. But in a remarkable and somewhat coldblooded way, the team put out an A.P.B.” Jackson’s doctor discovered his unresponsive body at his home on the afternoon of June 25, 2009. After he was taken to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead, a second suite there was commandeered as a war room and “filled with a haphazard team of intellectual-property lawyers and advisers — so many they might have outnumbered Jackson’s family” grieving at his bedside. “Once there, they immediately began to discuss the administration of the estate and how to protect his image and likeness.”
At the trial, Branca testified that he was on vacation in Mexico when he received word of Jackson’s death. A will dating from 2002 named Branca and a longtime family friend, John McClain, as executors of the estate. Jackson’s father would contest the will (unsuccessfully), but Branca didn’t wait for the question of its legitimacy to be settled; just days after Jackson’s death, Branca arranged a meeting at Mr. Chow, a Chinese restaurant in Beverly Hills, and assembled lawyers, accountants and advisers who had worked with Jackson. The main order of business was: “How do we stop foreclosure on all of the assets” and rescue the estate from bankruptcy?
They devised a plan to cobble together rehearsal footage from the O2 shows. Jackson, Branca said, “would have fired me on the spot” for doing such a thing, but the sheer level of debt had backed the team into a corner. The resulting film, “This Is It,” was rushed into theaters only four months later. It would gross $268 million, becoming one of the most successful concert films of all time.
For the tax trial, the estate hired Mark Roesler, the founder of CMG Worldwide, an intellectual property management firm, as an expert witness. Roesler, whose company’s clients include the estates of Malcolm X, Judy Garland and Harry Belafonte, cut his teeth managing the licensing and merchandising for the Elvis Presley estate. From 1982 to 1989, the estate’s value surged to $75 million, according to an estimate in The Los Angeles Times, up from $5 million at the time of Presley’s death in 1977. (Jackson’s future wife, Lisa Marie Presley, was eventually the sole beneficiary.) Roesler testified that Jackson’s positive Q score — a measurement of a celebrity or brand’s consumer appeal — had been dropping since 1995 until, by the end of his life, no recorded score existed. To determine Jackson’s long-term posthumous marketability, Roesler “recreated his life,” he told me, going from his earliest work with the Jackson 5 to the time of his death, when “you couldn’t find a Michael Jackson T-shirt, you couldn’t find a Michael Jackson poster, you couldn’t find anything in a store.”
In the first six months of 2009 — despite the sold-out O2 concerts — Jackson only generated $24 in revenue from his image and likeness. Holmes looked at several potential revenue streams, including the possibility of turning Neverland into a Graceland-style attraction, and deemed them unrealistic: The home was seen as “more of a recent crime scene than a future wonderland,” he wrote, and “common sense suggests that a home owned by an alleged child molester where the alleged molestation took place would be less than an ideal spot for a theme park for children.” Holmes saw the same problem in every aspect of Jackson’s value: “his poor reputation other than as an entertainer.”
Paradoxically, Jackson’s death would accomplish exactly what the London residency had been hoping to achieve. For a few weeks in the summer of 2009, songs from “Thriller” blared through car windows, at house parties and in restaurants. Newly sanctified by his tragic end, Jackson was once again viable in the marketplace, as the wild success of the concert film proved, followed in short order by deals with Cirque du Soleil — for a Las Vegas residency and touring show built around Jackson’s music — and with Sony for the release of 10 posthumous albums.
In the year after Jackson’s death, Billboard estimated, his estate earned a staggering $1 billion. “It may be unseemly to say,” the article began, “but sadly it’s true: Michael Jackson might be worth more dead than alive.” Since then, Branca has achieved notable wins, including the successful Cirque du Soleil shows and a Broadway hit, “MJ the Musical.” In 2024 Sony acquired the rights to 50 percent of Jackson’s recorded and published music. After the dismissal of objections in court by Jackson’s mother, the deal netted the estate somewhere in the vicinity of $600 million. According to The New York Times, it may have been the most lucrative sale of a single musician’s catalog in the history of the music industry.
The project of maximizing Jackson’s posthumous earning potential has hinged, in large part, on dismissing the allegations of child sexual predation. This effort was complicated by the 2019 release of “Leaving Neverland,” which arrived at the height of the #MeToo movement. The documentary’s director, Dan Reed, told me he began his interviews with Jackson’s accusers, Robson and Safechuck, with “quite a skeptical mind-set,” reluctant to stake his own reputation on their stories. But he was immediately struck by how “layered and detailed” their testimony was — and, specifically, by the way they both talked about falling in love with Jackson, describing a stomach-churning grooming process corroborated by their families, their diaries, investigators and other documents.
The estate has pointed out that the accusers’ stories have changed over the years — Robson testified in Jackson’s defense at his 2005 criminal trial, insisting no abuse had occurred in his case — but Reed finds none of these arguments persuasive. “This is exactly how pedophiles operate,” he said. “Beguiling the family, beguiling the kids.” He believes they “loved Jackson, and they lied to protect the man they loved, gross as it might seem.” The uncontested fact that Jackson and his accusers shared beds and bedrooms makes it “very difficult for any rational person to believe that all Jackson was doing was sort of lying chastely in bed next to these very numerous young little boys.”
While challenging Jackson’s accusers on the facts — and criticizing “Leaving Neverland” for not seeking comment from any Jackson lawyers or defenders — the estate also deployed a canny legal maneuver against HBO, the U.S. distributor and co-producer of the documentary. In 1992, the network aired a film of a Jackson concert in Bucharest, and the contract it signed included a nondisparagement clause. The estate’s lawyers used a novel reading of that clause to reach a legal settlement in 2024 with HBO. “Leaving Neverland” is no longer available on its streaming service. Asked to comment on the dispute, an HBO spokeswoman said, “It was resolved amicably.”
It’s unclear who would have prevailed had a settlement not been reached, given that the point of contention was a clause in a 32-year-old agreement, but Jackson’s estate, Reed says, has “very good lawyers, they’ve got infinite money and they have a vast, valuable asset that they need to protect.” They are “monetizing it very capably,” he says. “They’re on a roll.”
Earlier this year, Britain’s Channel 4 aired another Jackson documentary series — the four-part “The Trial,” focusing on Jackson’s 2005 criminal prosecution. It’s a more traditional documentary than “Leaving Neverland,” with archival footage and a selection of talking heads, including several Jackson defenders. (Christian Robinson, Jackson’s videographer in the early 2000s, says he saw the star as “an asexual man who wanted to be 12 years old and wanted to have water balloon fights.”) There’s also footage of the police search of Neverland, featuring a giant gumball machine, a life-size statue of Bruce Lee and Jackson’s cluttered bedroom, and a difficult-to-watch police interview with 13-year-old Arvizo, who describes Jackson masturbating him and telling him that boys have to masturbate or they’ll go crazy. One police officer recalls finding a briefcase filled with pornographic magazines in Jackson’s bedroom (just as Arvizo had described, she says). The prosecutor points to the keypad lock on Jackson’s bedroom door and the motion detectors that set off chimes. The jury ultimately acquitted Jackson.
There’s currently no way to watch the series here, though its producers are in talks with U.S. networks. Tom Anstiss, one of the documentary’s executive producers, told me he heard no complaints from the estate when the series aired in Britain in February but could not comment on the specifics of the U.S. distribution talks. In the wake of the HBO settlement, however, any network’s lawyers would be very likely to comb through previous dealings with Jackson for similar nondisparagement clauses.
Hopes for the biopic, meanwhile, remain high. When the “Michael” teaser dropped in November, some 114 million people watched it within the first 24 hours. Given the success of “Bohemian Rhapsody” — and the level of Jackson’s international fame — “Michael” could be on track to becoming the first film of 2026 to earn a billion dollars worldwide.
The estate, by virtue of its control over Jackson’s music, name and likeness, has long held sway over which stories disappear and which — backed by its official blessing — receive maximum visibility.
In 2018, the estate announced it was partnering with Columbia Live Stage, Sony’s two-year-old theatrical division, to create a jukebox musical about Jackson, led by a blue-chip creative team that included the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage. “MJ the Musical” was scheduled to open in 2020, a year after “Leaving Neverland.” The pandemic delayed it until 2022, creating a bit of distance from the bad press surrounding the documentary — and from Nottage having told Britain’s Daily Mail, in 2019, that she believed the film’s accusers “were telling the truth.”
More important, perhaps, was the decision by the creative team to center the action on Jackson’s rehearsals for the Dangerous World Tour, just before the first allegations of abuse emerged, thus limiting the story to a time when uncomplicated Jackson fandom was still possible. (Nottage declined through her spokesman to speak about the production.) Artistically, the musical presents Jackson at an interesting moment. He did not feel especially culturally vital in 1992, a worry that the MJ character voices, bringing up the popularity of Nirvana and hip-hop even though “they can’t dance or sing.” But the “Dangerous” album was still a huge hit, and its stuttering nods to new jack swing and recent albums by Jackson’s sister Janet sound fantastic today — far less dated than its predecessor, “Bad.” It was also among the last moments that Jackson looked cool: the white V-neck and the unbuttoned white dress shirt, black pants, hair pulled back.
Yet the musical sets itself up for an impossible task: As terrifically gifted as the performers are, no one can possibly dance or sing quite like Jackson did. Nottage’s nods to Jackson’s personal demons also feel coy. “I want to keep this about the music,” Jackson tells a documentary filmmaker, whose attempts to get him to open up spark various flashbacks. “Is it really possible to separate your life from your music?” she replies. Later, the filmmaker does discover a big secret about Jackson: his pill addiction, a perfectly forgivable rock-star vice.
Other projects have met with considerably less enthusiasm from the estate. In 2015, the hottest Jackson-related biopic making the rounds in Hollywood was not about Jackson himself; it was a dark comedy called “Bubbles.” The script, by Isaac Adamson, opens at a Florida ape sanctuary, where Bubbles, “a grizzled, paunchy, middle-aged chimpanzee” lives, then flashes back to survey his time with Jackson — hitting some of the same beats as the early draft of “Michael” but feeling, oddly, much more honest. There are appearances by Prince, who is invited to sing on “Bad” but can’t get past the first line, “Your butt is mine,” and by the members of Bon Jovi, who party with Bubbles in a Tokyo hotel room. (Both are based on real anecdotes.) But the story darkens when 12-year-old Kyle Bosman, a fictional character based on Chandler, the first Jackson accuser, begins to spend time at Neverland, and Bubbles senses a rival. In his initial drafts, Adamson maintained a sense of uncertainty regarding Jackson’s guilt or innocence. “Of course it’s going to be ambiguous,” he told me, “because Bubbles doesn’t understand what’s going on.”
Adamson, who was living in Portland, Ore., considered the script a bit of a lark, but he said that a week after receiving a draft, his manager summoned him to Los Angeles. He had 20 meetings over the course of three days; the president of Creative Artists Agency called him. Taika Waititi was in talks to direct. Eventually Netflix bought the script. Soon after the deal was announced, Adamson received a letter from the Jackson estate that he describes as a “pre-emptive warning,” asserting no music or name, image and likeness rights would be granted. Then “Leaving Neverland” premiered at Sundance. Waititi left the project. (His next film was a comedy about Hitler — somehow, in that moment, a less toxic subject for satire.) Netflix abandoned the film not long after. He had revised the script to make Jackson’s behavior more nefarious and changed the ending so that the man Bubbles calls his King receives a satisfying comeuppance. But there have been no other takers.
Working every available lever of power to manage the conversation around a famous decedent is part of the job description of any executor of a celebrity estate. Jeff Jampol, a leading manager of artists’ legacies whose client list includes the Doors, Janis Joplin, Charlie Parker and Juan Gabriel, consults with the Jackson estate. He wouldn’t speak about Jackson specifically, but he told me, “If you’re a successful artist today, you’re in the tickets and T-shirt business.” Once artists die or retire, it’s a very different proposition. Jampol teaches a class in artist management and marketing at U.C.L.A.’s Herb Alpert School of Music, and he always tells his students that they need to think about what “connects a 12-year-old to Jim Morrison or Janis Joplin or Kurt Cobain or Tupac,” adding, “If you think that magic is about the music, you’re going to fail this class.”
Credibility and authenticity are crucial, Jampol told me. In the end, refusing to shy away from potentially problematic biographical details can end up defusing them. In 2009, for instance, Jampol was a producer of “When You’re Strange,” a documentary about the Doors. “I would say over half of that documentary is talking about Jim’s alcoholism,” he said. “When I first met with the Joplin family, I said, ‘You know that she slept with girls and shot dope, and we need talk about it.’ They’re like, Why? I said, ‘Because that’s what happened, all right?’”
But for the Jackson estate, leaning into the warts-and-all approach would require a wholesale refutation of the abuse allegations. “Michael” avoids the issue entirely by embracing the iconic version of Jackson and ignoring the unsettling later stage of his career. In trailers and footage of the film that have been released, Jaafar Jackson moonwalks into an uncanny valley of indisputably glorious pop-culture events — the “Motown 25” special, the videos for “Thriller” and “Beat It,” the recording of that indelible high-pitched woooo 15 seconds into “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” — and maybe here the gulf opened by the simulacrum will subconsciously comfort viewers, making it possible to enjoy those moments without the queasy feelings stirred by their actual creator.
Mark Anthony Neal, a professor at Duke University who teaches a class on Jackson, has noticed that students in recent years have been more focused on “the Michael Jackson who was the subject of a documentary about pedophilia, the Michael Jackson who has done something to his face and who feels to some of them anti-Black.” He’s curious to see how “Michael” will be received “specifically in a Black cultural lens: post-Bill Cosby, post-R. Kelly, post-Sean Combs.”
With so much on the line, it is perhaps unsurprising that there was something of a circling of the wagons around “Michael.” The Lionsgate publicist handling the film abruptly ceased all contact regarding this article after an initial email exchange, and the producer Graham King also declined to be interviewed. Last year Branca told The Financial Times that he “sensed a wavering” among the first people attached to the movie after the release of “Leaving Neverland.” He went on: “Unless you understand that Michael’s innocent, we can’t have you.”
The estate has also been back in court in recent months to answer challenges from Jackson’s daughter, Paris, who is objecting to bonus payments of up to $1.75 million to outside law firms, while also demanding greater transparency from the executors and questioning the decision to become so closely entangled with the biopic.
Paris was blunt in her criticism in a series of Instagram posts last fall. Claiming her notes on an early script draft were ignored, she said: “The thing about these biopics — it’s Hollywood. It’s fantasy land. It’s not real.” She crumpled her face and mimed adjusting a knob with her finger. “The narrative is being controlled, and there’s a lot of inaccuracy and there’s a lot of just full-blown lies, and at the end of the day, that doesn’t really fly with me. I don’t really like dishonesty. I spoke up, I wasn’t heard, I [expletive] off.”
But even she recognized the likely unstoppability of the movie, given the nature of her father’s fame. “A big reason I haven’t said anything up until this point is because I know a lot of you guys are going to be happy with it,” she said in another post. “The film panders to a very specific section of my dad’s fandom that still lives in the fantasy. And they’re going to be happy with it.”
Jackson loved movies. He made some of the most groundbreaking music videos of all time, working with top directors of the day: Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, John Landis, David Fincher, John Singleton. Strangely, though, after playing Scarecrow in “The Wiz” in 1978, Jackson never again took a major role in a feature film. Aside from flirting with the idea of playing Peter Pan for Steven Spielberg in the ’80s, he didn’t publicly discuss many other film projects until his music career began to cool.
In the late ’90s, Jackson became interested in making a movie about the final days and mysterious death of Edgar Allan Poe. It never got off the ground, but he and the screenwriter, Philip Levens, spent time together at Neverland. Jackson wanted to play Poe, using extensive makeup and prosthetics. He felt a connection with the haunted, painfully sensitive writer, Levens told me. They discussed poems like “Annabel Lee,” and Jackson spoke frankly about how he’d been a “performing monkey” for his father. One night he announced that he was going to have his chef prepare Levens his favorite dinner. They sat at either end of a long table in “a really formal British dining room out of a 1930s movie,” complete with liveried wait staff and domed silver serving trays. The main course turned out to be macaroni and cheese.
Another time Jackson took Levens into his home studio to play some new beats. Soon Jackson began singing along to the music, then dancing. Levens says that Jackson was wary of the business people around him — even his voice would grow deeper when talking to the suits — but he told him, “I can relate to you, because you’re an artist.” Watching him perform from a few feet away, Levens found himself thinking: You’re not like me. You’re not like anyone.
Being unlike anyone is a narrative challenge for a biopic: Trying to humanize someone like Jackson who has reached the zenith of world-swallowing fame always risks diminishing their iconic status, and with Jackson the risks are even greater given the impossible tension of his dueling personas. Roesler, the I.P. manager, pointed out that when a musician like Jackson dies, their ability to perform “personal services” like touring and recording new music “evaporates,” though they leave behind “a great body of intellectual property.” For most artists, this is a net negative — Judge Holmes, for one, predicted that eventually “the grave will swallow Jackson’s fame.” But in the case of Jackson, his permanent absence might be the ideal path to staving off irrelevancy, given his habit, when alive, of reminding people of everything that made them uneasy about him. The grave could swallow Jackson’s infamy along with his fame, leaving behind the sort of shiny disembodied brand that, if properly tended, could generate income as reliably as a secret soda formula or a trademarked cartoon mouse for many years to come.
Mark Binelli is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of “Just a Shot Away: Martin Scorsese’s Life in Film,” which will be published in November.
The post The Rise and Fall and Rise of Michael Jackson appeared first on New York Times.
