Michael Jackson couldn't land the film roles he wanted, so he brought Martin Scorcese to him. Well, first Michael's manager Frank DiLeo had to push Michael toward Scorcese. Or Quincy Jones did. Quincy says he called Scorcese, busy then editing The Color of Money. "We need you for four days," he explained, to help create a "tougher" image for the first Bad video. Michael wanted George Lucas or Steven Spielberg, but agreed to Scorcese if he could put his stamp on things. Publicly, Scorcese would say only that Michael was "sympathetic, sweet, and open." Shooting started in January. The production budget doubled, then tripled. On Monday August 31, 1987, CBS debuted the 16-minute results with a special called "Michael Jackson—The Magic Returns." That morning, Bad was released: $6.99 for the record or cassette, $12.99 for the CD.
Most critics found the video ridiculous, cartoonish. Even biographer Randy Taraborrelli calls it "a pitiful parody" of the story famed novelist Richard Price wrote around the song. Price's inspiration came from Harlem-born Edmund Perry, the Phillips Exeter graduate killed by a plainclothes police officer. He died a block from home, on Morningside and 113th Street around 9 p.m., June 12, 1986. The prosecution claimed that Edmund and his surviving brother went looking for someone to rob. The defense insisted the white officer was drunk. The courts exonerated him and acquitted the brother. No witness either maintained their story or came to the stand unmotivated. In The New York Times, Brent Staples laments how "Edmund succumbed to the American fascination with angry black men."
"Bad" twists the allure of that monster role. Black-and-white footage follows Michael home to Harlem. He takes the Metro North train from the Duxston School to endure ribbing from his trio of childhood friends. Among them is Wesley Snipes. He taunts "Joe College" about what he's learning at "that little sissy school." Wesley wants to know: "Are you bad or what?" So, Michael searches the subway for a suitable victim to mug only to warn the older man. When Wesley confronts Michael, he screams back, "You ain't bad, you ain't nothin'!" With one cut, there's color and eight sonic bursts. Ethnically diverse dancers jump in from all sides. Michael himself drops from the ceiling. Breathing provides the soundtrack. The camera luxuriates on Michael's sudden transformation. He's a superhero of sorts, awash in buckles, zippers, and black leather. Sound effects attend to his every move. His hair whooshes. The choreography has percussion. He screams over the track. It's not anger as much as rapture. On one of the days Scorcese filmed in Harlem, Madonna dropped by to watch. She was both shocked and delighted by Michael's new conspicuous gesture: "Did you see that? Is he grabbing his balls? Oh my God."
Michael has little investment in realism. His videos dissolve any verisimilitude they create. What seems real implodes with inconsistencies. For example: how can Michael drop down from above in his leather get-up? A couple frames earlier, he was demure in a hoodie. It makes no sense because this quick change artist is much more into referencing or implying. Visual associations can be coy, elusively forthcoming. They work within the provided framework, but infer differently. As "Bad" dancer Casper attests, Michael's inspiration for his subway maneuvers came not from Edmund Perry but West Side Story. Michael would replay scenes "over and over again" for the dancers gathered about him: "When he saw something he liked, he'd let out a yelp. 'Oooh, did you see that? Did you feel that?'"
Just as palpable is the video's debt to The Wiz. Michael's friends banter much like the crow-men do to Michael's Scarecrow. The yellow brick road the film's black Dorothy and crew follow leads them through the same Harlem subway stations. Even the "Bad" video's fantasy of color in-between black-and-white recalls The Wiz's own source material. Michael's certainly aware of The Wizard of Oz starlet Judy Garland. Four pages into his autobiography Moonwalk, he contrasts his ambition with Judy's parents. "I wasn't forced into this business by stage parents the way Judy Garland was," he distinguishes himself. "I did it because I was compelled to do it, not by parents or family, but by my own inner life in the world of music." That inner world makes "Bad" compelling, too, even before the song's mechanical pulse make the video's theatrics colorful. When Michael leaves the Duxston School, the video reveals him in a progressively more personal space. It culminates with the intimacy of his railroad-style apartment. The camera watches him enter from his bedroom, just off the kitchen. He goes in to find a note from his mother on his typewriter. She's working. He holds it up to read it. There's a poster taped to his wall of Luther Vandross.
Michael trades the Metro North train for a subway with the only schoolmate who has similar circumstances. When he leaves Michael, they exchange the following slogan: "Be the man." A similar tenacity everyone expected from Bad's sales. The inevitable Thriller comparisons abounded. On the morning of Michael's CBS special, newsstands carried music critic Jon Pareles' unfavorable verdict. Despite writing eight of Bad's ten tracks, Michael shares even less of himself. Largely impersonal lyrics make way for his singular, isolated voice. Pareles concludes that Bad's "commercial fate depends on whether Mr. Jackson's audience wants shadows along with smooth surfaces."
Those shadows were in the cover shot Michael wanted, the one scrapped by Walter Yetnikoff, then president of CBS Records. It was a close-up of Michael's face wrapped in black floral lace. Red lips are partially obscured. His eyes stare ahead. That picture had to wait five years for Dancing the Dream: Poems and Reflections Written by Michael Jackson. It decorates a fable called "The Boy and the Pillow." When the youngster sells it to a peasant girl for a penny, his father murmurs, "You have learned well." The goose down pillow wrapped in silk brocade is worth far more. But the girl offers her penny "out of devotion."
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YOUR GUIDE TO THE MICHAEL JACKSON™ WHO PRODUCES OUR KING OF POP
This Day in Michael starts August 24, 1993. Certain days of the King of Pop's life expand far past their 24-hour periods. From there, this blog catalogs 100 days in the public life of Michael Jackson. It orders those calendar days chronologically but draws from any of the years Michael has lived.
Read from where you will. This Day in Michael's introduction lies below these Michael snapshots.
reading This Day in Michael
“Michael understands drama. He really does. … He’s been onstage since he was five years old.”
—Quincy Jones
Everyone thinks they know too much about Michael Jackson. Few appreciate how he modeled that speculation. Particularly since Thriller’s heights, he has influenced the public conversation about him with coy determination. As if from his own sidelines, he customizes the commodity known everywhere on a first-name basis. Michael stays in print by offering himself as a palimpsest. He’s an Etch-A-Sketch with which we can draw our fantasies and nightmares.
Michael’s achievements stand. But his charm also takes form in planted lies followed by indignant denials and sly explanations. Not the first but a notorious example of that celebrity method came in 1986. The cover of The National Enquirer’s September 16th edition declared that Michael slept in a hyperbaric chamber. Publicly, he disparages the exposé while his mother concedes it “had been spread by Michael’s own people.” According to biographer Randy Taraborrelli, Michael was elated. “We can actually control the press,” Michael gushed to Taraborrelli. “I think this is an important breakthrough for us.” Whether Michael admitted his complicity matters less than its plausibility.
Questions about Michael’s intentions only complement the lurid, reported details of his life offstage but never quite off-camera. For two decades now, Michael has orchestrated a renegade reality show that appreciates the fitting fantasy that should be celebreality. Unlike the stars parading themselves on VH1, apart from whatever vehicle made them known, Michael has never seemed regular. Nor does he stray from the vision that makes him alluring. That's how he maintains the product Michael Jackson™—with his singular showmanship. He's not joking when he confides, “I'm not like other guys” near the beginning of the “Thriller” video. He's shown us that consistently with the usually-disregarded design of his tabloid broadcasting. With those “silly reports,” as his mother calls them, Michael Jackson™ instructs how he should be regarded. They reveal less than they offer instead a theory on the sensational spectacle of being known that this book respects. This Day in Michael will demonstrate it’s not what you read about Michael, but how.
<the introduction continues below>
About Me
- Seth Clark Silberman
- New York, NY, United States
- I organized the first academic conference on Michael Jackson at Yale University September 23-24, 2004.
Blog Archive
Fame makes being in two places at once possible. The more famous, the more that star can multiply—and the more some find him falling apart. If he endures a media life, he knows that those who claim his irrelevance contribute to his legacy. The shreds they make from him sparkle like they're twisting together in a kaleidoscope. Controlling the coloring of that sight doesn't matter as much as making it worth watching and revisiting. Shaping it into a good mystery with the help of conspicuous discrepancies doesn't detract from deserved celebrity. It proves its tenacity by inspiring debate and research. A public life becomes a library. A documented past thus accumulates clues. It signals an audience’s collective viewing. Their memories are more palpable than the star they assemble.
Re-reading Michael Jackson™ requires a calendar. With This Day in Michael, I chart a daily career that proves why Michael matters still. Each entry recalls moments from the many years of Michael’s public life. Taken together, they coalesce the monumental with the anecdotal. That story relies on assessing a record not always accompanied by music. It also doesn't presume to represent—or pity—Michael’s inner thoughts. I have no access to Michael, but I do Michael Jackson™. I follow how intertwined his attributed actions are with the publicity that shapes them. With This Day in Michael, I want to consider how a celebrity reared by cameras understands the power of suggestion.
Few stars of his stature talk to the public so infrequently. His television interviews with Oprah Winfrey, Diane Sawyer and Martin Bashir were more than newsworthy. They were rare opportunities to ogle at a notoriously shy and beguiling curiosity. Every videotaped gesture competed with whatever he said—or mostly didn’t—about a life so familiar it’s hardly his own. So often, the arrangement of Michael’s apparent biography suits the designs of others. As the precocious Jackson 5 lead or as the best-selling Thriller, he represents crossover dreams. As the acquitted expatriate appearing to be cross-dressed in Bahran and France, he’s a kind of Frankenstein. His plastic surgery confirms he’s a monstrous shell of his past peak. Against recent tales of Jesus Juice, his purported vitiligo pales by comparison. Or, he’s a hapless victim, an easy target. Whatever story appeals, Michael remains metaphoric.
<the introduction continues below>
where i'm quoted about Michael
- The Washington Post (June 14, 2005): "One Strange Case: The Real Michael Jackson Remains at Large" by Libby Copeland
- Newsday.com (May 23, 2005): "Simmering race issue" by Tina Susman
- The New York Blade (April 22, 2005): "Gonna be startin' somethin': How has Michael Jackson's trial affected public perceptions of gay men?"
- salon.com (March 26, 2005): "The man in America's mirror" by Farhad Manjoo
- ABCNews.com (February 23, 2005): "Why Are Michael Jackson's Fans So Devoted?" by Bryan Robinson
That symbolism pronounced itself where This Day in Michael opens: Tuesday, August 24, 1993. That night, Michael launched the second half of his Dangerous tour. Hours before he took the stage in Bangkok, Los Angeles' KNBC was scrambling to report veiled allegations. In L.A., it was August 23rd. The day before that, a freelance journalist tipped off the network about a police raid at Neverland ranch. No one knew why. Monday's investigations answered little. Seven minutes before the 4:00 p.m. broadcast, KNBC received finally a vague confirmation from the L.A.P.D. On air, the anchor relayed the statement: "We are conducting an investigation on Michael Jackson for a criminal offense." That incomplete revelation exposed what we suspected already. The news accumulated illicit details that fueled a worthy scandal. Television testimony sounded like innuendo. Michael seemed equally suspicious. Reporting on the police investigation became its own industry. Defending Michael rested in swaying the coverage. Reasonable doubt had to shape the press.
Now, his interest in young boys justifies the Michael we need. For some, Michael's purported predilections prove what his recent trial couldn't. Or, his company confirms a childlike innocence more alien than journalists find his face. The mêlée publicizing the 1993 case characterizes the contemporary Michael debate. With its suspicious multi-million dollar settlement and complicit cast, it also signals what Michael learned from P.T. Barnum. That impresario and architect of modern popular culture appreciated the value of controversy. Barnum stayed in newspapers with compelling hoaxes he called humbugs that didn't lose their allure once exposed. Deceit's manipulation fascinates as much as its spectacle. Michael attracts attention by never fully explaining events so conspicuous and consonant they seem staged. Photos like his mug shot only contribute. That quizzical look works like a mirror. As one of four decades of performances, it reflects our interest in analyzing, lamenting, and protecting the King of Pop.
Throughout This Day, I adhere to Michael's consistent carnival, both with and apart from his melodic feats. After all, his appearances outside a Santa Barbara courthouse compete with his iconographic choreography. His late, disheveled arrival in pajamas couldn't have been better scripted. The gasps, applause, and snickers Michael generates coheres his media saturation. Parsing the telltale from either the juridical or the musical ignores the market that perseveres as Michael Jackson™. Thus, I place published details of his life, either attributed or irrefutable, alongside my readings of his videos and concerts. Leading it all is the undeniable drama of a man who exploded an industry's possibilities. He also appreciated the fantasy of celebrity. He teased us with an intimacy meticulously packaged. The man who started “making-of” programming for music videos with “Thriller” understood what cameras did "behind the scenes." They documented performances for an acknowledged audience. The VHS tapes sold as The Making of Michael Jackson's Thriller offered a first run of Michael Jackson™’s reality. Then, the child star who doesn't remember a life not looked at saw himself in a biography of P.T. Barnum. In 1985, Michael gave the book to his manager and lawyer. “This is going to be my Bible and I want it to be yours,” he told them. “I want my whole career to be the greatest show on Earth.” This Day in Michael details that profound pageantry.
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