“So I remember we– I had like two or three days or something and I rehearsed and choreographed and dressed my brothers. I choreographed them with the piece and picked the songs, picked the medley. And not only that. You have to work out all the camera angles and, oh, I direct and edit everything I do. Every shot you see, is my shot.” -Michael Jackson, on his preparation for an ’80s Jackson 5 performance. (Ebony Magazine, December, 2007).
Who doesn’t remember the worldwide shock and dismay when Michael Jackson announced his retirement from music in 1990, at the age of 32? But the real shocker was what came next. Mr. Jackson’s stellar career as a film director, now nearly 20 years on, seemed pure folly at the time. What magic could such a musical being possibly work with images? Surely, a performer who spoke so eloquently with his voice and feet would, with a movie camera, be all thumbs…?
We were spectacularly wrong.
The greatest films of writer-director Michael Jackson– Man in the Mirror, Beloved (from the Toni Morrison novel), She’s Out of My Life, the biopic Antwoine Fisher and remakes of Imitation of Life, Johnny Got His Gun and Seconds– are known to virtually everyone in the developed world, cherished by most. But few know that it all started with a personal letter sent to Warner Brothers executives. In the letter, Jackson asked to be considered as a replacement director on Edward Scissorhands, in the wake of creator Tim Burton’s nervous breakdown and departure (”This is as good as it gets,” Burton said at the time. “Inspiration gone dry after this, I can feel it. Better to quit now before I wind up making lame remakes and adaptions.”) Jackson took over the production and replaced Johnny Depp with himself in the title role, resulting in the box office equivalent of Jackon’s Thriller. Jackson used his share of the profits to completely finance his next film, the semi-autobiographical Man in the Mirror. From then on, all Michael Jackson films were financed completely from his private fortune.
And what strange, powerful films. In the book Revolutionary Michael, Donald Bogle writes, “A Michael Jackson film plumbs the self-loathing of individuals who don’t fit the mold of a cruelly stratified, rigidly capitalist, militaristic society, gives them a cathartic emotional workout, and then ascends from the ashes, audience in tow. It’s really quite beautiful– especially if one gives one’s self over to the notion of pop-as-politics and politics-as-pop.” Or, as Academy Award winner Dave Chappelle put it, “Michael’s films make everything alright, but not in a phony way. They are like the feeling you got when MLK threw some serious God in his speeches, or when E.T. rose up outta that freezer.”
The films are unprecedented in their combination of modest budgets, lack of overt sexual or violent content, minimal special effects and yet record-breaking attendance. “What’s so weird about Mike’s films,” said Jackson movie regular Jamie Foxx, “is there’s no killing or f–king or monsters chewing on people’s asses, no high-concept, just everyday folks going through their stuff, their dreams and problems or whatever– and they’re as exciting and suspenseful as hell. It’s the way he sees the world that makes it groove. These movies have The Force, man.” Some say Jackson’s uplifting filmography reflects an unprecedented period of peace, prosperity and reflection in America, while others wonder if his cultural contribution hasn’t practically provided for it.
Toward the end of the ’90s, Jackson became restless for something more than critical and box office success. Intent on producing what he called “pop with purpose,” he formed the film company Neverland Pictures in 1999. The Dubai-based company, the first major studio outside Hollywood, repeatedly stole Tinsletown’s thunder with a series of offbeat, delicately wrought blockbusters that confounded market research. Harmony Korine’s “incomprehensible” (Variety) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; George Miller’s beguiling Chronicles of Narnia series; David Gordon Green’s Huck Finn; the animated Bejesus, a “gospel-horror fable of the old South” co-directed by Hayao Miyazaki and Joe Dante: They represented an unprecedented dialogue between art, politics and the populace.
Not that the pop maestro, who still commands film sets wearing a single sequined glove, is without his passionate detractors. NBA chairman and frequent op-ed columnist Spike Lee has derided MJ’s films as “okeydoke, sunshiney negro fairy tales where everybody plays pattycake in the cotton fields.” Jackson responded, “I don’t even know what he’s talking about. My films confront and transcend race and class, where I suspect he’d prefer I either wallowed in it or ignored it.” When, after the foiled terror plot for September 11, he led a contingent of filmmakers protesting the attempt of some Pentagon officials to funnel patriotic propaganda into studio films, Jackson drew controversy with the statement, “It would be more to their [the defense industry's] benefit than ours to generate a bunch of pro-war films that traffic in fear and xenophobia. For this and other reasons, I’m not entirely sure some elements within our government didn’t have a hand in the [9/11] plot.”
“I guess his infantile worldview speaks for itself,” said actor Gary Sinise in response to this diatribe. “Our boys fighting overseas won’t be pleased to hear such comments coming from the King of Pop, over there playing in his Dubai sandbox with our enemies.” “Fighting where?” Jackson shot back. “This is 2004. We’re not at war.”
But MJ generally takes criticism in stride as much as he takes it personally. His serenity, he says, springs from his reasons for becoming a filmmaker in the first place: “Yes, I sit at the head of a big, powerful media corporation, but I try to bring something other than the standard corporate ethic, you know? I’m sorta like Willie Wonka, the version that Gene Wilder played. Corporate values drove me to success, but if you begin to live by them, you lose something of yourself and begin, even, to hate yourself. And I did, I did hate myself. As a kid, I tried to re-sculpt my face into something the world would accept and love. When I realized that it wasn’t my face or my soul that was the problem, I stopped carving away at them and began carving away at pieces of film– at this world that is so ugly and mean but hides so much beauty and possibility.”
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