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“This Is It,”

a psuedomentary of Michael Jackson’s final days, opened Wednesday amid all the fanfare Sony Pictures and it’s music arm, Sony Music, could muster. The Michael Jackson accidental death story having quieted down considerably, Sony has invested millions in the heavy lifting to get us riled up about it again and promote their film. Sony wanted This Is It for the end of August but bowed to director Kenny Ortega’s insistence the film not be merely a hastily cobbled-together hack job designed to cash in on the death of one of the world’s leading figures. Their investment appears to have paid off as, at press time, This Is It has grossed over $9 million domestically in two days, and has earned an additional $12 million overseas, creating a buzz that the film may become one of the best-grossing music documentaries of all time. Critics have so far universally applauded the film as a masterpiece, and there is even (premature) Oscar buzz. Those expecting a great MJ performance will likely be disappointed, as, in the film, Jackson concentrates more on the practical aspects of putting his show together rather than on stellar vocal performances, but the film itself affords a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at one of the world's greatest performers, and tells a compelling story of an ill-fated comeback effort. Sony Music co-released an accompanying CD of music from the singer, which will benefit from the assumption that it was the album MJ had been working on at the time of his death but is, in fact, yet another collection of hits even casual MJ fans already have.

Both the film and album are most obviously designed to attempt to recoup a reported $50 million investment by concert promoter AEG in the singer’s planned “This Is It” tour, an effort which suffered monumental losses upon the singer’s sudden death. While I’m sure every effort will be made to make both film and album (and subsequent merchandising tie-ins, and the rumored Jackson Family reality TV show and concert tour) tastefully reverent of the singer’s life, there is no doubt what all of this is about: Michael Jackson, the monster of all cash cows, is dead. It is now time to build a lasting legacy such that, even though the King of Pop is gone, the checks keep coming. “This Is It” is the first test of the Michael Jackson Legacy Machine.

People have gotten rich writing books claiming to tell us the truth about a guy who seemingly lied every hour of every day of his life, a guy we idolized and adored and made excuses for not out of respect for who he actually was but in homage to the family-friendly, adorable wunderkind he once was. Only, that guy—our naive play-vision of Michael Jackson—died a long time before his body was discovered in a rented house. Jackson was trained to lie, first as a child by his grotesquely dysfunctional father, a presence and, surely, a face Jackson spent most of his life trying to escape. Jackson lied about his age, lied about who discovered the Jackson 5 (Bobby Taylor, not Diana Ross), and lied about practically everything from how many plastic surgeries he had (he claimed only two on his nose), to whether he lightened his skin to the paternity of his children and much, much more.

It’s ironic that, only after he died, do we now begin to realize how famous this guy was. We’ve all had our fun with Michael Jackson over the years, but the most profound truth about this deeply troubled and now eternally-young man is that he was, quite simply, one of the world's most phenomenally talented people. His vocal style has been often imitated but never duplicated with any commercial success. I mean, if there was anybody out there with a more impressively unique vocal style than Michael Jackson, he or she would have put Michael Jackson out of the Michael Jackson business—or, at the very least franchised it a la sister Janet—years ago. Jackson was simply one of a kind, a marvel. A guy who tended to repeat the same dozen or so dance moves over and over and yet we never, I mean never, got tired of seeing him do it. A guy who could hiccup and sneer his way through Happy Birthday and amaze us with it. He was every bit the outsize phenomena Elvis Presley had been, only moreso because Jackson was black. A poor black child from a blue-collar Indiana family. Both Jackson and Presley had to overcome poverty, but Jackson had to overcome racism as well. By racism, I mean there were some radio stations that refused to play Presley's music because he was considered too sexual. But there were entire cities in entire areas of this country that would not play black music in 1968 simply because the artist was black—cute little boy or not.

During an appearance on CBS' Late Show With David Letterman, Letterman remarked to Donnie Osmond how the Jackson 5 were kind of like the black version of the Osmonds. Letterman is one of my favorite entertainers, but his more than occasional sloppy interview prep often leaves me gasping, as this did. A singing religious family, similar to the Jacksons, the Osmonds had indeed been singing as a family group a lot longer than had the Jacksons, but MGM Records recruited the Osmonds specifically in response to the success of the Jackson 5, in an effort to do what white entertainers had historically done: exploit ideas and even the intellectual property of blacks. Record producer Rick Hall crafted an extremely J5 sound at the famous Muscle Shoals studios in Alabama, the studio that launched the careers of Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, and the Staple Singers among others. Every black kid in America knew what Donnie and the Osmonds were about the minute "One Bad Apple" hit the charts in 1971—this was a declaration of war against the Jackson 5 and, specifically, young Michael. From all appearances it seemed the "rivalry" between the two groups was largely fabricated for the teen magazines, and while the Osmonds indeed enjoyed great success initially at the Jackson 5's expense, the Osmonds soon moved more toward rock and roll and then television variety. The Osmonds factored very little in the continuing meteoric rise of the Jacksons. As talented a kid as Donnie was, Michael Jackson wasn't merely a good singer and dancer. His was a gift that defied description and duplication. Instincts and dynamics that went far beyond Donnie Osmond's echo of those gifts.

However, Michael's eccentricities soon began to overshadow those gifts. Ever since Eddie Murphy broke the taboo—it was virtually against the law to make fun of Michael before Murphy’s 1983 Delirious HBO special—Michael Jackson has been a favorite butt of cruel jokes. Michael was always looked upon as a kind of saint. A harmless, devoutly religious, strange young man who may or may not have been a special needs person and thus well beyond the scrutiny of conventional social norms. He was a big, shy kid whose ruthlessness was only apparent onstage or in very sharp business decisions like beating his close friend Paul McCartney to the punch in purchasing the Beatles’ music catalog. We thought nothing, nothing at all, of Jackson’s shy flirtations with America’s virgin Brooke Shields, and it never once occurred to us that it was pint-sized Emmanuel Lewis, rather than Shields, who may have been the object of Jackson’s affections.

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The guy was so famous we certainly considered it possible (and for those of us who were at least marginally closer to actually knowing him—a friend of a friend sort of thing—considered it probable) that Jackson’s sleepovers with young boys were, to varying degrees, at least as harmless as he suggested. That he rarely, if ever, invited little girls to his bed suggested an odd sense of propriety reinforcing Jackson's claims that the sleepovers were harmless. The sheer inappropriateness of the notion of underage girls in his bed could make Jackson blush. He considered himself a boy, and boys play was, he maintained, all that was happening behind closed and locked and alarmed doors. And we at least partially bought it—that’s how famous the guy was. He was so famous that, for years, he likely molested and abused young boys right in front of us and we turned our head.

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