Skip to main content

When Martin Scorsese Directed Michael Jackson in the 18-Minute “Bad” Music Video & Paid Cinematic Tribute to West Side Story (1986)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sd4SJVsTulc

In 1983, Michael Jackson’s Thriller was the biggest album in the world, and he was the biggest pop star. And then he was expected to top it. But could he? The mounting pressures of fame and money, his falling out with his family over the Jacksons tour, and his perfectionist status as a musician meant the follow-up album kept being pushed back further and further. He became more reclusive and strange-looking, and went from being a sex symbol to being the butt of jokes. And in the background of all that was his increasing addiction to pain killers, which had started after a malfunctioning pyrotechnic burned his scalp to the bone.

Meanwhile his closest competitor, Prince, had been releasing an album a year since 1999. And, in 1986, as this Spin profile mentions, the two met for an odd, mostly-silent “summit.” Whatever was said, it spurred Jackson to finally finish his next album.

Jackson had worked with John Landis on the “Thriller” video, and then with Francis Ford Coppola for Captain EO, but for the title track off of his comeback album, he hired Martin Scorsese to direct, working from a script by Richard Price. Scorsese and Price had just worked together on The Color of Money, and the latter’s script was originally about a private school kid who gets killed in a Harlem shootout. A lot of that is still there in the finished full video, although the murder is not. Instead, Jackson turns the “Bad” music video into something multilayered.

For Scorsese it allowed him to mix the street realism of his classic New York City tales, and to indulge in a musical number with its several nods to West Side Story. Scorsese’s original film clocks in at over 18 minutes and it takes until half-way for the music video to begin, when the black’n’white realism gives way to color, and typical NYC winter wear turns into b-boy dance attire, including Jackson’s black buckle jacket. Choreographed by Jackson alongside Gregg Burge and Jeffrey Daniel, with input from Geron ‘Caszper’ Candidate, the team created a performance that is a collage of styles, from Jerome Robbins’ musical theater dance to moves from the days of Soul Train (Daniel and Burge had both been featured performers), to Jackson’s own idiosyncratic moves. Scorsese was there to capture it all with his always-moving camera.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RA3TasRXh8U

Also of note is the debut of Wesley Snipes, playing the antagonist Mini Max. There are few actors who can take a secondary role in a music video and make it stand out, but Snipes’ performance was so powerful, audiences and casting directors took notice.

And while most broadcasts of the video end with the final line of the song, the original film ends with a most amazing sequence. Jackson sings a capella, while his backup dancers repeat his improvisation, a call and response straight out of gospel music, caught on three cameras in one take. This scene, even more than the surrounding video, is Jackson placing himself in the history of Black entertainment, calling up the power of James Brown and Mavis Staples (from whom he got “shamone”) and numerous other singers. It was the rawest he had even been, and you can see all the tension of those four previous years spill out. He wasn’t a freak show or an oddity—he was part of a tradition that reached back through the 20th century, a lineage that the documentary makes clear.

Note: the 25th anniversary documentary seen in the clip above was directed by Spike Lee, who also shot a screenplay by Richard Price, “Clockers.” New York is a small town.

Related Content:

How Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” Video Changed Pop Culture Forever: Revisit the 13-Minute Short Film Directed by John Landis

How Michael Jackson Wrote a Song: A Close Look at How the King of Pop Crafted “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough”

The Origins of Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk: Vintage Footage of Cab Calloway, Sammy Davis Jr., Fred Astaire & More

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

When Martin Scorsese Directed Michael Jackson in the 18-Minute “Bad” Music Video & Paid Cinematic Tribute to West Side Story (1986) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/34oELzP
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wikimedia Commons Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States   in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the  Socialist Worker , pitched at “activists interested in making their own history.” Zinn’s recommendations naturally include the work of other historians, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (“a pioneering work of ‘multiculturalism’ dealing with racial interactions in the colonial period”) to Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more