Michael Jackson, Inc.

by Zack O'Malley Greenburg

  “John, listen to me, these guys are for real,” he said. “I’m going to sell CBS Songs. . . . I’m going to sell it to them, and they want you to represent them. You need to get on a plane and come.”

  Branca went to New York, and they closed the deal for $125 million. Three years later, Koppelman and Bandier sold their company to EMI for $297 million; Koppelman went on to become the chairman of EMI Records, while Bandier ended up at the helm of EMI’s music publishing division.

  And, to close the loop, Bandier was hired to run Sony/ATV in 2007.28

  * * *

  Michael Jackson, of course, was thrilled to finally acquire ATV in 1985. His organization had outmaneuvered some of the smartest in the business, somehow managing to convince a reclusive Australian billionaire to sell one of the most valuable assets in music for millions less than the next-highest bidder. And that was just the beginning.

  The catalogue contained a background music library called Bruton Music, an outfit that licensed mundane sound effects (a door closing, for example) to commercials and low-budget movies. Branca flipped it to Clive Calder’s Zomba Music for $6 million, lowering Jackson’s net cost to $41.5 million; Jackson took out a business loan of $30 million to finance part of the acquisition and paid for the rest in cash.29

  Then Branca hired a team of international tax experts to help sort out the transaction—and save Jackson a raft of money. At the accountants’ suggestion, they moved ATV’s corporations to the Bahamas, eventually liquidating them and distributing the assets to Jackson. His accountants also realized that tax laws allowed them to write off about $5 million of the catalogue’s purchase price annually as a business expense over eight years. As a result of this and the Bruton Music sale, Jackson’s net cost for the purchase would end up being only $20 million or so.

  The ATV catalogue had been generating roughly $6 million per year from physical sales and radio spins of its four thousand copyrights, propelled by low six-figure payouts for individual hits like “Yesterday.” But there was an opportunity to make much more. Shortly after acquiring ATV, Jackson and his team decided to lay off the bulk of the company’s forty employees and move administration of the catalogue to CBS Songs in exchange for 3 percent to 5 percent of publishing revenues. That slashed ATV’s overhead by $5 million to $10 million per year.

  To prevent his copyrights from getting lost in the shuffle at such a large company, Jackson hired veteran song plugger Dale Kawashima, who’d previously worked to get licensing deals for the likes of Prince and Bruce Springsteen, to serve as ATV’s president. Kawashima would spend his time pursuing new ways to make money on both ATV and Jackson’s Mijac catalogue while looking for new songwriters to sign, reporting directly to Branca and Jackson. The singer carved out a list of dozens of titles that were considered untouchable, at least when it came to advertisements.

  “The most important copyrights of Lennon-McCartney, like ‘Yesterday’ or ‘Let It Be’ or something, would never be used in any commercial,” says Kawashima. “It was other songs that were not deemed to be in the approximate top fifty or sixty that could be licensed in the right situation.”30

  * * *

  “We’re the largest, most profitable, and best music publishing company that there is, and Michael has a significant interest in it,” says Bandier, who’s winding down our interview (he’s got Berry Gordy coming in next). “So his investment is a pretty good investment. Like buying Apple [computer] stock when it first came out.”31

  That’s not necessarily hyperbole. A $47.5 million investment in Apple stock shortly after its 1980 initial public offering would be worth about $6.5 billion today, considerably more than Sony/ATV. But it’s all a matter of timing. Had Jackson spent $47.5 million on Apple shares at their 1987 peak, their value would now stand at $1.6 billion; factor in his catalogue’s fat dividends, and the two purchases would be roughly equivalent.

  Jackson’s single-minded focus on buying the catalogue despite vociferous objections from the record industry’s brightest minds might strike some as impetuous. But in hindsight, it’s clear that he was correct to follow his instincts, even to those who doubted him at first—and that his sense of the value of copyrights was impeccable.

  “I think if you were his advisor at that time you would have told him, ‘Don’t do it,’ ” says Yetnikoff. “Turns out that it was a very lucrative investment. . . . So I would have to say that his business acumen is better than mine.”32

  Jackson certainly never forgot that he’d been right. In 2007, on a conference call with Bandier, the executive recounted the story of ATV’s 1985 sale. Jackson was delighted to relive the experience.

  “See,” he said. “I told you I knew the music publishing business.”33

  Chapter 8

  * * *

  DANCING WITH THE STARS

  It’s a gray February day at Disneyland and business at Tomorrowland is sluggish, even for a Thursday afternoon. The Astro Orbitor is half empty. There are no aspiring Jedis queued up in front of Star Tours. And the wait for Space Mountain is a mere ten minutes. One bright spot: a crowd is gathered to see Michael Jackson in Captain EO, the futuristic featurette he headlined in 1986.1

  Two decades before 3-D films came to the mainstream, Captain EO became the first so-called 4-D flick—meaning viewers not only donned glasses that made onscreen asteroids seem as close as the seat in front of them, but also felt the whoosh of air from a spaceship lifting off and found their seats shaking in tandem with interstellar turbulence.

  As a result, Captain EO was the most expensive film per minute in history when released. The budget for its seventeen minutes was about $30 million2 ($1,764,705.88 for every sixty seconds), including a $3 million salary for Jackson.3 He played the lead role opposite evil space queen Anjelica Huston, while Francis Ford Coppola served as director and George Lucas as executive producer. The film aired in Disney’s parks around the world for varying chunks of time from 1986 to 1998, returning the year after Jackson’s death.

  Standing next to me in line today is Rusty Lemorande, perhaps the only person who doesn’t seem thrilled at the prospect of seeing Captain EO. He’s got a good excuse: he wrote and produced the film.

  “I don’t want you to feel bad,” he says. “But the prospect of seeing it was not . . .”4

  “. . . the most exciting?” I offer.

  “Maybe if I hadn’t seen it in years, but I saw it last time I was here,” he continues. “If I come here with friends, then it’s like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to go see Captain EO.’ ”

  “I could imagine it would get to be tiresome to see the same thing you produced, over and over again.”

  “Well, when you know every shot . . .”

  “Is there still some element of butterflies in your stomach?”

  “If people react to it around us, which may happen, that’s great. They may not. It was cutting edge at its time.”

  He pauses.

  “The Wizard of Oz still endures even though it’s incredibly period. So I’m hoping that, you know, fifty years from now, people will still be watching Captain EO.”

  * * *

  Lemorande was in Spain in 1985 when the call about Captain EO came in from Disney. After finishing the films Yentl with Barbra Streisand and Electric Dreams with Richard Branson, he had traveled to Europe to research a stage musical about Goya.

  “We want you to come in right away,” explained the voice on the other end of the line. “We’ll fly you in to meet with Jeff Katzenberg.”

  Katzenberg, who would go on to found DreamWorks with David Geffen and Steven Spielberg, was already a Hollywood force in his new role as head of Disney’s movie studio. But Lemorande wasn’t particularly eager to cut his trip short.

  “I’m in Spain,” he said. “I’m busy.”

  “We’ll send you back, just come in for this meeting.”

  “Well, tell me what it’s about.”

  “No, I can’t tell you.”

  When Lemorande insisted, the executi
ve offered one nugget of information about the project: it involved George Lucas and Michael Jackson. A few hours later, Lemorande settled into a business-class seat on a jetliner bound for Los Angeles.

  The Disney executives’ urgent desire to meet with him was part of a larger corporate sea change brought on by Michael Eisner, who had just taken control of the company. As part of a massive modernization program, he wanted to knock down the organizational walls between his theme parks division and film studio, which he’d just hired Katzenberg to run. Conveniently, two of Disney’s biggest fans were Jackson and Lucas, and the sides began discussing a collaboration that would combine a ride with a movie.

  “They said they didn’t care what I did, as long as it was something creative,” Jackson later wrote. “I had this big meeting with them. . . . I wanted to do something with them that Mr. Disney himself would have approved.”5

  Disney’s famed Imagineers then dreamed up the broad outline of an interstellar adventure in which a ragtag band of loveable misfits, headed by a charismatic leader, liberates a planet of enslaved creatures from an evil tyrant by using the magic of song and dance. The role made sense for Jackson, who was looking to build himself a Hollywood career following his performance in The Wiz and the record-shattering success of the Thriller video. As always, he wanted to be in the vanguard of whatever field he was working in; EO seemed like a suitably novel endeavor.

  “There were no 3-D movies, really, at the time,” says Branca. “So it was an opportunity to do [something] ahead of its time.”6

  Katzenberg met with Lemorande—who’d become something of an expert on the industry’s latest technology after working on a 3-D flick about a boy in space (which never made it to theaters)—to discuss the possibility of writing and producing the movie. Then Katzenberg sent him to San Francisco to meet with Lucas for final approval.

  “You really know 3-D,” said the Star Wars creator. “You really understand it, that’s great . . . would you like the job?”7 Lemorande accepted.

  His next stop was a conference room in Disney’s Burbank headquarters, where he quickly noticed two things: the dimly lit ambiance and the entrance of Michael Jackson. “I sensed from working with other superstars that Michael would determine the potential depth of our working relationship with the first eye contact,” says Lemorande. “I do remember the importance of ‘Do not turn away.’ I sensed that was a really important bonding moment. I recall saying something that made him laugh.”

  With that, the ice was broken, and a productive partnership began. Lemorande treated Jackson with a mix of familiarity and deference; the singer responded by offering the writer-producer unlimited access and feedback. Jackson told Lemorande he loved his first draft of the script—the dialogue, the characterization, the storyboards. With the music and the choreography, Jackson did more micro-managing, as one might expect. But Lemorande didn’t mind.

  “Michael was funny and playful and curious and animated and full of energy,” he recalls. “And had a high aesthetic, one of the best, and made you want to please him. Because if you pleased him, you knew you did something well; it wasn’t faint praise. It was the mark of a top person in his field.”

  Very early on in the production of Captain EO, Lemorande came to understand why Jackson was so interested in the role—and the film business in general.

  “Making movies for Michael was a number one priority in his life, and understandably so,” he says. “He had conquered videos; he’d kind of created them. He’d conquered pop music, and he’d staked his claim in the field of dance and choreography. So what was left?”

  * * *

  The first time designer Michael Bush met Michael Jackson, he had just walked into a dark trailer—and found himself being pelted with cherries. Lemorande had hired him to handle Jackson’s wardrobe for Captain EO.

  “I’m standing there, nervous,” Bush recalls. “And here’s Michael Jackson someplace over there in the dark. Another cherry came at me. The third cherry came at me. I picked it up and threw it back.”8

  Then Jackson emerged from the shadows, laughing, with a whole bowl of cherries. The pair started talking, and eventually the conversation turned to music. Bush mentioned that his favorite singer was Patsy Cline. Though Jackson didn’t know much about her at first, he returned to the Captain EO set the next day singing one of her songs, suddenly knowing how she died and how old she was when it happened.

  “I’m going, ‘How the hell did this man have the time?’ ” says Bush. “He didn’t go on Google, there was no Google then, this man educated himself about me, to talk to me. . . . With everything going on with this man’s life, even getting ready to step [before] a camera and perform, he knew how to make me feel comfortable around him.”

  Along with partner Dennis Tompkins, Bush would go on to generate some of Jackson’s most iconic outfits over the years, perhaps most notably his costumes for the Bad Tour in the late 1980s. Jackson had another long-term ally on the set: Matt Forger, the tech-savvy engineer who’d worked with him on Thriller and would reprise his efforts for many of the singer’s subsequent albums.

  Forger’s expertise was required to support some of Captain EO’s technological advances. The film was the first production with regular showings that featured discrete digital 5.1 channel surround sound, which would go on to become an industry standard. Much of the equipment that would be required didn’t yet exist, so Disney’s Imagineers designed a proprietary system from scratch.9

  Having not yet chosen a director, Lucas and Katzenberg left Jackson and Lemorande plenty of room to inject their own ideas into the movie. Lemorande asked himself what Walt Disney would do—and came up with a plan to add the in-theater effects that would make EO a 4-D trailblazer. He brought in John Napier, a costume and set designer from London’s theater scene, and together they worked with the Imagineers to figure out how to incorporate real smoke, laser beams, and fiber-optic stars that descended from the ceiling. Accomplishing all of this, however, would require extensive modifications to Disney’s custom-built theater.

  “We had to raise the ceiling by like five feet,” Lemorande says, recalling that the construction cost about $500,000. “You have to understand, if you raise it five inches, you’re still raising metal beams, and so that created a huge expenditure. George said, ‘Let’s do it.’ So he called Michael Eisner and talked him into it.”10

  Still, Captain EO had no director. Jackson wrote in his autobiography that Steven Spielberg had been offered the gig, but it seemed he just couldn’t fit the film into his crowded schedule.11 That didn’t dampen Jackson’s dedication to the project.

  “Michael was my constant ally,” Lemorande remembers. “He would, at the drop of a hat, do anything, be anywhere, answer any question, look at anything—and want to—because this was so desperately important to him. He thought this would show Hollywood that he could be as big a film star as Elvis Presley.”

  * * *

  “What do you think about Francis Coppola?” George Lucas asked Lemorande. It seemed he had finally narrowed down his search for a director.12

  “Wow, are you kidding?” replied Lemorande. “I’d be thrilled if he did it. What made you think of him?”

  “He’ll get a great performance out of Michael, he’s got experience with musicals, we can help him with the special effects. And most importantly, he’s a genuine artist, and genuine artists can do anything.”

  Coppola joined the production and began filming. Though the flick had a record-setting budget, it wasn’t unlimited: two weeks were allotted for filming. Immediately after that, Coppola was due to begin directing Peggy Sue Got Married—on the same lot in Culver City where he was working on EO.

  Jackson soaked up every aspect of the filming process. According to Bush, he even learned how to take apart a film camera and put it back together again.13 Beyond its technical aspects, the storyline of Captain EO—something like an interstellar version of “Beat It”—fit him like a rhinestone glove.

  “
He brings his message of love and light and music and transforms the planet,” explains Matt Forger. “This is a theme that reoccurs to Michael many times in his life and on many songs that he does . . . how to improve the world, how to make it a better place.”14

  At the conclusion of principal photography, the Captain EO team went to work on a preliminary edit. Lemorande remembers trekking to Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch to watch the rough cut. In those days, when a sequence hadn’t yet been filmed all that showed up on the screen was a white cardboard placeholder with a drawing of the anticipated shot. And that was the case with about every third shot in Captain EO. Lucas assured his small audience that the film would look fantastic once the missing special effects sequences were added—a laser battle between starships zooming just above the surface of a Death Star–like planet, for example.15

  As Jackson watched, new ideas swirled through his mind. He believed from the beginning that Captain EO could be the next step in the evolution of the music video—from promotional throwaway to short film—a process that began with “Billie Jean” and “Thriller.” As such, he wanted EO to have a similar feel, which meant adding more shots to capture the speed and sizzle of his dance moves.

  Lemorande had anticipated the possibility of additional filming. So rather than discarding everything at the conclusion of principal photography, per usual, he had used a technique called pack storing, where major elements were cut apart and saved. If necessary, the crew could reassemble enough of the set to make a backdrop suitable for filming. This step was one more expense for an already costly movie, but it proved invaluable. With critical parts of the set revived, the desired shots were added.

  Afterward, as he did following every edit of the film, Lemorande took a copy of Captain EO to Jackson. The singer liked what he saw. “A compliment from Michael was very, very rewarding because he wasn’t going to give them freely,” Lemorande recalls. “And it made him happier and happier that this had the chance to be a real hit.”