MTV caved, and as “Billie Jean” entered heavy video rotation, Thriller shot up the Billboard rankings. There were actually separate charts for black artists at the time (titled “Black LPs” and “Black Singles”). By the end of February, Thriller occupied the number 1 position on the general pop, black album, and singles charts,13 making Jackson the first artist to accomplish such a feat.14
A few weeks later, rumblings of Yetnikoff’s threats made it all the way to the pages of trade publications. But they were rumors then, not music business lore, and MTV shot them down. “The only pressure [CBS has] ever given us is Billy Joel’s,” said a spokesperson for MTV’s parent company, speaking of a popular song by the Piano Man.15
Although Yetnikoff had pledged to push Thriller “like a motherfucker,” Jackson’s album didn’t need much help. “It almost took off on its own,” the former CBS chief recalls. “I don’t think we had to do anything, we just did normal promotion. There was no specific thing. We didn’t have to. I think at that point, the intelligent thing was to get out of the way.”16
Jackson pressed on with his videos, or short films, as he liked to call them. Next up was “Beat It,” directed by Bob Giraldi, who’d go on to direct the cult classic film Dinner Rush (he also had experience filming commercials and would later direct Jackson and his brothers in a fateful Pepsi ad). For the “Beat It” video, Jackson wanted a literal interpretation of his song: two rival gangs preparing for a potentially lethal throwdown as they wander through an urban dystopia. In an effort to make the video feel as authentic as possible, Jackson had his team go around Los Angeles and round up actual gang members for the shoot.
In the video, Jackson eventually defuses the dispute between the warring groups by—what else—dancing (a narrative that would replay itself on the title track of his next album). Strangely enough, it also resonated in real life. Jackson found that the gang members, many of them from warring factions on the street, were quite pleasant when united for his video. They complimented him on his dancing, asked nicely for autographs, and even cleared their own trays at lunchtime.
“I came to realize that the whole thing about being bad and tough is that it’s done for recognition,” Jackson later wrote. “All along these guys had wanted to be seen and respected, and now we were going to put them on TV . . . they were so wonderful to me—polite, quiet, supportive.”17
But “Beat It,” like “Billie Jean” before it, had ramifications far beyond the career of Jackson and those who worked on the video. “It really spawned what turned out to be a wave of Top 40 stations playing artists that had a harder, rougher edge and an R&B sound,” says Berklee College of Music professor John Kellogg, speaking of songs like Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” collaboration with Run-D.M.C. “All of that started with ‘Beat It’ and Michael Jackson.”18
* * *
It was a different sort of video, however, that really sent Thriller into uncharted commercial territory. In 1983, Suzanne de Passe decided to put together a television special called Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever. She initially had to convince Gordy to authorize the project. He didn’t want to go up onstage and “be phony and smile at all the people” who’d left his company, he says.
“Come back for one night to celebrate Motown and me?” he asked de Passe. “For what, why should I be there?”19
“Everybody is coming,” she countered. “You have to be there because it is a legacy that you started twenty-five years ago.”
There was another consideration on Gordy’s mind: he was having financial troubles at the time and thought he might have to sell Motown (he would, five years later, for $61 million). Meanwhile, de Passe enlisted Smokey Robinson to help convince Gordy. “It doesn’t matter who owns the company,” the legendary songwriter said. “We got a legacy of love . . . and you need to help Suzanne.”
As soon as Gordy agreed, de Passe told him he needed to start working on Michael Jackson, who was ambivalent about coming and didn’t want to be part of a television special. The Motown chief’s own reluctance quickly turned to outrage at his former charge: “How dare he not want to come?”
So Gordy headed over to Epic’s recording studio and asked to see Jackson. He got right to the point.
“What do you mean you don’t want to come celebrate Motown 25?”
“I’m doing too much TV now,” Jackson replied.
“This is not TV—this is Motown 25 . . . and they’re honoring me. Are you saying you don’t want to come?”
“Well, they didn’t tell me that specifically. Do you want me there?”
“Yeah, I want you there.”
Jackson agreed to perform a medley of hits with his brothers, followed by “Billie Jean,” and went back into the studio.
Later, worried that the show would overexpose him, he briefly reneged, claiming it was because Branca didn’t want him to do “Billie Jean” on television. Gordy called his bluff.
“I know you, I taught you that,” the Motown boss said. “ ‘If you don’t want to do something, I’ll be the bad guy.’ . . . Now it doesn’t work. So you want to do it or not?”
“I’ll do it.”
Jackson choreographed the set and spent days practicing with his siblings at their Hayvenhurst home, videotaping each rehearsal so that they could go back and analyze what was working and what wasn’t. During his rare moments of downtime, Jackson mulled the options for his solo performance. “I had no idea what I was going to do at first,” he wrote in an unpublished note. “I just had one major thought in mind and heart: It had to be the best, incredible, the unexpected. I had determination of fire to be incredible on this show.”20
The night before the performance, Jackson decided he wanted to use his solo time to showcase his version of a move that was particularly popular with inner-city break dancers at the time. (“All I did was enhance the dance,” he told Oprah Winfrey in 1993.21) He gave it a name: the Moonwalk.
On March 25, 1983, after he and his brothers finished their routine in front of an enthusiastic live studio audience at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, Jackson took the microphone to make an announcement. “Those were the good old days; I love those songs,” he said. “Those were magic moments with all my brothers. . . . But, especially, I like the new songs.”22
With that, Jackson whisked a fedora to the top of his head and started gyrating to the tune of “Billie Jean.” The crowd squealed with delight as he swirled around the stage, but it was a five-second sequence in the song’s bridge that would unleash the flashbulbs of history on Jackson’s performance. After pointing at the crowd and letting out one of his trademark whoops, Jackson planted his feet and glided backward across the stage—his feet appearing to move forward and backward at the same time like mystical pistons—before easing into a spin and landing on his toes. Though the audience erupted in applause, the perfectionist Jackson’s first reaction was frustration.
“The audience loved it, I got an incredible response, more than I imagined, standing ovation, screaming, dancing,” he wrote. “But still I was disappointed that after the big spin, I didn’t stay on my toes long enough.”23
Walter Yetnikoff has an explanation for Jackson’s feelings: “He was a star at six. And he had his father hovering over him, smacking him in the head when he didn’t do it well . . . this will tend to give you a perfectionist kind of thing.”24
Any lingering doubt as to the merits of his performance dissipated when he received a call from Fred Astaire. “You’re a hell of a mover,” the dance legend said. “Man, you really put them on their asses last night.”25
Some fifty million people had tuned in to watch the Motown 25 special on NBC, and quite a few shared Astaire’s attitude. Many of them went out and bought Thriller. The album had sold 2 million copies in the United States by March of 1983. After Motown 25 and the videos for “Beat It” and “Billie Jean,” Thriller would sell an additional 10 million before the end of the year.26
The album spent eighty weeks in the top ten
on the US charts, including thirty-seven at number 1. Thriller fared almost as well overseas: in Japan, it spent sixty-five weeks on the charts; in the Soviet Union, it became a valuable trading chip on the black market; in South Africa, it became the segregated country’s top seller. In 1984, the Guinness Book of World Records named Thriller the top-selling album of all time, a title it still holds.27
“He did what other people couldn’t,” says former Def Jam president Kevin Liles. “It’s the spirit in which he did things—‘I’m going to moonwalk, and you ain’t gonna know what the hell I just did.’ . . . He definitely was an inspiration to a lot of us.”28 Adds rapper Ludacris: “He was the definition of what a superstar was to me . . . there’s an intangible energy whenever you listen to his music that you can’t even explain.”29
And like the hip-hop moguls he inspired, Jackson was determined to monetize his success to the greatest extent possible. He often spoke of the many great artists of the 1950s and ’60s—particularly black musicians—who had signed away vast swaths of their future musical interests because they were so eager to land record deals.
“He studied people who had attained success in their field . . . but he also studied people who, although they were successful in the popular sense, they may not have been successful in a business sense,” recalls Forger. “And he studied those people and the mistakes that they made so that he would not make those same mistakes.”30
* * *
One afternoon at the height of the Thriller frenzy, Jackson and Branca were sitting in the living room at Hayvenhurst when the singer decided to give his lawyer a motivational speech.
Jackson often did this with his closest lieutenants in those days, a habit he picked up from Berry Gordy. This time, he had something very specific on his mind: renegotiating his record deal. Given Thriller’s record-shattering success, Jackson knew he could squeeze just about anything out of CBS.
“You sure you can get me a great deal with Walter Yetnikoff?”31
“Yes, Michael.”
“Well, you know, Frank Sinatra uses Mickey Rudin.”
Rudin, who would pass away in 1999, was one of the biggest names in Hollywood during the second half of the twentieth century. As Sinatra’s right-hand man, he guarded his client’s interest with the vigor of a mother bear. Four years after hurling a $2 million lawsuit at author Kitty Kelley over her 1987 unauthorized biography His Way, Rudin sued her for including his name in the acknowledgments of her next book, a dishy tome on Nancy Reagan that suggested that the First Lady had a long-term affair with Sinatra.32
Jackson expected the same level of excellence—and ferocity—from his attorney.
“Are you as good as Mickey Rudin?” he asked.33
“Yes, Michael,” Branca replied. “And, you know, Mickey Rudin’s a little older now. I probably have more energy than he does.”
“Oh, okay, I like to hear that. You know, when people speak to me about Sinatra and Rudin . . . [I want them to] speak about us that way, Branca. We need to be the model for the world. We need to be the people that people point to and say, ‘I want to do it like those guys do it.’ ”
Evidently, Jackson knew how to motivate those who worked for him. Branca would go on to renegotiate his deal three different times during Thriller’s historic run. After that afternoon at Hayvenhurst, Jackson homed in on something even more important than percentage points: ownership of his master recordings. And Branca knew that to accomplish such a momentous feat, he’d need to wait for just the right moment.
* * *
Thriller continued to get scooped from store shelves at a record pace as 1983 wore on. But by the summer, it was no longer number 1 on the charts, and Jackson was peeved. Rather than sit back and watch the royalties roll in, he decided to make another late-night call to Yetnikoff.
“The record, it’s slipping from number one,” he said. “What are we going to do?”
“Michael, what we’re going to do is we’re going to go to sleep, and we’re going to pick this up tomorrow.”34
But Frank Dileo, Epic’s chief of promotions, had some ideas. A squat, cigar-chomping fireplug of a man who looked so much like a mobster that he was later cast as Tuddy Cicero in Martin Scorsese’s film Goodfellas, he suggested making a third video as Jackson had initially planned. Thriller’s title track seemed a good target (“It’s simple,” Dileo said. “All you’ve got to do is dance, sing, and make it scary”).35
It wasn’t quite so easy, though, once Jackson developed a vision for the video. He wanted to hire John Landis, director of An American Werewolf in London and many other movies, to lead an ensemble of dancing zombies in a short film three times the length of a typical video—and an order of magnitude more expensive. Yetnikoff wasn’t buying it: “What are you, fucking crazy, making a video about monsters?”36
In fairness to Yetnikoff, “Billie Jean” and “Beat It” had already gobbled up a big chunk of CBS’s cash, and the record company generally didn’t bankroll more than two videos per album anyway.37 That was mostly because, at the time, it was rare to have more than two singles from one album. To top it off, Jackson’s plan for “Thriller” called for a budget of at least $900,000—in era when budgets rarely exceeded $50,000 per video—and the film had to be flawless.38
“He became more of a perfectionist than I was,” recalls Berry Gordy. “I would spend whatever money it took, and he knew that. . . . I said the money is less important than the quality of the work. So when he started doing his [own projects], he took that to major extremes.”39
Jackson’s message to Branca about the budget: “I don’t care, figure it out.” The lawyer’s solution was to find partners willing to finance an entertainment special on the making of the “Thriller” video, thereby covering the budget of the video itself at the same time. He was able to convince Showtime and MTV to cough up about $300,000 apiece—marking the first time the latter had ever paid for programming—and got another $400,000 from home video outfit Vestron (CBS agreed to pick up an additional $100,000 to $200,000 as the video’s budget ballooned to $1.2 million).40
By mid-1983, Landis and Jackson had written the screenplay and completed filming. The result seemed poised to live up to even the singer’s lofty expectations. There was something for everyone: the spooky voiceovers of Vincent Price, the good looks of Playboy centerfold Ola Ray, an opening scene in which the world’s top entertainer turns into a werewolf (and then, famously, a zombie). Just days before the film was to be delivered to MTV, however, Branca received a phone call spookier than anything that happened in the video.
“Get the tapes for ‘Thriller,’ ” said Jackson in a whisper. “We have to destroy them.”
“Michael, think about it tonight. Call me tomorrow.”
The next day, Jackson called back.
“Did you get the canisters?”
“No, Mike, but they’re coming.”
After having a handful of similar calls with Jackson over the next few days, Branca realized that—for some reason—his client was serious about destroying the film. So he phoned John Landis, who had the precious cargo in his possession.
“John, you gotta bring me the [canisters].”
“Why?”
“John, just give them to me,” said Branca urgently. “Do you want [“Thriller”] put out or not?”
“Yeah.”
“All right, then, get me them!”
As soon as Landis turned over the film canisters to Branca, Jackson called again.
“Did you get them?”
“Yeah, I got them here, Mike.”
“Destroy them.”
When Branca pressed Jackson as to why he wanted the tapes obliterated, the singer finally admitted that the Jehovah’s Witnesses—whose beliefs he still shared—had heard about the video. Outraged by its supernatural suggestions, they essentially told him he’d lose his spot in heaven if he ever allowed it to see the light of day.
Branca scrambled for a way to soothe his client.
“Mike, you remember Bela Lugosi?”
“Yeah.”
“He played Dracula,” said Branca, stalling for time. “Well, you know he’s a very religious man.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s a very religious man and yet he’s playing Dracula . . . did you ever see the disclaimers in his movies that it didn’t reflect his personal convictions?”
Jackson said he hadn’t.
“Michael, why don’t we put a disclaimer at the beginning of the video?”
After a long pause, Jackson agreed. What he didn’t know was that Branca hadn’t a clue as to Lugosi’s piety—and that the actor had never made a habit of including sly disclaimers at the beginning of his films. But that bit of shrewd maneuvering ended up saving the “Thriller” video, not to mention the making-of special that would pay its bills. More important, it prevented Jackson from making a then-rare disastrous business decision—the sort that the sycophants who later came to surround him would never have had the gumption to help him avoid.
Branca next called Landis to notify him of the impending addendum. The director initially resisted, but when the attorney fully conveyed the gravity of the situation, Landis gave his approval. The video went live in December of 1983 with the following note in the introduction:
Due to my strong personal convictions, I wish to stress that this film in no way endorses a belief in the occult.
Michael Jackson41
The fourteen-minute flick would later be named the best music video of all time by MTV,42 and was certainly the most important chapter in Michael Jackson’s revision—and reinvention—of the medium. The video on the making of “Thriller” eventually sold 9 million copies, making it the bestselling home video of any kind at that point.
“Michael pioneered videos as an art form,” says Branca. “I really think when you talk about his business contribution and business acumen, it was especially in the area of marketing and music.”43
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