So I’ve seen Michael, the family-authorised, hits-heavy Michael Jackson biopic that is chomping the global box office right now. I enjoyed it but it’s not a total classic. As you’d expect, it immaculately recreates key moments and slavishly avoids any potential for controversy. Jaafar Jackson (Jermaine’s son, Jackson watchers) is impressive as Michael.
Like any musical biopic, the producers have taken major liberties with the facts for story-telling purposes. These aren’t documentaries, so that’s no shock. That in turn has led to a bunch of fact-check articles (see The New York Times, Rolling Stone and People for starters).
These look heavily SEO-driven, covering off obvious (to me) questions like: Was Michael’s relationship with his father Joe Jackson that awful (yes), did Michael write ‘Thriller’ (no), did John Branca really fire Joe Jackson by fax (no).
Much of this stuff falls into the “obvious dramatic device” category. Is it likely that Joe Jackson ran into Michael the very night he returned from his first plastic surgery and asked what happened? No. But it makes for an effective on-screen moment.
Some of it just comes across as lazy writing. There’s a much-discussed scene where Michael and his manager/lawyer John Branca ask CBS head Walter Yetnikoff (played in an excellent cameo by Mike Myers) to contact MTV and make sure Michael’s videos are shown on the channel. Yetnikoff threatens to withdraw every one of CBS’s videos from MTV, covering a laundry list of artists that includes Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Body Dylan and . . . Cyndi Lauper.
This is patent nonsense. Cyndi’s first solo single ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun’ was released in October 1983. By that point, ‘Beat It’ and ‘Thriller’ had both made their world debuts on MTV. Whatever earlier issues MTV had with Jackson, they’d been resolved long before Cyndi hit the scene.
But that wasn’t the glitch that really bothered me. That was a clunky moment but a brief one. The issue was the early scene set in 1968 where the Jackson 5 are shown supporting Gladys Knight & The Pips and being watched from backstage by legendary Motown executive Suzanne de Passe.
Several fact check articles note that this didn’t happen. The band’s introduction to Motown came via Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers, after the Jackson 5 supported that group.
But that compression doesn’t really bug me. What does is that the group are shown performing ‘Never Can Say Goodbye’. That’s literally impossible, because that song wasn’t even in existence in 1968.
It was written by Motown songwriter Clifton Davis, and originally intended for the Supremes. But Motown executives instead gave it to . . . the Jackson 5, who recorded in June 1970. It was released in March 1971 and became the group’s sixth US Top 10 hit.
So it’s a legitimate Jackson 5 banger from the Motown era – but not one they could have possibly performed in 1968 in order to impress Motown. And that kind of outright impossibility bugs me.
For more Michael Jackson madness, check out the Michael Jackson song titles puzzle and the full story behind the Billie Jean answer track ‘Superstar’. For a different Motown angle, see what happened when the New York Times got confused about the Supremes.
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