MJ (50 page)

On July 7, Mitchell Beckloff, an LA Superior Court judge, backed Branca and McClain to control Michael’s estate. Howard Weitzman, a longtime MJ attorney who worked with Branca and the estate, called
it “the correct decision” and said the executors would immediately try to “maximize the estate.” At first, Katherine’s attorneys strenuously objected, but they backed off. Why? Streisand says Katherine confided to him she didn’t want to fight with Branca and McClain and was weary of squabbling over the will; Katherine told Randall Sullivan that Streisand aggressively talked her out of going to war with John Branca.

Unlike Katherine, Joe Jackson and his longtime attorney, Brian Oxman, did not back off. In November, they filed a sixty-page document objecting to the appointment of Branca and McClain, listing “violations of fiduciary duties and conflicts of interest” and accusing them of acting “in a fraudulent deceptive manner where their veracity can no longer be trusted.” But because Michael had not named Joe as a beneficiary, Beckloff ruled he had no standing in court—and he rejected Joe’s request for a monthly estate allowance. On November 10, Streisand told the court his client, Katherine Jackson, withdrew her
objections to Branca and McClain, saying it was “high time the fighting end.”

That gave Branca an opening to go to work. The first thing the newly formed estate did was ally with AEG. That was controversial among the Jackson family, because Katherine and others in the Jackson family were beginning to form a theory that AEG hired Conrad Murray and encouraged him to prop up Michael Jackson for the shows even when the singer was conspicuously sick. AEG had spent more than
$24 million on This Is It costs, including $15 million in advances to MJ. (The promoter filed a claim for its $17.5 million insurance payout after Michael’s death, but Lloyd’s of London opposed it, suggesting AEG had not adequately disclosed Michael’s health and drug issues. The two sides settled out of court in January 2014.) The promoter recouped a portion of its losses by issuing souvenir tickets to those who’d paid for the O2 shows, and Randy Phillips was putting his usual spin on the crushing financial blow:
“I don’t think we’ve lost anything,” he told a reporter.

The estate had financial problems of its own. In addition to Michael’s copious debts, as
Forbes
’s Zack O’Malley Greenburg reported
in
Michael Jackson Inc.
, dozens of creditors were after him for a variety of legal claims, from the reasonable (the State of California franchise tax board demanded $1,647.24) to the ridiculous (someone named Erle Bonner filed a $1,109,000,503,600 lawsuit that accused MJ of stealing his cure for herpes). But Branca and AEG’s Phillips had an idea. They would make up all the promoter’s lost revenue, set the estate on the road out of debt, and permanently restore Michael Jackson’s reputation as perhaps the greatest entertainer who ever lived.

*  *  *

When he heard the news Michael Jackson died on June 25, Tim Patterson had just returned home from lunch. The cameraman for the This Is It rehearsals was editing footage at his home office for a promotional clip about the backup singers. He called his boss, AEG’s Paul Gongaware, and asked whether he should continue working.
“Grab your camera,” Gongaware told him, “and come in.” After Kenny Ortega composed himself, he invited dancers and crew into his Staples Center dressing room, lit candles and encouraged everybody to recall favorite moments with Michael. Patterson showed up and joined Sandrine Orabona, his colleague, in filming everything until he went home around seven
P.M.

The next day, Gongaware called Patterson again.
Load up all your drives,
he said,
and come over Monday.
Patterson had 120 to 140 hours of rehearsal footage, between what he and Orabona had shot. He and a film-editor friend, Brandon Key, reported to AEG headquarters Monday in downtown LA and began to edit the raw footage. AEG posted guards outside the editors’ small rooms. Gongaware, Patterson, and Key were the only people allowed inside. To maximize security and avoid leaks, they had no Internet connection. “By the end of that week, Paul and Kenny were blown away with what we had,” Patterson says. “So Paul put the word out to the studios.”

After a bidding war among Hollywood studios, Sony Pictures bought the footage for $60 million. Soon new guards, this time with
pistols on their hips, were sitting outside each of the rooms twenty-four hours a day. Ortega signed on as the film’s director and added one of his own film editors, Don Brochu, to the team. For three weeks, Patterson, Key, and Brochu waited for lawyers and courts to hash out the details of
MJ’s estate and the terms of the contract. After Ortega took a short vacation, the editors put together a two-and-a-half-hour version of the movie. Patterson favored an early version of the opening scene, with the This Is It dancers and musicians reacting emotionally to MJ’s death on the evening of June 25. It ended with a poignant quote from a crew member as he watched the stage coming down:
“It’s like the greatest show that never was.” Amy Pascal, cochair of Sony Pictures, loved that cut. In his grief, Ortega killed it. He didn’t want MJ’s kids watching the movie and reliving the tragedy. He might have made other drastic cuts, too, but Pascal pushed him. “I was traumatized and going through a lot of grief at the time,” Ortega said. “Basically, she said, ‘You need to step out of your own way. You need to find objectivity or don’t do it.’ ” Still, Ortega insisted on no sad death stuff whatsoever, and Patterson and the rest of the editing team had to use a different opening about the dancers’ lives. The editing team worked in secrecy twelve to fourteen hours a day, taking off only MJ’s birthday in August.

The deal was to split the proceeds according to AEG’s original 90–10 split with Michael for the shows—
90 percent for the estate and 10 percent for AEG.
Michael Jackson’s This Is It
seemed desperate, like a novelty, when Sony Pictures first announced it. Rehearsal footage of the notorious perfectionist Michael Jackson? But the film turned out to contain a certain magic that served as MJ’s swan song, something grieving fans could latch on to the way Kurt Cobain fans binged on Nirvana’s
MTV Unplugged
in the early nineties. Some found it ghoulish.
“No one can ever watch ‘This Is It’ again, with any sense of joy,” Michael’s friend and makeup artist Karen Faye would tweet. “It WAS made with Michael’s blood.” The film grossed
$200 million.

For Michael Jackson’s estate, the movie was just the beginning of a path from steep debt to immense profitability. The next step was to sign a deal with Sony Music for ten albums through 2017 in exchange for $250 million in advance payments, plus a high royalty rate for song and album sales. The estate most likely came out ahead, as iTunes-style downloads, then free streaming services such as Spotify and YouTube, began to obliterate old-school record sales and cut into the Sony record label’s profits.

Not counting the
This Is It
soundtrack and an
Off the Wall
anniversary compilation, the first estate-approved Sony release was the
Michael
album, which came out in 2010, an attempt to pull together the unreleased album MJ had been working on for a decade. It was a strange hodgepodge of an album, a combination of old, forgotten songs and newer stuff Michael had intended to release during his comeback.
Michael
drew from roughly the period when MJ had lived in exile, in Vegas, LA, and Bahrain. “Hold My Hand,” the up-tempo first single, came from Akon, who had recorded dozens of tracks with Jackson in Vegas. “Best of Joy” was a ten-year-old ballad full of happy bromides—“I am forever,” “we will always be friends”—that Michael recorded with longtime collaborator Michael Durham Prince at the Bel Air Hotel in 2008. “The Way You Love Me,” which had floated around under the unexplained code name “Hanson,” contained
eleven different vocal lines. “Hollywood Tonight,” a fast-paced dance track with a distinctive bass line, was originally conceived for
Invincible
. Sony enlisted longtime MJ producer Teddy Riley to finish most of the tracks; he wound up treating Michael’s original vocals with pitch-correction software called Melodyne. But once the album came out, numerous MJ collaborators ripped it as unbefitting of the King of Pop’s perfectionism—will.i.am said he refused to release his own unfinished songs and called the album “fucking disrespectful.” Quincy Jones added,
“It should have all stayed in the vault.”

The most mysterious of the new tracks were the “Cascio
recordings”—“Breaking News,” “Monster,” and “Keep Your Head Up.” It was Frank
DiLeo who brought the songs to the attention of Sony Entertainment’s John Doelp. Michael’s longtime manager claimed to have spoken to MJ in 2007, while he was working on new songs with producer Eddie “Angel” Cascio (brother of Michael’s friend Frank) at the studio he ran at his parents’ home in New Jersey. The Cascio tracks prompted an angry public mystery. Immediately after Sony released “Breaking News” online to tease the upcoming album, Michael’s nephew TJ Jackson tweeted the vocals were clearly those of an impersonator.
“I’m disgusted, disappointed and saddened,” he wrote. Jackson’s estate had anticipated this accusation, hiring a forensic musicologist to study the tracks and bringing in six producers and engineers who’d worked extensively with Jackson’s vocals over the years for an a cappella listening session. All, including Bruce Swedien, Michael Prince, and Teddy Riley, insisted the vocals belonged to Jackson. But some fans remain obsessively unconvinced.
Damien Shields, an Australian MJ fan and self-published author, has conducted numerous interviews to investigate what he considers a conspiracy to hide the truth about these recordings. He insists MJ wasn’t even in New Jersey at the time.

Michael
was not a blockbuster—it sold
405,000 copies in the US by the end of 2010, making it the year’s seventy-fourth-best-selling album, not a detail MJ would have written on his mirror. The next album of posthumous material, 2014’s
XScape
, opened with a splash—a
Thriller
throwback called “Love Never Felt So Good,” with a newly recorded Justin Timberlake duet vocal. The release seemed poised to dominate the pop charts, especially after the Billboard Music Awards promoted a 3-D performance that brought the King of Pop back to life during a performance of
Dangerous
-era “Slave to the Rhythm.” (Almost every report called the trick a “hologram,” but it was actually an illusion based on a 150-year-old technique known as Pepper’s ghost, in which projectors bounce an image onto a screen tilted at a 45-degree angle.)
XScape
made its debut at No. 2, behind the Black Keys, then
quickly dropped off the US charts, although reps for MJ’s estate noted it sold more than
2.3 million copies worldwide.

Branca and McClain were making shrewd deals. They trimmed Michael’s $75 million loan against the Mijac song-publishing catalog from 17 percent to 6 percent, then paid it in full by the end of 2011. Michael’s investment in the Sony ATV catalog continued to provide crucial revenue, and Branca and McClain slashed the loan against that investment, too, from 5.8 percent to 2.9 percent. The catalog began to pay out $25 million per year. By the end of 2010, the estate had racked up
$300 million. Not everybody agreed with the way the estate handled its finances. Although Branca and McClain had officially valued the estate at $7 million, the
Internal Revenue Service in 2013 set the number at closer to $1.125 billion, demanding $702 million in unpaid taxes and fees. The discrepancies, according to documents filed in US Tax Court, ranged from a 2001 Bentley Arnage (which the estate said was worth $91,600, while the IRS estimated $250,000) to the rights to MJ’s image and likeness (estate $2,105, IRS $434,264,000). As of this writing, negotiations are pending. Finally, Branca agreed to take a $500,000 salary in 2014, climbing to $1 million in 2015, as an adviser to the board of Michael’s publishing catalog Sony ATV—while he served on the same board. In an e-mail leaked online in 2015, Sony executive Nicole Seligman wondered about a conflict of interest: “The Board is awkward because he is on it, so why pay him to advise it?”

The estate succeeded in helping Michael Jackson to once again became one of the world’s biggest music stars—his disembodied voice anchored Cirque du Soleil’s Immortal World Tour, which since 2011 has earned more than $325 million, through nearly three million ticket sales. Cirque followed up in spring 2013 with
Michael Jackson ONE
, a residency in Las Vegas’s Mandalay Bay casino. Like every Cirque show, it’s packed with acrobats bouncing spectacularly on trampolines and tightropes, dancers, tumblers wearing elaborate costumes, and thumping music. The show reinterprets MJ’s music in surreal ways,
with dancers attacking a central electronic robot system made of wires and flashing lights. The climax is a ghostly, gold-tinted,
Dangerous
-era MJ dancing to “Man in the Mirror,” breaking apart into tiny lights and reappearing elsewhere onstage. The show covers Michael’s entire career, moving beyond what he had envisioned for This Is It, hauling out obscurities such as MJ’s solo Motown hit “Never Can Say Goodbye” and the solemn spoken-word portions of “Will You Be There.”

Posthumous MJ has sold fifty million albums as of this writing. He was in $500 million worth of debt when he died; the estate paid it off in 2012.
Michael
and
XScape
had their problems, but tons of vintage Jackson material, including rare tracks Michael had kept locked in the vaults, has come out over the last five years—the
Bad
twenty-fifth-anniversary reissue contained unreleased gems such as “Al Capone” and “Streetwalker,” while a 162-song, iTunes-only compilation from 2013 included a fantastic live 1981 version of “Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough,” among other things.
“His passing—unfortunately—allowed a separation from those things that the tabloids dwelled on endlessly,” says Matt Forger, Michael’s longtime engineer. “People were able to take a little bit more objective look at what his accomplishments were.”