Andrew Eaton: Michael Jackson biopic

Published on Friday 18 September 2009 16:25

ONE day, surely, there will be a Hollywood biopic of Michael Jackson. Who could resist a story like that?

There will, obviously, be creative conundrums. Who the hell is going to play him, for a start? If it was up to me, I'd cast Johnny Depp as the older Jacko, with Will Smith's son Jaden as the boy Jacko, if only so the irritating wee runt would have to endure a whole year of punishing dance lessons.

Good thing it's not up to me, then. I'm not sure I'd enjoy the hate mail, although admittedly I could just redirect most of it to Darren Aronofsky, who would be directing, having fought off stiff competition from Spike Lee and Oliver Stone.

An alternative to Johnny and Jaden, of course, could be the wowtastic motion-capture technology that James Cameron used to make his new sci-fi epic, Avatar (in which he has somehow managed to make Sigourney Weaver both 20 years younger and blue). If you can do that to Sigourney – or gradually turn Brad Pitt from an old man into a baby in The Tedious, sorry, Curious, Case of Benjamin Button – surely it wouldn't be a stretch to morph one actor's face, over a two-hour movie, from a young black boy into an old white man. They wouldn't even need to learn how to moonwalk. The computer could do it.

Would Michael Jackson recognise – or at least acknowledge as remotely realistic – any biopic version of himself? In the later years of his life, every marketing campaign suggested he preferred living in a fantasy world where he was forever an earth-saving, children-inspiring King of Pop, rather than a slightly creepy, deformed old man. I think he'd approve of This Is It, though, the new film by High School Musical director Kenny Ortega – not the man you hire if you want an insightful portrait of anything resembling reality. "His music reached billions, his dreams inspired the world," goes the breathless trailer, bringing back memories of that mindbogglingly hubristic 1990s PR campaign when Jackson sailed a giant statue of himself down the Thames.

This Is It will be fun to watch, no doubt. The footage of the rehearsals for Jackson's doomed final live show looks genuinely spectacular. How OTT is that stage set? Are those zombies? Is that, crikey, the monolith from 2001? Where was he going with all this? Don't hold out hope for much insight into the man though. We'll need to wait for the biopic for that. Please, please, don't let Ron bloody Howard direct it.