About five years ago, I heard that Michael Jackson had chosen me
and my dance group Diversity to support him on a huge run of concerts he had planned in London.
It was one of the greatest moments of my life
because Michael Jackson has always been my greatest musical hero.
But then we heard the tragic news.
While he was preparing for his shows here, he died,
following an overdose of prescription drugs.
He was only 50.
So I never got to meet the man who inspired me to dance.
But this is MY tribute to him.
I've come here to California to learn more about Thriller,
the ground-breaking album that sold an incredible 60 million copies worldwide
and turned Michael Jackson into a global superstar.
# THRILLER CHORDS
Michael Jackson released a record-breaking seven Top Ten US hits off this single album...
# Ama-ma-se, ma-ma-sa, ma-ma-coo-sa
# Ama-me-se, ma-ma-sa, ma-ma-coo-sa
..wrote a new chapter in the history of dance...
What we did wasn't respected as a real art form.
All that started with Michael Jackson and Thriller.
..and revolutionised the world of music video.
He really had genius. He was an extraordinary performer.
An ambitious soul singer set out to make the most successful record of all time.
I have lots of dreams and they usually come true.
And in the process, changed the music industry for ever.
I believe Thriller killed the record business.
Even today people are still just following in those glittery footsteps.
I want to find to how Michael Jackson made Thriller
the best-selling album in recording history.
And the price he paid for his unprecedented success.
# Every little swallow, every chick-a-dee
# Every little bird in the tall oak tree
Michael Jackson was the ultimate child star.
By the age of 14, he'd already racked up ten Top Ten hits in the UK.
# Rockin' robin # Tweet, twiddly-dee
# Blow, rockin' robin, cos we're really gonna rock tonight
Everybody, clap your hands!
Then in 1979, he released Off The Wall,
his first solo album as an adult.
And the statement he wanted to make a break from the music of his childhood.
# Wanna rock with you
# All night
# Dance you into sunlight
The album did well. It produced four Top Ten singles
and won a Grammy Award for Best Male R'n'B vocals.
But Michael Jackson felt he'd been snubbed.
He felt Off The Wall deserved much more recognition
and he certainly didn't want to be pigeon-holed as an R'n'B artist.
# Don't stop till you get enough!
So, he set out to make an album that the critics couldn't ignore.
An album that would easily outsell any other record ever released.
An album that would make him the biggest star on the planet.
And that album was Thriller.
# THRILLER INTRO
I've come down to the studio where Thriller was recorded.
I'm here to meet a key member of the team that Michael Jackson put around himself
to make the album that would revolutionise popular music.
Bruce Swedien was the engineer on Thriller and right-hand man of legendary producer Quincy Jones.
Quincy had worked for decades with some of the world's top performers,
but during the recession of the early '80s,
music sales were in steep decline.
The very first day we're in this room,
Michael and I, and Quincy came in and says, "We're here to save the recorded music industry."
So you set out to achieve something and the plan was on such a huge scale
but that never scared Michael. Never.
The bigger the plan the better he liked it.
He wasn't afraid of anything.
Tell me something about the recording.
All the music that we did together he had it in memory.
We also recorded most of it with him in the dark.
So he didn't want anything around him to distract him from the moment.
Not even the lights. Yes.
He never wanted the printed page
to detract from the emotional value of the music.
And so what would he say if something was coming out of these speakers and he really liked it?
He's say, "Oh, man, that's smelly!"
Smelly? He was a Jehovah's Witness.
So he didn't curse.
He wouldn't say, "Oh, that's goddamn good."
He'd say, "That's smelly."
So finally, Quincy just started calling him Smelly.
That was Michael's nickname?
That was Michael's nickname, yeah, Smelly.
Do you miss him? Oh, terribly.
I think about him every day.
It almost makes me cry when I think about it.
He was just uh...one of a kind.
The first single off Thriller, a duet with Paul McCartney,
called The Girl Is Mine, was released in October 1982,
a month ahead of the album.
Nice pop fluff.
By no means a classic single.
Didn't sound like the first of an endless stream of hits.
It sounded like a hit
but it wasn't so great that you thought, "Wow."
# The girl is mine
# The doggone girl is mine
On Thriller there's nine songs and almost every song
is aimed at a particular demographic.
The Girl Is Mine - an obvious way to try to reach out to the soft-rock audience
that otherwise would not have heard Michael Jackson's work.
What Michael Jackson really wanted was to break past the idea
that his music was aimed for a black audience only.
# Sending roses...
If Michael's duet with Paul McCartney was seen as a little lightweight,
the next single off the album was anything but.
# She told me I was...
Billie Jean was written and demo'd by Michael at his home in 1981.
Greg Phillinganes, who played keyboards on this track
and most of the rest of the Thriller album,
remembers hearing the song for the first time.
# It seems that you...
You can just feel the...the power. Yep.
These raw grooves and...
..singing...but he didn't have all the words.
# Billie Jean is not my lover
That's the first time we heard it. I'm like...
This'll work!
# The kid is not my son
What makes that song so powerful?
You got that driving, undeniable bass line.
Yeah. Under a very simple beat.
But when you put that...
There's just nothing else like that.
But Quincy would argue that...
the inspiration for Billie Jean
came from a Donna Summer cover of State Of Independence.
# This state of independence shall be
# This state of independence shall be...
(PLAYS STATE OF INDEPENDENCE BASS LINE)
Now, if you were to slow that down...
Yeah, exactly. ..and put it in a different key,
you might end up with something like this.
(BILLIE JEAN BASS LINE)
Which...
But he listened to everything.
He studied the greats in cinema and music as well as dance.
After Off The Wall, did he make a conscious effort
to make Thriller different? He did.
There's stories of him writing a certain number of millions of sales
and focusing on that daily.
And...there's obviously another level of maturity in writing.
I think he wanted to establish himself as a legitimate cornerstone
of pop music.
That Thriller period turned into a different level of fame.
Basically there was fame and then there was Michael Jackson.
And, so it was unchartered territory.
# She was more like a beauty queen from a movie scene
Music was only part of Michael Jackson's Thriller masterplan.
Now he needed a cutting-edge video to promote his remarkable new single.
Michael's previous videos had been little more than films of him performing.
But for Billie Jean, he wanted something different.
He was impressed by the glossy promo for the Human League's Don't You Want Me?
directed by Steve Barron.
# Don't you want me, baby?
# Don't you want me, oh-oh-oh?
The manager said if you can come up with an idea that suits Michael, that has a similar vibe
and satisfies a feel that matches the song,
then...we'll have you meet him.
He's into Peter Pan and wants it to have some magical element to it
so I talked through it, showed him how his character would walk along the street
and various scenes would transform.
# I am the one
# Gonna dance...
I did ask him what the song was about.
And he said that it wasn't about him.
And that it was about an incident that he'd read about in the newspaper.
He said there was a private detective involved in the article
so I combined the newspaper and the private detective
and gave little hints of the narrative of a story that I didn't really know.
# But the kid is not my son
The manager said, "Michael's been practising in front of the mirror some routines.
Can you keep a little bit in the video somewhere where he can dance?"
# Don't think twice, don't think twice!
So we rolled the playback really loud and Michael burst into life.
# Showed a photo of a baby crying, eyes...
He was engaging with the camera and he was up on his toes.
He was spinning. # ..in the round, baby
And we stopped. There was a silence.
Nobody could say anything.
And then spontaneously, everybody just burst out into this applause.
Billie Jean was a really important moment for Michael Jackson as a dancer.
He was drawing on all of the influences around him
that gave him...the iconic spins,
to the slides and the funk of James Brown.
What was happening was all the street-dance styles,
it was coming up and inspiring Michael Jackson.
The poppers and lockers that started to emerge in the '80s.
But not just that. Going up on his toes,
the hits and the shapes from Bob Fosse - Snake In The Grass.
The famous choreographer pioneered many of the Billie Jean moves
in this sequence from The Little Prince.
Michael Jackson was drawing inspiration from everywhere.
And the first time it came out to the world was the Billie Jean music video.
Michael had a brilliant dance,
a great video and a classic song.
There was only one problem.
It wasn't getting air time on MTV.
MTV was not in the business of playing black artists in the early 1980s.
They imagined their particular demographic was young white males
who listened to rock music and they didn't see Michael Jackson as part of what they did.
# My blood runs cold, my memory has just been sold
# Angel is the centrefold
A lot of people are watching MTV and they're thinking,
"There are almost no black artists."
And so Walter Yetnikoff who's running CBS records
famously says, "I'm going to pull all of the videos from CBS
unless you put on Billie Jean."
# My blood runs cold, my angel is the centrefold
It was partly through that that MTV changed their minds,
played his video in rotation and it broke to a much wider audience than it ever would have.
Billie Jean reached No.1 in Britain and America in March 1983.
But Michael Jackson had still not revealed his trademark dance for the song.
The moonwalk became a Jackson staple,
but this move had been around long before Michael did it.
The first person to perform it on British television
was Jeffrey Daniel of Shalamar.
# My love to you, baby, I surrender
I was just acting out what was in the music
then I waited for the breakdown to come.
So I just took it to that.
# This night you won't forget
That is the back-sliding.
That's what it was known as, created as.
Michael Jackson changed the name to the moonwalk.
Michael wanted that street-dance element in his performances.
And he wanted me to come over and start working with him.
And that's 1980. It wasn't until '83 that he did it publicly
at the Motown 25th anniversary. I was in the audience actually.
Michael Jackson's inspired performance at Motown 25,
and in particular, the stunning public debut of his moonwalk,
has gone down as one of the greatest live musical events in television history.
Some of my people looked at me but the rest of the people were looking there.
I was like, "Wow!"
After that I saw Michael. He was like, "How was it?" I said, "Man, it was amazing."
He said, "Yeah, but it didn't come out right."
I said, "What? It was great."
The moonwalk became the key element of Michael Jackson's live performances of Billie Jean.
Which left Jeffrey Daniel with a bit of a problem.
It only bothered me in the early days
because that's how I dance, right?
So suddenly I go out to a club and a good song comes on
and we're body-popping, you know.
And we're doing that and they're like, "Hey! He's doing Michael Jackson."
I'm like, "OK, well..."
Jeffrey went on to work with Michael on many other occasions,
most notably as a dancer and choreographer on the Bad video.
# You know I'm bad...
Michael made what was known as street-dancing
part of the general industry.
What we did wasn't respected as a real art form
until Michael Jackson comes along and he loves what we do.
He wants it in his videos.
Therefore, I'm the first street-dance choreographer on MTV.
# Who's bad?
The third single from Thriller was yet another change in direction.
Beat It had a really strong rock influence.
So for this single, Michael and producer Quincy Jones brought in rock superstars Toto.
# I bless the rains down in Africa
# Gonna take some time do to the things...
How did you guys get involved in the Thriller album in the first place?
Well, Michael called my house at like eight, nine in the morning.
This is the '80s, man. We didn't go to bed till six in the morning!
So I get this call. "Hi, this is Michael Jackson."
And I'm going, "Fuck off!"
And he calls back again. "This is me."
"If you're Michael Jackson why are you calling me at eight in the morning?!
Who is this?!" I thought it was one of my friends messing with me.
Yeah, yeah. So two or three hours later I get a call from Quincy's office.
"That was really Michael. Call him back."
So I have to call. I get the number. I go,
"Hey, Michael. It's Steve Lukather." And he goes, "Hi."
I go, "Hey, man, I'm really sorry. I thought somebody was messing."
"I get that all the time."
Michael had produced a home demo of the track he wanted the band to play on.
# Beat it, beat it, beat it, beat it
# No-one wants to be defeated
I kind of laughed at the lyrics cos I'm a funny guy.
"Beat it." With my sense of humour, you know where I went with that!
I didn't really get it at first.
I got it right away because Quincy had been asking for something like My Sharona.
# M-M-M-My Sharona
He wanted a real simple straight-ahead rock thing.
And we wound up filling that slot.
# Close enough to look in my eyes, Sharona
Quincy was like, "OK, man, this is rock and Michael crossing over."
I said, "OK." I got out the Marshall stacks and I played the riff.
Yep. And I quadruple-tracked that with the big, huge real heavy sounds
and then I played bass guitar on it as well.
And we sent it to Quincy and it worked. It was great.
But Quincy called and said, "It's too much. It's too rock."
They'll never play it on R'n'B radio.
It had to be right in the middle. He was trying to find that sweet spot,
so rock radio would play it AND pop and R'n'B.
So I used the smaller amps and re-did it.
And that's what you hear on the record.
(GUITAR SOLO)
With the addition of a blistering Eddie Van Halen guitar solo,
Quincy, Michael and Toto had come up with a track that obliterated music boundaries.
Beat It would be the second video off the Thriller album
and Michael Jackson wanted something even more spectacular than Billie Jean.
So he put up $100,000 of his own money
to film this gangland confrontation
with top commercials director Bob Giraldi.
Bob Giraldi had come to Michael's attention with a poignant news promo
about an elderly blind couple holding a block party for their new black and Hispanic neighbours.
BOB: This wasn't the big story of the day but we felt it was an important one.
And that's why it was on Eyewitness News.
Michael saw it and was moved by it
and the rest is history.
# BEAT IT INTRO
Beat It had to do with my growing up with a bunch of tough guys
who thought they were a lot tougher than they really were.
And I wrote a narrative based on the non-violent message of the song.
And based on my experience walking around trying to be tough.
# BEAT IT INTRO
The story revolves around two rival gangs preparing for a rumble
on the mean streets of 1980s Los Angeles.
# They told him don't you ever come around here
# Don't wanna see your face, you better disappear
# The fire's in their eyes and their words are really clear
# So beat it, just beat it
Michael decided that the one missing piece was the authenticity of the gangs.
He knew that I was gonna pick dancers.
We talked about that.
And they're hardly gang members.
No matter how they get wardrobed.
So he decided that he wanted to include two of LA's most notorious gangs -
The Crips and The Bloods. And let's use them in the video.
I thought he was crazy.
He got the police to go along with it.
He got The Crips and The Bloods to go along with it.
Everything was fine for half a day. Then after lunch it got hairy.
As it turned out, one of The Crips starts smacking one of The Bloods.
And there was a little bit of a fight.
# Beat it, just beat it
The police came to me and they said, "Bob, I really have to shut this down.
This gets a little bit scary." I got this superstar over here.
I got these two gangs that hate each other.
You know what's gonna happen next. Let's call it a day.
And I said, "There goes the whole music video."
I said, "You know what? Do me a favour.
Let me try one thing. Just one thing. When it doesn't work we go home."
I said, "Let me play the music."
And we picked it up from Eddie Van Halen's guitar solo.
(GUITAR SOLO)
Peace.
The way they watched those kids dance.
The look on the faces said, "We may be the baddest asses in the world,
but that's something we'll never be able to do."
It just was brilliant.
# Beat it, beat it, beat it
Certainly when Michael came down the stairs and started going into his dance, I had a front-row seat
to watch him really do what he does best.
He could dance his ass off.
The two gang leaders are played by the late Michael Peters,
dressed in white, who choreographed this video after winning a Tony Award for his work on Broadway.
And Vincent Paterson, who went on to collaborate with Michael
throughout much of his career after meeting him for the first time at the auditions.
How would you describe him as a dancer?
The bizarre part was that you're dealing most of the time with this guy who is so quiet,
so shy, who doesn't talk above a whisper.
"Hey, Vince. Everything all right?" "Yeah, Mike, everything's great."
Then the music would come on - BAM!
And it was like - It explodes! It was like an explosion.
You could feel the energy and you got sucked into that energy
and it elevated YOUR performance ability.
It was such a ride.
And something I've never ever experienced with anybody else. Ever.
Vince, tell me about Beat It.
Was Michael involved at that point in the choreography
or did Michael Peters say, "This is how it's gonna be"?
Well, I think Michael Jackson's history was one of being told everything to do.
You know. From his dad, from the way Motown was.
So it was totally Michael Peters' work.
But as we started working a little bit,
he did begin to make some suggestions but not too much on Beat It.
Vincent also appeared as one of the zombies in Michael Jackson's next video - Thriller.
By the time we got around to Thriller, things had changed for Michael Jackson.
I mean, I saw that transition just in one video to the next.
Of being someone who was kind of quiet, not wanting to put too much energy,
too many ideas into the picture.
And by the time we got to Thriller, man, he was like right there.
He was a really major part of it.
Vincent Paterson choreographed several of Michael's later videos
including my own favourite Smooth Criminal.
But things were never quite the same as those early days together.
I felt that with Beat It and Thriller Michael was having the opportunity
to kind of um...be himself and find out who he was as a human being.
Stepping away from the Jackson 5
and beginning to establish his own life.
But it was a little bit sad because when you become that famous that fast,
you never know any more who loves you because you're yourself
or because you're this idol.
With the success of Beat It, Michael Jackson was well on his way
to becoming a global megastar.
He had already scored three Top Ten hits off the Thriller album.
But he'd hardly even started.
The best was yet to come.
# WANNA BE STARTIN' SOMETHIN'
I've come to Los Angeles to find out why Michael Jackson's Thriller
became the best-selling album of all time.
The record's success was built on a series of stunning hit singles.
The fourth to be released in May 1983, was Thriller's opening track -
Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'.
# Ama-ma-se, ma-ma-sa, ma-ma-coo-sa
Backing vocals on the track came from the world-famous Walters Family.
# Ama-ma-se, ma-ma-sa, ma-ma-coo-sa
Whoo! Yay!
Bam! Bam! Bam!
Yes!
Ama-ma-se, ma-ma-sa, ma-ma-coo-sa.
So cool, man.
Thank you, guys, for that. Thank you!
I'm delighted. I love it!
Gets you going. You hear it. When it comes in...
(HUMS RIFF) Yes! Yes!
Yes! Yes!
Yes. What did you think when you first heard the track?
We loved it. Did you love it? You could feel the rhythm in it
and I always related to his dance moves.
And you could see how he would just...come up with that like that.
And it would be something he would be able to perform well to.
With the rhythms and stuff. Of course.
He felt music from the very last hair on his head
to the tip of his toes. Did you see the difference in him as an artist
between Off The Wall and Thriller?
I feel he started to explore different types of music
and the influences were much greater.
I always considered it like if you're gonna cook a certain food
you use certain spices. Exactly.
And if you're gonna make a certain dish that's characteristic to a certain thing
then you use those spices. Right here with one soprano, one alto,
one tenor. And our brother's bass.
And so we have all the four voices. Exactly. I'm a choir.
Mm-hm. Yes, we do.
It's a bit like with me when I dance, depending on what type of music, where I am,
depends how my body moves. Yes!
Simple as that.
One thing that came to my attention, Ashley,
as we're talking about specifically the rhythm and stuff,
was that lyric "you're a vegetable".
"You're a vegetable, people eat off of you."
# You're a vegetable # You're a vegetable
# They hate you # They hate you
# You're a vegetable # You're a vegetable
If you're gonna interpret their ideas for the music
and give it back to 'em, you have to, in some way,
get into their head so you can have that understanding.
And so when we get to that lyric, I'm like, "Hmm...
This is interesting." He sort of went...
Right. It kind of got dark.
Yeah, yeah. You know what I mean?
I'm looking at Mikey, I'm like... "OK, you know what I mean?"
Yeah, yeah. He never had that chance to be a child.
Because we worked with him when he was a child.
We just watched their family grow.
But by then he was so inundated with...different people
that he never had a chance to be...a... ..normal kid.
He couldn't be a normal kid or a normal person.
Because just imagine being in a position where you can't even
walk out of the door of a place and somebody's not...
# My baby's slowly dyin'
As Michael Jackson's fame grew,
his personal life became more difficult.
And in time, more controversial.
But in the summer of '83, he was still riding high.
Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' was the fourth hit single off Thriller.
And all four songs had been written by the singer.
But producer Quincy Jones had also invited a number of other composers
to offer tracks for the album.
Including the main song writer from the American rock band Toto -
David Paich.
David had been working away on these demos,
different grooves, at his home studio where I lived with him.
Quincy was sending a guy over every day to pick up a cassette.
David's band mate Steve Porcaro had been working on a composition of his own for Toto -
Human Nature.
They had just done a quick down-and-dirty mix of Human Nature
to cassette, which wound up being the last cassette we had.
So what I did was took the thing that I'd just recorded,
fast-forwarded it, turned it around, re-labelled it,
so David's two things were on the A side.
And handed it to the guy.
So the next day Quincy was working in his office, I guess.
And he let the tape run.
And all of a sudden, like 20 minutes later...
..Human Nature starts playing.
# Why, why, tell 'em that is human nature
# Why, why, do they do it that way?
What happened next? He called you and said...?
He called David and said, "I love this song why why of yours."
And I said, "That took a while."
David was bombed. He was like, "They don't like my song. They like your song."
So you guys knew about the track at the time but you just didn't...?
We dug the song. We thought maybe it was a little too pop for us.
We were trying to be in a rock band at the time.
The story I like to tell is the band were saying
it wasn't stadium-rock enough. Edit to Michael at the stadium!
AUDIENCE: # Why, why, tell 'em that is human nature
Steve's there like...
Yeah.
"Guess it didn't make the stadium-rock thing."
# They say why, why, tell 'em that it human nature
And another thing I gotta say.
You can't put in words for a song-writer, someone who had something to do with it,
for an artist like that, who's got that much talent.
what they bring to the table when they do one of your tunes. Amazing.
# Why does he do me that way? #
Human Nature was followed two months later in the US by PYT -
Pretty Young Thing.
A funky soul workout written by James Ingram and Quincy Jones.
# I want to love you, PYT, pretty young thing
It was amazing how CBS just thought,
"Oh, OK. Let's put out another one."
And so out comes another one.
And then, "Hey, let's do Human Nature and PYT. Why not?"
And they both got to be Top Ten records.
This was new territory.
No album in history had ever generated six major hit singles in the US.
The important thing that the record companies of America learned was,
every time one of those Michael Jackson tracks was played as a single on the radio,
it was a free commercial for the album.
By autumn of 1983, album sales were finally starting to drop away.
But Michael Jackson had one card left to play.
The release of the album's title track and maybe, more importantly,
its ground-breaking video.
The song was written by Englishman Rod Temperton,
who had worked with Michael on several of his earlier hits,
including Rock With You and Off The Wall.
For the video, Michael brought in Hollywood A-list director John Landis,
after seeing his horror film An American Werewolf In London.
The 1981 hit featured brilliantly-realised
monster transformations, created by seven-times-Oscar-winning make-up designer Rick Baker.
All Michael wanted to do was go through some kind of change on screen.
And become a monster.
So Rick Baker and I went over to his house with a book of monsters.
And he was like..."Euw!"
It was so funny because he'd never seen any monsters.
He'd seen hardly any horror films.
I mean...I think two.
Cos he was too scared.
So I wrote the script, he loved it.
And then we did the budget.
Now, what I didn't know was CBS records were saying,
"Calm down. There's no way we're spending any more money."
So Michael puts me on the phone with Walter Yetnikoff, CBS records.
And to this day I never heard language like that.
I thought the phone would melt.
I mean, he went on and on. It was like...ahhh!
My hair was...!
And I give the phone back to Michael.
And Michael takes it, says, "OK, Walter, I'll talk to you later."
"What did he say?" I said, "He said no."
With the record company unwilling to pay the half-million-dollar budget
for the Thriller video, the project seemed dead in the water.
But John and his team came up with a solution.
They'd produce a Making Of documentary
and sell that to fund the film.
The Making Of Thriller was a unique, behind-the-scenes look at
the most successful pop star in the world.
It became the biggest-selling home video release of all time.
In one of the most fascinating sequences,
Rick Baker is filmed preparing Michael for his transformation into a monster.
John surprised me. I thought I was going to be taking a life cast of Michael that day.
I didn't know there was going to be a camera crew.
I said, "John, come on. Michael is obviously shy.
It always looks horrifying when you show someone getting a life cast taken.
"Do we really need to do this?" "Yes!"
Yes! Now, in hindsight, I'm so thankful they did do the making of Thriller
as it inspired a lot of people to become make-up artists.
Was you involved creatively from the tip-top - what characters were gonna be in the video
and how they were gonna look? Yeah, pretty much.
I really didn't want to do another Werewolf, so to speak.
And I thought it would be cool to do him more feline, like a cat.
And he went for it.
We did it with bladders under his brow and his cheekbones growing.
I think we shot most of the transformation one day at my shop.
With the stuff in the hands and the inserts and all that stuff.
And the whiskers coming out of his head was a half-a-head of Michael
that we made. We punched the hairs through this thing and pulled 'em,
actually pulled 'em in and reverse-printed it so it looked like they were growing out.
That's cool. Tricks. We didn't have computers in those days!
I happen to have brought the teeth that Michael Jackson wore
when he was the cat monster. The actual teeth?
I'm sure there's some of his DNA right in these teeth right here.
Can I have a look? Sure. Just don't drop 'em!
These are... It's a little scary! Yeah. They're sharp too.
I was worried about that. I was afraid - Don't want that biting you.
I was afraid of Michael biting his lip or falling. Yeah.
Obviously he had two characters. He had the cat character
and the zombie. When Michael turned into the zombie...
..it was incredible how much he still looked like Michael
but yet he looked completely different.
How did you go about creating that look? That zombie look.
It was to make more skull-like cheekbones and eye sockets.
But he was up for it.
He really... He really wanted to wear these make-ups.
The Making Of documentary reveals John Landis's skilful direction of Michael Jackson
as he flirts with his screen girlfriend played by former Playboy model Ola Ray.
I just had Ola keep the beat.
She keeps the beat, walking straight.
And I told Mike, "You can never get more than four feet away from her."
Did he freestyle all that? Totally.
Yeah. Completely freestyle. So cool.
And Ola was so crazy about Michael, she was just...
so in love with him, I think she makes it work.
# Under the moonlight
# You see a sight that almost stops your heart
# You try to scream
I met up with Ola at an LA studio
and asked her to recreate that iconic Thriller sequence for me.
OK. Let's talk a little bit about the walking scene.
The famous scene of you and Michael when you've left the movie theatre.
I really enjoyed it cos I got a chance to touch his face
and play with him a little bit.
And John Landis had me walking to the beat of the song.
But I was walking too fast.
I was, like, going like this. Show me the speed of the fast walk.
OK. I want to see this.
Then I wanna see how you did it for the movie.
That's not how you did it in the video.
No. Then John Landis had me slow it down so I did...
Slowed it down.
Yeah. I remember it. Michael was moving along here.
And he was walking around and he was singing.
And you guys were back and forwards. He was playing around me.
And he was going back. I have this big old smile on my face
and loving every minute. It wasn't fake. You were genuinely loving it.
Of course! Who wouldn't?
It's true. I was in love.
I feel so bad. I'm like I don't know who's going to take his place.
Gonna be hard to find a replacement for Michael. It is.
The world's not gonna have a replacement for Michael Jackson.
Who's gonna top that?
The whole thing with Thriller was good, it was fun.
THEN came a problem.
Someone felt it was satanic.
And that the Jehovah's Witnesses could not be involved.
During Thriller, Michael went out to proselytise!
Really? Yeah. Knock-knock.
Can you imagine opening your door and there's Michael Jackson?
Saying, "Do you want to become a Jehovah's Witness?"
I don't know what the spiel is but I do know they disapproved the video.
And Michael called John Branca, his lawyer and said, "It has to be destroyed."
And so I went to Michael who had locked himself in his room.
It was very strange. And basically said,
"Michael, do you think I'm satanic? It's YOU! Are YOU satanic?!
It's fake. It's not real. It's a movie."
And so what we worked out was...
"We'll put a disclaimer on it."
And what's funny about it is people were intrigued by it.
It helped sell the video! It made it more interesting.
Everything Mike did, even though some things were so eccentric,
worked out.
Thriller is the absolute pinnacle of the video era.
Because everybody was waiting for the premiere.
Can you believe this?
People were watching television at a certain time
because a video was going to have its premiere.
That's how important Michael Jackson had become in that short period of time.
Thriller was a watershed moment in terms of what you might call event pop.
You have to remember that in the 1970s,
film had really changed with the rise of blockbusters.
Michael Jackson envisioned Thriller as the equivalent of what Star Wars,
one of the biggest films of all time, an event.
He wanted to do that in the context of music.
And he did it with Thriller.
He IS this new format.
Just as Al Jolson sang... in The Jazz Singer,
Michael Jackson just fits.
And he knew that this video era was for him.
Michael Jackson achieved everything he set out to with Thriller.
The album won a record number of Grammies.
It was well on its way to becoming the best-selling LP of all time.
And he had conquered the new world of music video.
# I want to love you, PYT, pretty young thing
But the story of Thriller doesn't end there.
Three decades on, Michael Jackson's masterpiece
remains one of the most influential records of all time.
I've come to America to find out what made Thriller
the most successful album of all time,
and Michael Jackson the most famous man on the planet.
This was the time when Michael started to establish his own separate identity.
And costume played a key part in that.
So I'm here at the Grammy Museum to check out some of the more iconic outfits from the Thriller era.
The photo on the front of the album is a glossy 1980s classic.
With the singer staring seductively from the cover in a pure white suit.
He looks like a smooth guy. He does.
Tell me a little bit about this suit.
There are so many stories about this suit.
What we know here at the Grammy Museum
is that the suit was custom-designed by Hugo Boss.
For Michael Jackson.
This is Michael Jackson coming out of the whole disco era
and you're seeing the tide of the world changing.
Fashion is changing. And he was saying, "This is my time to shine,
and I'm here to be taken seriously."
And that's what this suit is doing.
The Grammy Museum also holds one of the custom-made Fedoras,
designed by Rick Pallack for Michael Jackson's Billie Jean performances.
Would you like to see the hat? The one he's worn?
The one he's worn. All right, let's do it!
Isn't this pretty cool? That is very cool.
Right. His name's in it.
You can really see like how he would flip the hat.
You hold this and you can see him tipping it.
Tipping it. It feels like it should do that.
It's a prop. And the brim is really...almost like a frisbee.
Like a frisbee! Exactly like a frisbee!
That is so cool. It has so much structure to it.
Not your normal Fedora. Not your normal Fedora.
This is a Michael Jackson Fedora. Yes.
The jewel in the crown of the collection is the jacket from the Thriller video.
So the jacket was designed by Deborah Landis,
and I think she did such a phenomenal job.
It really looks like an M. You see that? For Michael?
Maybe it's my choreographic head but the black V
follows the shape of the dancers in the video.
It was perfect. And that red colour just pops so he stands out
from the rest of the zombies. This jacket was one-off.
There's 100 been made like it
but this was the one that started the craze. This is the one.
So do you believe that Michael Jackson, stylistically,
has influenced other artists? My God, without a question. Yes.
There's Rihanna, Beyonce, hello, with the glove.
Usher. Justin Timberlake. So many different artists.
It's absolutely insane. It's insane.
In 2009, after more than a decade without touring,
Michael Jackson scheduled a series of 50 concerts in London.
This is the final curtain call.
My dance group Diversity were booked to support him.
See you in July.
Michael also got in touch with one of his former choreographers Travis Payne
to work with him again on this show.
I was very happy to know we'd get to pick up where we left off.
And just to hear how happy he was,
to get back out on stage and perform.
Fascinating behind-the-scenes footage of the rehearsal
shows Michael and Travis preparing a re-working
of the Thriller video for the planned stage shows.
What was that time like, being with Michael?
He set such high standards for himself and those around him.
And sweated every detail.
He had days where he was just tired
because of doing so much.
But all of that fed him because he missed being able to create like that.
The London concerts never took place.
On the 25th June 2009, Michael Jackson died following an overdose of prescription drugs.
It was just a complete shock.
To not only be told that he had passed away,
but...in the manner in which he did.
It was just...and continues to be...
utterly devastating.
Obviously he had so much negativity around him.
But just as an artist he would go on to inspire...so many people.
I agree. I think it's awesome to see.
That means they have studied the greatest. Exactly.
That's what Michael did.
He felt to be great you need to study the greats.
Michael Jackson's music is still being performed at venues across the planet.
The girls give it and go...
Here in London, Thriller Live has been running in the West End for over six years.
And then hit it now.
Its creator, Adrian Grant, invited me to sit in on one of their rehearsals.
I sometimes feel that Michael is under-rated as an artist
because of the hype that surrounded him.
And when you strip it down he was a fantastic song-writer, dancer.
And that's what Thriller Live is about.
He's still inspiring people through his work.
All the dancers we have in the show grew up listening to Michael Jackson's music.
And rehearsing and doing their dance school to Michael Jackson's music.
Kids as young as five years old come to watch our show,
who weren't even born when Thriller was created.
And people as old as 80 are out in the aisles dancing
and waving their arms to his music.
# PYT (Pretty Young Thing)
But it's Thriller that everyone knows and they come to see the Thriller song
with the zombies. And songs like Beat It and Billie Jean.
That defined him as the world's greatest entertainer.
Thriller and its seven US hit singles became the benchmark
for the way record companies marketed their major stars.
Big problem. Almost no other artist had as many hit singles on an album
as Michael Jackson did.
So I believe that Michael Jackson's Thriller killed the record business
while of course being great for Michael Jackson.
# Thriller
I think there are some artists who are so radical
that their influence is felt for decades and decades after
the moment in which they first make their major impact.
And so I feel like even today in the 21st century people are still...
just trying to figure out how he did what he did and they're still
following in those glittery footsteps.
In 1987, Michael Jackson gave a rare interview to Australian journalist Molly Meldrum
about Thriller and how he coped with the fan frenzy that followed.
I'd like to sneak into theatres without being noticed sometime.
Um...sometimes there's really nothing you can do about it.
It's the price you have to pay.
Did it flatter you people were trying to do your dance steps?
I always loved watching that. Especially the children.
When they wore all the gear and everything.
And imitating me. I think it's fun.
Did you check up on sales each week?
I pretty much did the album and sat back and watched
cos it was another one of my dreams.
I knew it was gonna do what it did.
I have lots of dreams and they usually come true.
I wanted to find out how my musical hero fulfilled his dream
and made Thriller the most successful album of all time.
It seemed to me this unique combination of rock, pop and R'n'B
attracted a massive audience.
# Just beat it, just beat it
Three ground-breaking videos brought the music to a new market.
# Cos this is Thriller
But most of all, Michael Jackson was a consummate performer
at the height of his powers.
A great singer, songwriter and dancer.
The perfect package.
But was there a price to pay?
He became the most famous man in the world.
And as the rumours became ever more bizarre,
and the tabloids became ever more frenzied,
Michael Jackson retreated into what seemed an odd, isolated
and at times, even sad life.
But his masterpiece, Thriller, still stands as a testament to this brilliant artist.
And still brings pleasure and inspiration to me and many other millions like me.
# Every night she walks right in my dreams
# Since I met her from the start
# I'm so proud I am the only one
# Who is special in her heart
# The girl is mine
subtitles by Deluxe
# The doggone girl is mine
# I know she's mine