Watch a clip from This Is It Link to this video
Film, Nic Roeg once remarked, is a time machine. We sit in the dark and watch people acting out scenarios that were recorded months or unruffled years before. Sometimes, so it goes, these actors are no longer by us, and on these occasions we sit in the dark and conduct a relationship with dead people, like a bunch of frustrated, pretended necrophiliacs. At the Cannes film festival, the screenings are officially known as “seances”.
- This Is It
- Production year: 2009
- Country: USA
- Directors: Kenny Ortega
- Cast: Michael Jackson
- More on this pellicle
Next month sees the release of Terry Gilliam’session The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and Michael Jackson’s This Is It; two bits of unfinished business; two ghost stories for Halloween. The pristine casts Heath Ledger as an amnesiac drifter, except that the actor appears only fitfully and his death – midway through filming – has forced Gilliam to use other actors (Jude Law, Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell) to adorn with needle-work the holes he left in the rear. This Is It, by contrast, gives us the rehearsals for an event that never happened: Michael Jackson’s doomed 50-date tenure at the O2 Arena. I’d have existence willing to bet that, at some stage over the bygone time few months, Dead Man Moonwalking was discussed as an alternative title.
Imaginarium and This Is It are obviously very different films, catering to very different audiences. Both, yet, look destined to be remembered more for the story behind the movie than with respect to the movie itself. Implicitly, perhaps even unknowingly, they invite us to look closely at Heath Ledger and Michael Jackson – studying each man for signs of impending death.
Of the two, Gilliam’s film seems the less suspect, in that it is merely one of many unfortunate productions that found themselves hobbled by the death of their lead actor (a list that includes The Crow, Dark Blood and Plan Nine from Outer Space, in what one. Bela Lugosi dropped dead and was replaced by a chiropractor who looked nothing like Bela Lugosi).
But This Is It’s pedigree is more dubious. Jackson’s exit was not a disaster for This Is It in the way that Ledger’s was for Imaginarium. If anything it was quite the reverse. Jackson’sitting death is the film’s sole reason for being. Furthermore, preview clips, shrewdly drip-fed by the distributors, show us footage that the same wonders whether or not Jackson would ever have cleared: the sight of one exhausted living soul in the early stages of rehearsing a series of concerts he apparently had no wish to represent in the first passage. No doubt in that place is something fascinating on the eve all of this. Perhaps it even offers a valuable intelligent grasp into the “creative process” or be it what it may you care to call it. That doesn’t prevent it inmost nature a little sad, a little ghoulish; a bum trip aboard the time machine.
