After you pick up your jaw and affix it back into place, read on. For reasons that have to be as infuriating and asinine as having George Bush moderate an economic workshop, several major Hollywood studios are jostling for the rights to the concept, Rolling Stone magazine reports.
Here’s how this virtual sacrilege unfolded. Drool started accumulating around the feet of Hollywood execs when the King of Pop’s postmortem documentary, This is It, shattered box-office records for concert films. This confirmed to execs that there was a bigger market for a dead Michael Jackson than the one who was alive just a few months previously. While Jackson was breathing, he was treated like flesh-eating bacteria.
Hope your in the mood for jokes, because here’s another knee-slapper. The movie based on the sacrosanct “Thriller” video will not be about Michael Jackson at all.
Allow me to break it down: the Thriller movie will take a meta approach, focusing on “folklore” around “Thriller,” looking at Vincent Price, the legendary horror actor who narrated the video, and the town that Price grew up in. This Is It director Kenny Ortega is set to direct the piece and will receive input from genius songwriter Rod Temperton, the man who penned the smash hit “Thriller” as well as “Rock with You” and the title tracks from the Off the Wall album.
Deadline.com reports the film will have a budget of about $50 million, which doesn’t include what will likely be a hefty price to secure the rights to “Thriller” from the Michael Jackson estate. Here’s hoping that the estate peels off several layers of the movie producers’ backsides before they allow Jackson’s creation to be bludgeoned inside some studio.
Here is some good news: Deadline writes that Hollywood vet Ivan Reitman has his eyes on a film based on Jackson’s early years. Good to see that some sanity pierce through the fog of ridiculousness and monetary lust.
It’s also nice to know that, much like on the open plains of the Serengeti when a dead animal dies and gets consumed, that jackals on two feet are finding new and innovative ways to consume all vestiges of fan interest in one of the greatest recording artists of all time.
Is this a great country or what? –terry shropshire
