Stephen King’s strange experience working with Michael Jackson: “He’d tried to write the number on the carpet”
Stephen King has had enough experience with the entertainment industry over the decades that he probably doesn’t get phased very often by bizarre celebrity behaviour. Michael Jackson, on the other hand, took things to a whole new level of strangeness, and King is still processing it.
In 1993, the Carrie author was on the set of the miniseries adaptation of The Stand when someone told him Michael Jackson was on the phone. Having never spoken or expected to speak to the ‘King of Pop’, King was nonplused. Jackson explained that he wanted the writer to create the scariest music video ever made, which he was planning to call Ghosts.
“Stephen, we must do this,” King remembered the pop star saying. “We’re going to shock the world.”
The writer decided to give it a whirl. The concept was about a man with supernatural powers who lives in a castle outside of a town until a mob of angry townspeople descends on the property to try to throw him out of the neighbourhood. The production got underway with direction from King’s friend and the director of The Stand, Mick Garris, but things were strange from the start.
On one occasion, Jackson called King’s wife, Tabitha King, asking for the author’s phone number. She gave it to him. “Michael called back five minutes later, on the verge of tears,” King recounted. “He hadn’t had a pencil, he said, so he’d tried to write the number on the carpet with his finger, and he couldn’t read it.” She gave him the number again, but according to King, the pop star never called.
After three weeks, the production was shut down. King wasn’t quite sure why. Three years later, it started up again as if nothing had happened, though Garris was no longer involved. King said that the final product strayed significantly from what he had written. At 39 minutes long, Ghosts pushes the boundaries of a music video and features the pop star performing three of his songs, ‘2 Bad,’ ‘Is It Scary,’ and ‘Ghosts.’
The film’s visual aesthetic and main character bear a striking resemblance to Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands, which was released in 1990, but the music and dancing have Jackson’s unmistakable flair. Before Pharrell Williams’s 24-hour video for ‘Happy’ was released in 2013, Ghosts was the longest music video ever made.
Despite his bizarre experience working with Jackson and the significant changes that were made to his original artistic vision, King had nothing but admiration for the film, saying that it contains some of the most inspired dancing of Jackson’s career. The film is also, he pointed out, a clear allegory for the star’s life as a supremely talented but troubled musician. When you watch the video, “You’ll also see Jackson’s sadness and almost painful desire to please,” he said. “‘Yes, I am strange,’ his eyes say, ‘But I am doing the best I can, and I want to make you happy. Is that so bad?’”
Nothing, of course, could top the star’s groundbreaking 1983 music video Thriller, and Ghosts doesn’t live up to the cinematic standards of 1987’s Bad, which was directed by Martin Scorsese. But as King said, Jackson’s musical and dancing talent are inescapable, even if the video doesn’t come anywhere close to being the scariest ever made.
