Spike Lee at Venice for the Bad 25 premiere
Spike Lee , at the Venice film festival presents Bad 25 http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/aug/31/spike-lee-michael-jackson-venice-film-festival?newsfeed=true<br /><br /><br /><br />In the days before establishing himself as the swaggering firebrand of African-American cinema, targeting racial tensions in films such as Malcolm X and Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee nursed an unlikely ambition. He longed to sing ABC on primetime TV, just like his childhood idol.<br /><br />"You could say I grew up with Michael Jackson," the director told journalists at the Venice film festival. "I was born in 1957, he was born in '58. And when I saw the Jackson Five on the Ed Sullivan Show I wanted to be Michael Jackson. I had the Afro, the whole Jackson look. But the singing and dancing – that's where it stopped."<br /><br />Four decades later, Lee pays a belated tribute to his hero on Bad 25 – an exhaustive, track-by-track tour through the recording of Jackson's 1987 album and the world tour that followed. Bad was the record that saw Jackson setting out to redefine his image. The promotional videos cast him in the role of lethal jungle cat, facing down heavyweight hoodlums or tracking leggy vixens down ghetto streets - even though this was not his natural habitat. On finally catching the girl, for instance, the cripplingly shy Jackson couldn't bring himself to kiss her and opted for a chaste embrace instead. Elsewhere, director Martin Scorsese recalls the singer's horror at shooting the flagship Bad video in the projects of Harlem: "He looked around and said, 'Do people really live here?'."<br /><br />Lee described Bad 25 as his "love letter" to Michael Jackson – a chance to accentuate the positive. "There's been a lot of focus on the personal stuff," he said. "I wanted this film to concentrate on the music. It was a chance to dig into his creative process. The film shows that Michael did not just sit on his ass. He was out there watching Bob Fosse, Gene Kelly, James Brown and Fred Astaire. He studied the greats and then made himself greater."<br /><br /><br /><br />http://www.reuters.com/video/2012/08/31/spike-lee-presents-michael-jackson-docum?videoId=237441089&videoChannel=3
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