Revisionist History - Bubbles with Isaac Adamson | Development Hell

Episode Date: March 7, 2024

This is the story behind a biopic about a chimpanzee named Bubbles, sidekick to the King of Pop. Malcolm talks with the writer, Isaac Adamson, about the project’s rise and fall. Netflix optioned the script, a director was attached, and then… everything fell apart. In the episode, Isaac reads from his 2015 Black List winning script, and he and Malcolm consider whether now is the time for “Bubbles.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. Before we do any talking, I just want you, can you just read the opening scene? Exterior, apepe Sanctuary, day. Bubbles, a grizzled, muscular, 33-year-old chimpanzee lazily knuckle walks across the floor of a large, domed enclosure nestled in a verdant Florida woodland. Superimposition, Center for Great Apes, Wachula, Florida, present day. There are many kinds of kingdoms in this world, and many kinds of kings. Bubbles scoops up a hunk of sweet potato from the ground.

I have known more than most, though all here have served outside these castle walls in some capacity. He comes upon a cluster of three chimps and acknowledges them. Butch and Chipper served the Ringling brothers, as did Petunia. Moving along, he passes two other chimps. Ellie and her friend Kodua were both in a Super Bowl commercial. A third chimp runs over, whacks Ellie on the head, and then runs off. That's Jonah. He starred in a Planet of the Apes film. Unfortunately, it was the one people didn't enjoy. Bubbles effortlessly ascends a wooden jungle gym and then sits perched on top of it, overlooking his domain, munching his sweet potato.

Now this is their kingdom, and I am their king. But it was not always so. I was once heir to the greatest kingdom on earth. One ruled by a king like none before him. But every kingdom, great or small, has its boundaries, its walls. Every kingdom is itself a kind of cage. I have, in my life, become a student of cages. Welcome to episode three of Development Hell, our series about the Hollywood that never was. I heard about this script from Franklin Leonard, who runs something called The Blacklist. It's a Hollywood institution that polls movie executives every year, asking them to name their most liked unproduced screenplays. The

project we're going to talk about today hit number one on The Blacklist. It was called simply Bubbles, a story told through the eyes of the most unreliable of all unreliable narrators, a chimpanzee who rose as high as a chimp can rise and then fell. And the entire town, the entire community of development executives, studio honchos, producers, everyone in Hollywood agreed that this was the best thing they had read. But do you know when Bubbles hit number one on the blacklist? 2015. Nine years ago. Hollywood decided as a group that a story about a chimp called Bubbles

was the absolute best script of 2015. And yet, in the decades since, Hollywood has decided that they did not want to make a movie told through the eyes of a chimp called Bubbles. Why? This is why all of us at Revisionist History decided the world needed Development Hell. A series devoted entirely to the stories that Hollywood loves, but will not share with the rest of us.

So I called up the creator of Bubbles, Isaac Adamson, screenwriter, novelist, thwarted chronicler of the inner lives of large primates. You may hear in Isaac's voice a certain resignation about the fate of his screenplay. But that's not how I feel. I read Bubbles and I thought, I have to do something. First they came for the chimpanzees and I did not speak out because I was not a chimpanzee. You know how that ends. So here we have a middle-aged chimp who is clearly in some kind of retirement, has been pastured out to this sanctuary in Orlando.

But he speaks in this grandiose, formal manner about this life. Tell me, give me a little more in your own words about the character of this, of Bubbles, this majestic aging chimp. Yeah, well, I think of Bubbles kind of as a would-be king in exile. You know, he's had this amazing, adventurous life and now he's kind of been, he's been removed from. And now he's sort of biding his time

away from the life that he thought he was going to have and from the kingdom that he felt that he was going to inherit. He's a tragic figure. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. But he has, and what's hilarious, this is a comedy.

Let's be clear. Yeah, at its core. At its core, yes, it has core. It's many other things as well, but it this is a comedy. Let's be clear. Yeah, at its core. At its core, yes, at its core. It's many other things as well, but it's fundamentally a comedy. I must say, parenthetically, Isaac, that I love this script so much. You know how in your world, in Hollywood, it's always X meets Y? A movie is always described as X meets Y. You know what this is?

Right. You probably, I'm sure you've thought, this script is Remains of the Day meets Puff the Magic Dragon. I actually had never thought of it that way. That's one I hadn't heard before either. But you see, you know what I'm getting at. Yeah, definitely I get it.

That makes sense. So let's explain. Bulb was a real chimp. Yeah, correct. He is a real chimp. He's still alive and living at this ape sanctuary in Florida. And he is famous. He's probably one of the most famous chimps of our generation. Yeah, I would think so, for sure. I mean, he's up there with like cheetah from previous generations i suppose oh

cheetah you mean like a tarzan psychic in those tarzan movies and tv shows um so bubbles is on cheetah's level he's famous uh he is famous because he was michael jackson's chimpanzee during the height of jackson's fame yeah And he was more than a kind of pet. He was like Michael Jackson's companion. He was. When Michael Jackson went on tour, he took him all over the world. He tried to take him to Europe.

He had some trouble getting him into the country because of the animal quarantine laws. But he did. He took him to Japan. He took him famously to a meeting with the mayor quarantine laws. But he did, he took him to Japan. He took him famously to a meeting with the mayor of Osaka. So you had this idea of doing a movie about Michael Jackson,

seen through the eyes of his chimp bubbles. Yeah, I guess the genesis of it happened a long time before I actually sat down to write the script. You know, it was right around the time Michael Jackson died. I guess the genesis of it happened a long time before I actually sat down to write the script. It was right around the time Michael Jackson died. And there were all sorts of articles about every aspect of his life. And I happened across something in People or one of those magazines that you kind of flip through at the dentist's office.

And it was just a little blurb about whatever happened to Bubbles? Remember Michael Jackson's chimpanzee? And I thought, oh, that's kind of interesting because I sort of remembered Bubbles being around and everything. And then a couple of years later, there was a book that was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in the UK called Me Cheetah. And I thought it was like the Tarzan story told from Cheetah's perspective that it turns out I was totally wrong. I didn't actually read the book. I just read about it. I'm like, oh, that's an interesting idea. Yeah. So at a certain point, I just decided to try to write a Michael Jackson story told from the perspective of this chimpanzee. But it was really important to me to make the chimpanzee the lead character, though, the real protagonist, not just have it be he's kind of a fly on the wall witnessing all this crazy stuff going on.

And how did you come to give Bubbles the persona that he has? I mean, there's a million directions you could go with a chimp. If we're going to live inside the mind of a chimp, the chimp could be a rascal. He could be a partier. He could be an immature adolescent. I mean, there's a million chimps, and you chose this kind of formal, self-serious, grandiose kind of character to be. Where did that notion come from? Well, there was a couple of things really, because yeah, although this is a comedy, I did see it as a tragedy from Bubba's perspective.

He sort of has this notion that Michael Jackson is a real king, like a monarch. And chimpanzees are very hierarchical animals. There's definitely a pecking order there. Once I sort of had this idea of it's almost a Shakespearean tragedy about a king and his son, the would-be king, then I started thinking, well, it'd be really funny if Bubbles spoke in this kind of pseudo-Shakespearean language, just to elevate it a little bit. Yeah. So that's kind of where a lot of that came from, yeah. Yeah.

But it gives him an enormous amount of dignity. If he was a, this is one of the first things that struck me about this. I was like, why am I, why do I feel Bubbles' pain? Because he eventually will go through a great deal of pain. I was asking myself, why do I feel it so keenly? And I realized it's because he has this very precious dignity, which he's going to enormous lengths to preserve. And if he was just the stereotypical chimp who's just out to eat bananas and jump around, then there's no stakes if he's humiliated. But in this case, there's enormous, I mean, his pride, Bubbles,

Bubbles has this enormous amount of pride in his position and his status and his accomplishments. And it's just deeply hilarious. Yeah, I think, you know, it would have been a fun to just the visual juxtaposition of this chimpanzee, which I think we all associate with that kind of, you know, wacky hijinks and slapstick and weapon at head and, you know, blowing raspberries and all those things we've seen in all kinds of movies and TV shows and commercials and even nature documentaries. But then, you know, having that sort of goofy, funny exterior aspect to it,

but there's really sort of deep kind of sad interior thing going on at the same time. I thought that was an interesting juxtaposition. Yeah. And he's a nun. He doesn't really, he misunderstands who Michael Jackson is. So when he, when Michael Jackson is referred to as the king of pop, Bubbles thinks that means he is the king, actually the king of pop. And not only that, he consistently misunderstands

all these things that we understand about Michael Jackson. I'm wondering if you could read, there's that incredibly lovely scene where he's talking about the first time he discusses Michael Jackson's cosmetic surgery. Can you, can you, there's a number of times where he does, but I'm wondering whether you can find that section. I've forgotten what page it's on. Oh, here we are. 13. Interior, Havenhurst Mansion, Michael's bathroom, night.

Michael looks at the man in the mirror, unhappily inspecting his face for a moment before picking up a bottle of porcelain skin bleaching cream. Bubbles sits on the stool next to him, watching as Michael rubs the cream into his face. Before venturing forth to the battlefield, he would don war paint that turned his face a spectral, phantasmic shade meant to strike fear into the heart of his enemies. Later, Michael faces the mirror again. A bandage covers his nose. Often, he would return from these battles with bandages covering wounds received in combat. Michael peels the bandage away to reveal a noticeably narrowed nose. But he had remarkable powers of self-healing, each time recovering from

such injuries without so much as a scar. He's such a hilariously unreliable narrator about his king. That's like half the fun of this. That's why, you know, when I said it's half Remains of the Day, Remains of the Day is a novel about a butler to an English lord who's sympathetic to the Nazis in the years before the Second World War. And the butler thinks that his master is one of the great statesmen of his day instead of just being a groveling neo-Nazi. That's a tragic novel. But the whole thing is the butler never understands who his master is.

But this is the same thing. Bubbles is like the butler it remains the day he just doesn't he never ever cottons on to the kind of um hollowness in Michael Jackson I guess yeah I think you know because he is a chimpanzee and he does he misinterprets a lot of what he sees I think it sort of allows him to retain an innocence too that you know yeah a quote-unquote normal person that was seeing some of the things that Bubbles was exposed to, you know, wouldn't come to the same conclusions

that Bubbles does for sure. But Bubbles does, there are certain things he, he has a lot in this, in this screenplay about Joe, Michael Jackson's tyrannical father. And Bubbles does understand that there is something deeply kind of corrosive and tragic about that relationship. Yeah, it's true. I mean, he does, I think one thing that he's good at sensing

is sort of power dynamics. And he can kind of understand that, yeah, Michael's maybe the king, but here's this other figure who is unkind to him, but clearly has power over him, you know, in some sense. Mm-hmm. You have an enormous amount of fun in the script with populating it with every single pop culture person of the moment. In fact, I lost track. I was keeping track of all of the cameos. We get Elizabeth Taylor. We get lots of Quincy Jones.

We get Bon Jovi in a hilarious scene when Bon Jovi basically co-opt bubbles for a crazy night on the town. LaToya, obviously. Corey Feldman, Prince. Prince in a memorable scene. When we see Prince encounter Michael Jackson through Bubbles' eyes, Bubbles tries to make sense of the... I mean, this part of the script sounds like you must...

I pictured you laughing out loud as you were writing these scenes. Oh, yeah, definitely. Pretty much every scene, there was something that just made me giggle. And even before I was writing it, when I was just researching it and coming upon all these stories. I mean, Bon Jovi tells that story on a clip, I think it's on YouTube, about how when he was in Osaka, yeah, he basically, they gave him bubbles for the night and they just had a big hotel party. And the Prince story, that's another one that was based on,

you know, a true thing that happened. I mean, Michael Jackson being the massive figure he was at that time, he did interact with pretty much everybody. He was everybody, you know, in pop culture during that period. What's also interesting is that there's things happening inside Bubbles, which you made up yourself. Everything that happens outside, it seems like, so basically we're covering Michael Jackson's life

when he's writing and touring for Bad. Is it Bad? Was the album called Bad? Yeah, it was Bad. Yeah, yeah. You're just fishing through all of the true accounts of that era and taking out stories. Basically. Yeah. There there's other stories that I've heard, you know, since, since the script got out and I talked to so many people about it and everybody was sharing their Michael Jackson stories and rumors and all kinds. I've heard a lot of other just

kind of wild stories since then, you Madonna and Michael Jackson and some involving Bubbles and people that saw him when he was at Neverland. Yeah, I've heard a couple where Bubbles was probably not as well-behaved as he generally is in the script. Yeah, yeah. Well, that goes without saying. We have to give him, if we're going to give him some dignity, he can't be throwing his feces at the wall every five minutes.

Right. Yeah. Of course, there are all kinds of things about Michael Jackson's story that are not funny. When we come back, Isaac hits a roadblock

as he tries to get the Bubbles movie made. We're back. Michael Jackson dies in 2009, but Bubbles is still alive. And nearly six years later, Isaac Adamson writes the biopic we're talking about, the story of the King of Pop from the point of view of his pet chimpanzee. He's thinking of using stop-motion animation to tell the story, for obvious reasons. Hollywood is used to dealing with prima donnas, but a chimp as a star of a movie would be on a whole other level. And Isaac isn't ignoring the pedophilia allegations against Michael Jackson.

The Leaving Neverland documentary that exposed Jackson's behavior isn't out yet, but there's been investigations in the 1990s that have become headline news. So around 2015, Isaac takes his admittedly unusual project and starts shopping it. And studios like it. In 2017, Netflix bought the project.

And Isaac entered development hell. You know, when Netflix bought the project, I had to do a pretty lengthy annotation for them citing anything in the script I had to basically cite a source for. Yeah. Just to get clearance from their legal department. And we ended up, you know, in the latest versions of the script, some of the names changed in certain cases or a few characters kind of got squashed down into one character. Who did you lose in the legal review? Well, the biggest change had to do

with a lot of the stuff related to legal charges that Michael Jackson faced. And we just changed some of the names there because there were a few things that were included in the script that were a little bit... There wasn't a whole lot of proof or the only stories about it were like disreputable British tabloids and stuff like that.

Yeah. So this brings up this crucial thing, which is what begins as this kind of strange, kind of lighthearted romp takes a dark turn in the second act. And we actually get into Michael's well-known allegations around Michael Jackson's pedophilia, only this time we're seeing it through the eyes of a kind of jilted,

of our jilted chimp, whose place of prominence next to Michael has been, he's been supplanted by a young boy. Yeah. I think Bubbles- Isaac, this is like, it gets heavy. It does. Yeah, it does. I mean, it's a heavy kind of story.

I feel like the Michael Jackson story is a heavy story. And Bubba's story within that story is kind of a heavy story. But yeah, I think he views these kids at first as just sort of these annoying sort of interlopers that are taking Michael's attention away from him. And then he sees them kind of as rivals and even comes to fear like, well, maybe they're actually part of the succession now and not me. Once again, the one way in which Bubbles sees the world clearly is through the prism of hierarchy.

Right. And so he understands accurately that in Michael Jackson's hierarchy, these boys are now higher up than he is. Correct. They occupy a place in Michael's heart that he does not. And this is, like I said, this is why I said this is Remains of the Day meets Puff the Magic Dragon. It's the Puff story. Then one day it happened.

Jackie Paper came no more. It's the Puff story. Then one day it happened. Jackie Paper came no more. That's what happens to him. He gets pushed aside. And it's like it broke my heart when that happened. Yeah, it's a tough

moment. It's a tough thing for Bubbles. And I think if you talk to the kids who were around Michael Jackson a lot at that time, I think a lot of them went through similar experiences with him where they were his favorite and then someone else came along and they were just sort of jilted out of Neverland.

And I think, you know, in certain cases that hurt these kids a lot, even some of the ones like Corey Feldman, you know, who says that Michael Jackson never touched him or, you know, did anything sexually untoward, but he was just hurt by that whole experience of feeling like they were buddies and he was the favorite. And then one day he's just out. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. What does it do to our understanding of that part of Michael Jackson's life that we're viewing it through the eyes of a chimp? Yeah, that's a good question.

I feel like, you know, in a certain sense, it gives us Bubbles' interpretation and often misinterpretation of these things that he sees. It works almost as a distancing device that allows us to see things through a different viewpoint that wasn't necessarily our own or the way I experienced Michael Jackson when I was a kid growing up in the 80s. I mean, when I was growing up and where I was, it didn't really matter what kind of music you listened to. You liked Michael Jackson. Like if you were into, you know, Iron Maiden and heavy metal and all that stuff, you still like Michael Jackson. If you were listening to Duran Duran and a bunch of new wave, you still like Michael Jackson. Everybody liked Michael Jackson. You know, I remember seeing the thriller video a thousand times on MTV when I was a little kid. So yeah, I was definitely a fan. Yeah. I'm trying to kind of figure out why years later, the kind of psychological dimensions of this story would have been so kind of clear to you, right?

It's sort of weird, like, you know, an entire generation of seventh graders kind of encounter Michael Jackson. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I'm sure a lot of people were jealous of those real-life kids at the time. Oh, my God, you know, Jimmy's getting to go to Neverland, getting to go on vacation with Michael.

And it looked like the greatest life ever. You're just eating ice cream and watching movies and, you know, riding on the Ferris wheel at Michael Jackson's house and all that kind of thing. And just the sort of, you know, the darkness that was actually going on. And even in just the sort of hollowness of those kind of fake friendships too. It was something that I don't think a lot of people certainly knew at the time. Do you think that seeing Michael through Bubbles' eyes makes Michael a more sympathetic character to us or less?

Yeah, that's tough. I mean, I think he probably comes off as a little bit less sympathetic because we are we're told the story from kind of a quote-unquote victim's viewpoint you know because it is it is bubbles telling the story but at the same time bubbles can't really especially in the early you know version of the script can't really bring himself to hate Michael Jackson. He's still, even in the last, you know, that first scene I read and the last scene in the script, he's hoping one day Michael Jackson is going to come again. He's still waiting for Michael to return, you know, so they can rule the world together once more. But yeah, it's tough.

I think maybe different audiences would have different reactions. You know, everybody has a lot of different reactions to Michael Jackson in general. Yeah. What was hard about writing the script? You know, honestly, just from a technical point of view, the hardest thing was keeping Bubbles as the protagonist and not letting Michael take over too much of the script just because he is such a compelling figure. And, you know, finding ways to include the moments that I wanted from Michael Jackson's life, but have Bubbles somehow be there for them, hopefully in more than just like I was saying before, fly-on-the-wall capacity, where he's just sort of reporting what he's seeing.

So to give him stakes in some of those instances, too. But he can't, the thing about Bubbles is he can't grow, can he? If you have an unreliable narrator, as in Remains of the Day, the pathos comes from the fact that the world outside the narrator changes and the narrator is blind to it, right? So if the unreliable narrator becomes reliable at the end, then it kind of ruins it. Am I wrong? Yeah, that's a good question too, especially as it relates to sort of versions of the script that we revised after Leaving Neverland had came out. I think I felt and the producers thought

that we couldn't allow Bubbles to be quite as ambiguous or I guess agnostic about what happened at Neverland because he is telling our movie and then therefore it makes the movie feel like we're agnostic about it and trying to question, well, maybe all those terrible things didn't happen, which was not our intention at all.

So in later versions of the script, and the changes are pretty small, but I think Bubbles does display a clearer understanding of what's going on there. It kind of loses his innocence a little bit. And his parting with Michael Jackson is a little more final. We don't really see him longing to see Michael again in those last moments. I do feel like we kind of needed to write it that way based on everything going on, but it is a good question whether that sort of undermines

a lot of the other things in the script about his unreliable narration and his innocence overall. I think he became a little bit less innocent character in the final versions of it, as I think he became a little bit less innocent character in the final versions of it, as I think everybody became less innocent after Leaving Neverland hit and really had the impact that it did. I don't think people could pretend anymore about Michael Jackson, who really was, at least in certain aspects of his life. Talk a little bit more about Leaving Netherlands, which comes out when? I believe it was January 2019.

It premiered at Sundance. Yeah, and so you wrote your script. First draft was written when? I originally, yeah, the first draft of this script was written in March 2015. And when do you see it? Do you see it right away? I didn't see it right away. It's funny, my manager was in Sundance and he went to the premiere of it

and he called me immediately and he's like, I think we got a problem. Then I saw the film and the thing that I really underestimated was just the power of hearing these guys tell their own stories in their own words. And, you know, they really become real people in a way that they're not when you're just looking at court documents or magazine article or something like that. And you really heard them, you know, expressing the hurt and the pain of the things that they had been through.

Yeah. I mean, that had, that had a huge impact on the project for sure in a negative sense for me, but. When your, when your manager said you had a problem, what did he mean exactly? Did he mean that the script as it presently is doesn't work anymore because it's too ambiguous about Michael Jackson's kind of sinister side? Or does it mean, did he mean that just that you had to rewrite it? I mean, how dire was your manager's kind of perspective? I think the real problem and the thing that he saw coming was that Michael Jackson was just going to be toxic. And I think once Leaving Neverland came out, it was going to be hard to make this sort of whimsical, fun movie

that I think a lot of people thought they were signing up for coming onto this project. I think that's what he meant by we're in trouble, just because almost overnight, just sort of the perception around Michael Jackson changed and nobody wanted anything to do with any Michael Jackson project at that time. So prior to leaving Neverland, was this script on track to be made into a movie?

Yeah, it was. We had Taika Waititi attached to direct it. And there was another director, Mark Gustafson, who was going to work on all the stop motion animation because that's how we had decided to do it. Dan Harmon at Starburns was producing it. So we had all his, his company was on it. Netflix bought the project at Cannes, and I think it was 2017. So yeah, it was, it was kind of ready to go. The two things that killed it were, well,

Taika Waititi had this other movie that he wanted to do kind of in the meantime called Jojo Rabbit. So, yeah, he went off to do that, and then in the meantime, Leaving Neverland came out, and I think we got to a point

and we're pretty deep in pre-production. They'd already hired all the department heads. We had 40 some animators working on it. And it was kind of getting to the point where we needed Tyke to really engage and start making some directorial decisions. And he was just not engaged in the project. We knew something was up.

And finally he just, you know, he made the call to his agent or whatever get me out of this. I can't do this anymore. And that's when it sort of died. Netflix had said, well, you've got two months to find another director

for this. And then three days later they completely changed their minds and went, no, we're killing it. Everybody's fired. Go home. So yeah, that was not a good day. We'll be right back. Do you, do you, did the script revert to you at any point or did they own it? It has recently, yeah. I own it now.

Yeah. Do you think it's dead? I don't know, you know. Things kind of never die. It's funny, people bring it up to me all the time, but we haven't really pursued any serious avenues towards getting it going again. But who knows?

I will say it's pretty obvious to me that Michael Jackson just as a public figure is not, I mean, you know, they're making a Michael Jackson biopic right now. Just yesterday, Usher on the Super Bowl was wearing, you know, like a Michael Jackson glove. I don't think we would have seen that in the immediate wake of leaving Neverland. Yeah. Yeah. and gloves. I don't think we would have seen that in the immediate wake of leaving Neverland. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's funny because I to take a contrary position,

I feel like this is more interesting post-Neverland than pre-Neverland. I mean, it goes from being, if you do this in this movie at a time when we think of Michael as a talented eccentric,

then the movie is fun and whimsical, but there's nothing at stake. It's just another log on the fire of Jackson's celebrity. It's a clever log, and the fire is wonderful, but it's not

deviating in any,but now it's like, now that I know going in that Michael Jackson is this kind of complicated, twisted, deeply problematic figure, then the fact that Bubbles is straining through his chimp eyes to see him clearly and failing is like, it's heart-wrenching. This movie now has kind of, it's got stakes now that it didn't have before. It's like, it's important for us to know what we know about Michael Jackson for this to move us emotionally. And what you're saying, you know, this idea that Michael Jackson is toxic or is more toxic than he used to be, is absolutely right, but this is not a Michael Jackson movie. It's a Bubbles movie.

Yeah. It's a movie about Bubbles, right? A naive underling with this kind of self-deception, powerful self-deception, powerful self-deception, trying to make sense of a world that he has no understanding of. It's like, it's heartbreaking.

Yeah, I mean, to me it is. I don't think anything, what we've learned about Michael Jackson, it's been funny to me because I say we learned it, but everybody kind of knew it anyway. And that's what's been odd about the funny to me because I say we learned it, but everybody kind of knew it anyway. And that's what's been odd about the reaction to me is that there wasn't anything new in these revelations,

but suddenly had been gone through Me Too and all the stuff that came with it. I think we just, as a culture, learn to take a lot of that stuff a lot more seriously and give it the weight that it deserves. And I think that's what sort of changed about the public perception, at least, of Michael Jackson. But for me, I mean, I always kind of believed that the kids were telling the truth.

Bubbles becomes a stand-in for us. We all looked the other way with Michael Jackson for years, right? Because we were in love with his talent and his music. And Bubbles is just representing our own kind of willful blindness. Bubbles just thinks he's the king. And because he's the king, he's not willing to entertain any idea that his monarch might be flawed, at least until the very end. And I think that's like, like I said,

it's such a stronger, better, more powerful movie after that stuff's come out. Yeah, I mean, I would agree. I think what frightens a lot of people, or at least did a few years ago when this was all, when the movie sort of fell apart, is just the sort of moral panic around anything related to pedophilia in our country currently, whether it's stuff like Pizzagate or Elon Musk

just using pedo as a broad insult. I know Netflix had gone through some things too with the controversy surrounding cuties. I just think that it just became, it became a word that, you know, nobody really wanted to be associated with in any form whatsoever. You know, they don't even want it coming out of their mouths

when they're talking about a movie. And I can understand too why if you're, you know, a big name director, you don't want to spend a whole lot of time at con or wherever answering questions about Michael Jackson's pedophilia. I can understand just not wanting to deal with it. But I agree. I think it does make the story a little bit deeper, a little bit more interesting. And I think it does implicate the audience in some interesting ways. I mean, this is, the story of what happens to the script is this kind of, the meta story is about

kind of Hollywood abandoning its position as a kind of cultural authority. I mean, you would think that a medium as powerful as film would feel free to address the most complex of topics and kind of force us to think about them in new ways and confront our own complicity and all that kind of thing. And, you know, I feel at various times in Hollywood's history, film has done that.

There's been these moments when, but like this is a classic example of an opportunity to kind of address that. And the fact that nobody wants to do that breaks my heart. Yeah, I mean, it's possible it could see the light of day, you know, again, sometimes who knows. It's funny because sometimes you can see it you know what's interesting about it the director actors and producers you know the people that are sort of

intimately involved with it um on a creative level but then when you're just talking to marketers or publicists or whoever else like that or or, you know, financial people. It's just another product. Can you, one last thing, Isaac, can you read a little bit of where Bubbles struggles to come to terms with what he is observing at Neverland? Yeah, let me find a good one here.

Okay. I found a good one. Exterior, Neverland, amusement park, day. Bubbles glowers as Michael leads a delegation of kids down a path towards the amusement park. There's a manic quality to Michael's movements. He was as some mad pied piper, determined not to drive the snakes away, but lead them instead to the very heart of his kingdom. Michael laughs a little too brightly as he rides atop the carousel horse

with all his noisy little friends. Bubbles continues. Determined to lower the drawbridge for these pint-sized Trojan horses and let them carry him away in a stampede of frivolity. I knew then that no ordeal would change him. No brush with ignominy, no humiliation, no torture, no trial, no punishment. He had waded so far into a sea of infamy that returning was as tedious as

continuing to the other side, and a troubling notion arose. Was what I had taken for reckless folly masking something darker? My loyalty had found its limit, and I could serve no longer. This episode was produced by Nina Bird Lawrence and Tali Emlin, with Ben Nadaf-Haffrey. Editing by Sarah Nix. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Engineering by Echo Mountain. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. And our special guest voice actor was the old Pushkin friend, Ethan Hirschenfeld.

An extra special thanks to Franklin Leonard at The Blacklist for bringing bubbles to the attention of the world. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.