How Should We Think About Michael Jackson?

The director of Leaving Neverland watched the new Michael Jackson biopic Michael in the same theater where his own documentary had its press premiere six years earlier. Dan Reed found the experience "kinda weird," but not surprising. The crowd-pleasing film, he says, presents Jackson as a "wax work" — a wooden performer whose relationship with children is sanitized into the familiar tropes of a stolen childhood and a love of Peter Pan, with no acknowledgment that Jackson's sex life involved boys as young as seven.

The Script That Never Was

Reed reveals that an early draft of the Michael script was leaked to him, and it tells a very different story. That version was framed around the Jordan Chandler case — the 13-year-old boy who first accused Jackson of sexual abuse in 1993 and received a settlement reportedly worth $25 million. In that draft, the Chandlers were portrayed as frauds and gold diggers, with Jackson as the innocent victim.

The problem? The settlement agreement between Jackson's estate and the Chandler family apparently included a clause preventing the story from being turned into a movie. "They had to axe all of that, reshoot the whole movie practically," Reed says. "They tried to make a film that was like the rebuttal of my documentary and they failed. They couldn't even try to refute the claims because of their illegal settlement."