Late in 1986, a film crew took over a subway station in Brooklyn. The biggest pop star on Earth was somewhere down in those tunnels, and the man behind the camera had made Taxi Driver.
That star was Michael Jackson. His 1982 album Thriller had become the best-selling record of all time, so everyone was waiting to see what he’d do next.
His answer was an album called Bad. And for the title song, he didn’t want a normal music video.
So he went to Martin Scorsese, the New York director behind gritty street films like Raging Bull. Scorsese brought in the novelist Richard Price, who had just written The Color of Money for him, to write the script.
Filming ran for about six weeks in November and December of 1986. A big chunk of it happened at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn Streets station in Brooklyn, a real stop on the line.
Michael played Darryl, a quiet kid coming home from a fancy private school. He’s back in his old neighborhood, and his old friends aren’t sure he still belongs there.
The leader of that crew is a guy called Mini Max. He was played by Wesley Snipes, a young actor almost nobody knew yet. It was one of his first screen roles, and he gives Darryl a hard stare that makes you nervous for him.
Michael said the idea came from a true story he’d read in a magazine about a bright kid from a poor area who went away to school. Biographers have tied it to Edmund Perry, a Harlem teenager at an elite prep school who was shot by a plainclothes police officer in 1985.
Price’s first draft ended with the boy dying, though that ending never made it into the finished film.
For a long stretch, the movie plays like a small, tense drama shot in black and white. Nobody sings. You just keep waiting for something to snap.
Then Darryl and Mini Max end up face to face on that subway platform, and Michael makes a choice you won’t see coming.
The full film is still up, the long version the way Michael wanted it seen.
Michael Jackson – Bad (Official Video)
Keep an eye on the moment the screen jumps from black and white into color, because that’s when the music finally kicks in.
Michael worked out the dancing with two dancers he trusted, Jeffrey Daniel and Gregg Burge. They borrowed some of the finger-snapping cool of the old movie musical West Side Story and mixed in street moves, plus a moonwalk for good measure.
The film premiered on CBS on August 31, 1987, inside a TV special called Michael Jackson: The Magic Returns. A shorter cut exists too, and plenty of broadcasts trimmed the long one down.
Snipes didn’t stay unknown for long. A few years later, he was starring in New Jack City, and in 1998 he became Blade.
But don’t click away when the song ends. The full version closes with Michael and the crew trading lines back and forth with no band behind them, just their voices bouncing around a Brooklyn subway station.