The sidewalk is the thing everybody remembers. Michael steps onto it and each square lights up under his feet, one by one, like the pavement itself knows exactly who he is. It looked like magic. The truth was a lot more hands-on than that.
The director was a young guy named Steve Barron, and he was working with about $50,000. To give you an idea, the “Thriller” video that came along soon after cost somewhere around $2 million. “Billie Jean” was made on pocket change by comparison.
So they couldn’t afford the fancy gear. There were no pressure pads hidden under the sidewalk to sense Michael’s feet and trigger the lights.
What they had instead was people.
Watch the sidewalk light up, one square at a time
Keep your eyes on his feet and those glowing stones. Every single one of them was being switched on by hand, by electricians crouched just out of frame, timing each flip to his steps.
Barron even had to walk Michael through it beforehand and show him which stones would light up and when, so the two of them could stay in sync on the day.
Then came the part that tells you everything about Michael Jackson.
Barron offered to take it slow. “We can rehearse it a few times,” he said. He figured a tricky shot like this, with grown men flipping switches by hand, would need plenty of practice first.
Michael wasn’t interested in rehearsing. “No, no, let’s just shoot it,” he said.
And they did. Michael had been working on that dance alone in front of a mirror for weeks, refusing to show a soul until the cameras finally rolled. So Barron had left open space in the video and trusted that whatever Michael did would fill it.
When the take was done, the director could barely speak. “It was just… wow. Wow!” Barron said. He even said the little eyepiece on his camera “literally steamed up” while he watched it happen.
It all came together in that one take, on a homemade light-up sidewalk, for a dance nobody had seen coming.
So press play and watch it the way Barron did. A whole room full of people were holding their breath and flipping switches by hand, just to keep up with a man who only needed one try.