In 1983, Michael Jackson was filming the music video that would change everything. Thriller was about to become the most famous video ever made, and he was already the biggest star on the planet.
Then his parents turned up to watch the shoot. His mother Katherine and his father Joe.
What happened next is small and quiet, and somehow it says more about Michael than almost any story from that whole era. He didn’t want his father on the set. But he couldn’t bring himself to say it to Joe’s face.
Behind the scenes on the Thriller shoot (1983)
So, as the director John Landis has told it over the years, Michael came to him quietly and asked him to have Joe removed from the set. Landis walked over and gently tried. Joe wasn’t interested in going anywhere. In the end, security had to step in to settle it.
Sit with that picture for a second. Here is a 25 year old man directing the most watched video in history, running a huge production, adored by millions of people around the world. And the one thing he simply could not do, the thing he had to hand off to somebody else, was ask his own dad to step out of the room.
Director John Landis on working with Michael
Michael spoke later, in his own soft and careful way, about how frightened he’d been of his father growing up. You don’t have to go anywhere near all of that to feel the weight of this one moment. A grown man, standing at the very top of the world, still shrinking at the sight of his dad in the doorway.
On the surface it’s just a story about asking someone to leave a set. Underneath, it’s quietly one of the saddest things you’ll ever read about him.