You know the move. In “Smooth Criminal,” Michael Jackson and his dancers lean forward, slowly, way past the point where any human should be able to stay standing, and just hang there at an impossible angle. In the music video he could cheat it with wires. On a live stage, with thousands of people watching from every side, wires weren’t going to cut it. So he engineered a solution, and he actually holds a patent on it.
It’s real. US Patent 5,255,452, titled “Method and Means for Creating Anti-Gravity Illusion,” filed in June 1992 and granted in October 1993. The inventors listed are Michael Jackson himself along with two of his longtime costume and design guys, Michael Bush and Dennis Tompkins.
Michael Jackson’s Patent for Anti-Gravity Illusion Boots
The trick is in the shoes and the stage working together. Each shoe has a specially cut slot in the heel. At the right moment in the routine, metal pegs rise up through hidden holes in the stage floor. The dancer slides a foot forward so the peg slips into the slot and locks the heel to the stage. Once that’s locked, the performer can tip the whole body forward and the hitch holds the weight. When it’s over, they straighten up and slide back off the peg, and nobody in the crowd ever sees the hardware.
Michael Jackson’s Anti-Gravity Lean Explained | Inverse
That’s the part people miss about him. Everybody knows he was a once-in-a-century dancer. Fewer people know he was enough of a problem-solver to sit down with a couple of collaborators, work out the mechanics of an illusion, and file it with the patent office. The lean wasn’t magic. It was engineering, invented by the guy doing the dancing.