Dorothy Doesn't Make It to the Storm Cellar

     Michael Jackson, in John Landis's epic 1983 "Thriller" music video, transmogrifies into a werecat.  Such alteration from pop singer to beast mirrors Jackson's changing face as he welcomed plastic surgery, a process coinciding with his withdrawal from the public gaze, making him a reclusive legend, his attempt at a comeback in his final year a guaranteed moneymaker.
     In 1981, 1982, and most of 1983, MTV's music videos were mostly three to five minute presentations.  "Michael Jackson's Thriller," at thirteen minutes and forty-one seconds, was a short film budgeted at half a million dollars, roughly 1.2 million today.  For a music video to cost so much money seemed typical of the excess already displayed by the video's director, John Landis.  In 1982, he directed his segment of the anthology film, Twilight Zone: The Movie.  Actor Vic Morrow and two child actors, Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen, were killed in a spectacular scene lacking proper safety measures and characterized by poor communications between director and crew.  Taking place in Vietnam, the scene, like that war, was too real.  In 1983, Landis brought out a clever and funny comedy, Trading Places, the "Thriller" video, and the sour-tasting Twilight Zone, minus the death scene featuring Morrow and the two children, aged six and seven, working in violation of the law prohibiting child actors from working at night, and also in the proximity of explosions.
     Exploitation of children to make films was not new in 1982.  Judy Garland, when a minor, was the victim of child abuse by studio head Louis B. Mayer.  He didn't hit her or sexually molest her, but he did have her on a cruel diet to keep her weight where he wanted it.  When the other members of cast and crew got to have lunch, Garland didn't.  The phrase "sing for your supper" literally fit Judy Garland's adolescence as she worked for MGM studios, making lots of money for them.
     Like the tyrant Mayer, Michael Jackson's father, Joe, also abused Michael, whipping him, subjecting him to verbal abuse, telling him he had a fat nose.  Was Michael's nose, diminishing over the years, the result of his father's opinion of its natural size?  Was there truly anything wrong with the appearance of his nose when he was a child and young man?  Was young Judy Garland fat?  Do parents often tell youthful people with naturally impressionable minds things that just aren't true, but that sink into psyches not yet strong enough to weigh evidence logically?
     Landis and his pyrotechnics crew thought they knew what they were doing, and they didn't.  Vic Morrow was a hero; he tried to save the lives of those kids as the "make-believe" explosions made the set verge towards lethality, followed by the helicopter finally coming down on them.
     The mistreatment of child actors in Golden Age Hollywood led to laws like requiring filmmakers not to make minors work at night, but even in 1982 that wasn't followed by Landis, one of America's most popular, at the time, directors.  The following year, we saw Twilight Zone: The Movie, the real carnage cut out, and got thrilled by the groundbreaking music video starring the abused child of one of the world's famous stage dads.  Bury the children, the show must go on.

                                                                                 Vic Neptune