May 06, 2003 12:09 PM
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(Updated May 06, 2003 12:26 PM)
I watched this ''show'' Living With Michael Jackson that was a documentary of the eight months journalist Martin Bashir spent with the reclusive pop star Michael Jackson. Since I knew there was also another ''show'' that would be soon aired & one which would be Michael's defense to the betrayal by Martin, I decided to keep my opinion on hold till I could hear/see both sides of the story. A two-hour program of The Michael Jackson Footage: The Interview You Were Never Meant to See, was documented in a tape & shown so that the viewer could arrive at his/her own conclusion about the betrayal of Martin Bashir.
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Who is Martin Bashir? What does he stand to gain with all this? Did he really take advantage of a vulnerable innocent celebrity?
Martin Bashir is an award-winning journalist working for a popular Britain television network and he is best known for conducting a series of exclusive interviews with some of the elusive celebrities, the most famous being late Diana Princess of Wales. As far as I see, there is nothing wrong in the way Martin & his crew portrayed Jackson as they were simply doing 'their job' something, which a hugely famous celebrity like Jackson would already be aware of. I guess this was the reason that Jackson insisted on the interviews being filmed by his own cameraman too [so that he could later get a chance to defend himself]. While watching the Bashir documentary one should keep in mind that this interview was meant to show the other [read: personal] side of MJ & not his performance of which we are all too familiar, all this was recorded with MJ's consent.
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Living with Michael Jackson : the interview that kept me glued to the TV !
As we see Bashir spending weeks with Jackson in his Neverland home in California and accompanying him on trips to Las Vegas, Miami and Berlin, we also notice the change in Bashir's behaviour towards MJ.
In the beginning he seems to be in awe of the star when Bashir witnesses the generosity of Jackson, as he takes him & a group of underprivileged kids on a tour through his Neverland - an amazingly beautiful ranch which includes a zoo and a fairground - where the kids can eat drink & play all they want. At the end of this tour, Martin tells Jackson of how touched he is to see the charitable side of MJ where he is spending millions of dollars only to bring happiness to some unknown little kids. Or when Bashir is with Jackson who is spending 6million dollars on a shopping trip in a Las Vegas mall.
Obviously, as he gets to know MJ closely Bashir is in for a huge surprise especially when during the interviews Jackson admits that he shares his bed with young boys while he slept on the floor calling this a ''beautiful charming thing''. More revelations come when Jackson introduces Bashir to a 12-year-old boy Gavin, his little friend who with Jackson's help fought cancer. The boy said his parents were happy with their friendship. The most disturbing part of this interview was definitely where Jackson attempts to bottle-feed his baby son, while the baby's face is covered with a scarf. Even through the thin cloth one can clearly see the fear/discomfort in the baby's eyes as he struggles to drink some milk. The disgust on Bashir's face was surely not part of any act; it was as genuine as the expression on my face. [Any fan who can ignore this madness & still appreciate MJ, is in denial & being unfair.]
And of course, Bashir was present during the infamous ''baby dangling'' incident in Germany when Jackson held his baby son over a balcony for his fans beneath. ''Thousands of my fans were chanting they wanted to see my child, so I was kind enough to let them see. I was doing something out of innocence.''. In the later interviews Jackson talked about his hard-working childhood, his abusive father, his three children & why he keeps them masked in public, the mother of his third child - a woman he had never met & did not care who she was so long as she was healthy and when Bashir asked him about the multiple plastic surgery, MJ totally denied having more than two operations on his face, saying ''Oh God, lets not talk about this... it's stupid & none of it is true.''
In the end of this interview Bashir said of MJ denying about his plastic surgery: 'I felt he wasn't being entirely honest,' As if we could not see that for ourselves! What we saw was a deeply disturbed man with an obsession with Peter Pan, children, shopping, a man who refuses to grow up!
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The Michael Jackson Footage- The Interview You Were Never Meant to See : The drama continues......
Following the damaging interview, Michael Jackson released his own version of the actual interview; many parts of his interview [mostly where he had praised himself & his love for humanity/kids] had been edited from Bashir's interview & this response was assembled starting from the images of the first day MJ met Bashir to the last interview where MJ was literally bullied into bad mouthing his father. The aim of this video was to show that the journalist had manipulated & misused the gentleness of the singer to obtain certain revelations & that Martin made seriously offensive inferences on the same.
In this video, many close relations of Michael Jackson have testified that Jackson had been cheated & portrayed wrongly in the previous documentary. The one person who spoke the most was his ex-wife Debbie Rowe -mother of Jackson's two children son Prince & daughter Paris- said she handed over the two children to him as ''gift'' & she was not involved in bringing them up. She tearfully explains that Michael is a wonderful father, such that their kids do not need a mother & it is her decision to keep them veiled in order to save the children from being kidnapped. She also insisted that it was her choice to separate herself from MJ & the kids as she found it too hard to cope with the paparazzi & all that came with fame. [I've no comments on her testimony]. It was also shown that Gavin the young boy who recovered from cancer is now facing serious humiliation because of the questions raised by Martin during his interview with MJ. There are also interviews with Jackson's parents, brother, his cameraman & also his make-up girl. All try to convince MJ's innocence but fail miserably.
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My Word.....continued in comments [sorry!] ;)
