THURS 19TH JULY 2007 MJ IN D.C.

The Washington Post

Michael Jackson touring the Smithsonian's National Air and Space and American Indian museums yesterday.

The reclusive pop star (trademark hat, sunglasses, striped pants), his kids (well behaved) and bodyguards arrived before the buildings opened to the public.

At Air and Space, the 45-minute tour was led by 84-year-old Deputy Director Don Lopez, a World War II ace who gave Jackson a similar tour 25 years ago.

The singer lingered over the 1903 Wright Flyer, his kids loved R2-D2 and C-3PO. What's he doing in D.C.? The tourist thing. "He wanted to show them the sights," said rep Raymone Bain, who said Jackson will be in the area for a few days; he's still looking for a summer home, hasn't bought a place yet.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...7071802880.html

TUES JULY 17th 2007 Las Vegas Judge Rules Michael Jackson May Get Belongings Back

Michael Jackson may get his belongings back after a decision was made in court Monday. A judge ruled that the business, Universal Express, was in contempt of court and must return the items.

Universal Express held an auction in May for a collection of Jackson family materials it had previously purchased, but the company held some items back.

Jackson now faces another court date with Universal Express Friday in New Jersey. If the judge rules in favor of Jackson, he will get his belongings back next week.

TUES JULY 16th 2007 Michael Jackson ordered to pay more than $256,000 in legal fees

Michael Jackson has been told to pay more than $256,000 in legal fees to a firm that handled some side issues during his 2005 child molestation trial.
A Superior Court judge signed a judgment Friday that awarded $216,837 along with $39,177 in interest to the Torrance firm of Ayscough & Marar, according to court records.

Jackson's attorney, Marshall Brubacher, agreed in principle to the judgment June 26 when he told the judge that going to trial would be costlier and "we want to stop the hemorrhaging."

The law firm sued the 48-year-old pop star for failing to pay legal fees for preventing the release of some information to the public and to lawyers in civil cases during his 2005 criminal trial in Santa Barbara County. Jackson was eventually acquitted of child molestation charges.

Jackson countersued the law firm but that case was dismissed.

Ayscough & Marar also helped defend Jackson against a lawsuit that claimed the singer owed $1.4 million to former business associate Marc Schaffel.

Last year, a jury awarded Schaffel $900,000 and awarded Jackson $200,000 in a countersuit against Schaffel.

SOURCE : USA TODAY

TUES JULY 10th 2007 Producer Syience Talks Upcoming Project With Michael Jackson

He's not a household name yet, but up and coming producer Syience is getting calls from the biggest names in the business, including Jay-Z and Michael Jackson.

When Flint, MI producer Syience (born Reggie Perry) arrived in New York two years ago he never imagined he'd soon be making beats for Jay-Z's comeback album Kingdom Come. Fortunately fate joined the young musician with Def Jam singer/songwriter Ne-Yo and the rest is history.

"The first time my managers took me to Sony, they were working on Omarion and they said 'we gotta put him and Ne-Yo together.' People knew our sound together would be something unique," Syience told SOHH.

While working on new material the two wrote "Hollywood," a track initially intended for Ne-Yo.

"I remember Ne-Yo coming to the studio like 'Jay-Z wants to use Hollywood for one of his singles,'" Syience recalled. "My first reaction was 'Jay Z out of retirement!' I'm so much a fan, before I could realize that he wanted to use my track I was just excited he was doing another album. Ne-Yo was like 'Did you hear what I said?' I didn't believe it until I actually heard the vocals when I went to track the song out."

After hearing Jay's vocals, Syience made some additional changes to the song, further impressing the Def Jam mogul, who also used the session to dispense some advice.

"Jay came in toward the end of the process like, 'What are you doing?'" basically like, 'the song was already a hit, why are y'all letting him make changes?' They played the track and Jay stopped it where it was breaking down like 'Yo, you really are the truth,'" Syience remembered. "Jay talked to me about a lot of things that probably would happen...just the business, the way it comes so fast and the way things can change, and how it can have you pretty much crazy."

Fans of nearly every music genre can look forward to hearing more from Syience via his music production company Stay Fresh. He is currently working with Alicia Keys, Cee-Lo Green, Keyshia Cole, Chrisette Michele, Daniel Mayweather, Lupe Fiasco, Amy Winehouse and Wynter Gordon.

"Hopefully, I can be on the Gnarl's Barkley project," Syience said, before revealing a reluctance to go into detail. "I hate speaking on things before they happen. I've been a part of a lot of projects and spoke on them and then at the last minute the label will say 'this ain't coming out until next year. We don't even know if we're releasing this album.' So I just wait until the album is ready to drop."

However, Syience did confirm that a new Janet Jackson album is in the works and he's vying to work with the King of Pop as well.

"I'm actually working on music for him now," he said. "I always wanted to be a part of anything he ever did. Nobody really knows what Michael Jackson is going to do. Even the biggest producers and writers are not sure what's going to happen with that, but we are all sitting back and still creating and trying to get on the project. They asked me to work on the project so we're working on it. We're working on Janet Jackson as well. She's coming back. Pretty much everybody is a potential Syience track getter."

SOURCE: http://www.sohh.com/articles/article.php/12036

MON JULY 09th 2007 How Thriller turned into a monster

Twenty five years ago, a Michael Jackson music video transformed the face of pop. Marc Lee meets its director, John Landis

Film director John Landis is as boisterous and garrulous a character as you're likely to meet. An unstoppable raconteur, he has an endless fund of anecdotes ("Let me tell you this joke I heard from Fellini"), and much of his expletive-strewn conversation is shouted, as if he's addressing someone in the next room.

Perhaps it's his irrepressible good humour that accounts for the equanimity with which he reveals the sorry aftermath of Thriller, the groundbreaking video he shot starring the King of Pop, Michael Jackson.

"Listen," he says smiling, "Michael probably owes me $10 million because he's in hock to Sony so deeply. All the monies from the Thriller video, which I own 50 per cent, are collected by Sony. My deal is with Michael's company, and he owes Sony so much that they keep the money. So I will never get the money, and if I want to sue Michael, it's like, 'Get in line.' "

Landis bears no resentment towards Jackson. Indeed, he still has the highest regard for the troubled singer, and they remain friends. Their collaboration on Thriller marked the high point of both their careers.

Although Jackson was only 24 when he released his fourth solo album in 1982, he'd been a star for more than a decade. None of what had gone before, though, could have prepared him for what was about to happen. Thriller changed the course of pop music and catapulted him into global superstardom. It sold more than 50 million copies and spent 37 weeks at number one in the American charts, where it remained for more than two years. All but two of its nine tracks were hit singles.

And it wasn't just the singing. Soon after the LP's release, he perfected his "moonwalk" dance: the worldwide hysteria that ensued was barely containable. Then, as if driven by an obsession to reinvent, he made himself the star of the promo video that would transform the way pop music was marketed.

Jackson had already smashed MTV's extraordinary musical apartheid: Billie Jean (a track from the album) was the first song by a black artist to be played by the channel. But the 14-minute mini-film inspired by Thriller's title track rewrote the rules for the music video, opening up undreamed-of creative possibilities - and, in the process, helping MTV on its way to world domination.

It became the bestselling music video ever, and, a quarter of a century later, it has staked a place in the digital new world, nestling confidently in the iTunes video chart (number two at the time of writing) among tracks by whippersnappers who hadn't even been born when it was shot. It has also been viewed more than three million times since it was added to the YouTube website just nine months ago.

The shoot was rumoured to have cost $1 million. The true figure was half that but still vastly more than the usual budget of $50,000 to $75,000 for a pop video of the period.

Today, Thriller still thrills as much as it did all those years ago, and that is thanks in large measure to its director. For, although the song and Jackson's dance moves are the irresistible ingredients, it was Landis who whipped them into such a satisfying feast.

The young filmmaker was at the peak of his career in Hollywood. He was about to release Trading Places starring Eddie Murphy, having, in the previous four years made Animal House, The Blues Brothers and An American Werewolf in London. And it was after seeing the last of these that Jackson called Landis and said: "I want to turn into a monster. Can I do that?"

The release of the video and the accompanying making-of film marked the point at which, according to Landis, Jackson became "a god".

"It created MTV really," he says. "And it created the whole making-of business. It had a huge impact on the business. And all of it was accidental. All that happened was that Michael called me up after watching American Werewolf.

"So I went to see him with Rick Baker, who had done the special effects make-up on that film, and we took along a big book of monsters for him to look at. He hadn't seen many horror films: he was scared of that stuff.

"After The Blues Brothers, I wanted to do a good musical number with real dancers and shoot it correctly. And I tried to exploit Michael's celebrity to reinvent the theatrical short. That's why it's 14 minutes: it's a two-reeler, the same length as a Laurel and Hardy short or a Bugs Bunny cartoon."

Landis's ambitious script did not go down well at Jackson's record label CBS, who refused to pay for it on the grounds - entirely erroneous - that the album had slipped down the charts and wasn't going to sell many more copies.

So Landis did a deal with the new cable network Showtime, who handed over $300,000 for the video and the making-of feature that Landis would oversee, too. The rest of the budget came from MTV.

The 45-minute Making of Thriller established the genre, anticipating the "extras" that now accompany almost every DVD release. However, at the time, says Landis, "we used to call it 'The Making of Filler'. It turned out very well, but the truth is that it's filled with scenes from American Werewolf because I owned them, and anything else we could find to fill up the time.

"When we found we were still six minutes short, we decided to put in pieces of the video itself. In fact, it's very effective, but at the time I thought, 'This is shameless.' "

When the video hit the small screen, the album went straight back to number one and tripled its sales, while MTV increased its viewership a thousand-fold.

"Michael was terrific to work with," says Landis. "He was in his mid-twenties, but he was like a gifted 10-year-old. He was emotionally damaged but so sweet and so talented."

The purpose of Thriller, in Landis's mind, was "to give Michael some balls". The female presence in Jackson's two previous videos was virtually zero, "so I said I want to get a pretty girl, and I want you to relate to each other sexually. And he went, 'OK.'

"He was agreeable to everything, even when I wrote that line where he says to the girl, 'I'm not like other guys.' I warned him, 'Mike, this is a laugh line.' He said, 'Why?' And I said, 'Because, Michael, you are... unusual, and people will laugh and interpret it any way they want to.'"

The next potential problem arose with Ola Ray, the actress Landis wanted to play Jackson's girlfriend. "We found out she had been a Playboy playmate. Oh, Jesus Christ! I went to Michael and told him and said, 'Can I hire her?' He said, 'Sure', though I don't think he even knew what I was talking about."

A bigger difficulty emerged after the video's star-studded theatrical première ("Marlon Brando was there, Elizabeth Taylor, Diana Ross, Cher - I'd never seen anything like it"), when members of the Jehovah's Witnesses church, of which Jackson was a member, started to kick up a fuss.

Landis recalls: "Michael was told, 'This is evil. It endorses Satanism. You can't release it.' So I had to negotiate this bullshit statement and put it on the beginning of the video." The disclaimer ("Due to my strong personal convictions, I wish to stress that this film in no way endorses a belief in the occult - Michael Jackson") probably had the opposite effect to the one intended.

"It was such a bizarre opening, but it actually had a positive influence because it created so much talk, so much controversy. And, by the way, Michael didn't write it; I did."

Landis last spoke to Jackson a few months ago. What, I wondered, is his mood like these days? "When I talk to him, he's very friendly and funny. I'm upset at what he's done to himself physically; it's quite creepy. But he's still a gigantic talent, and I really believe he'll make a comeback. There's talk of him doing one of those big shows in Las Vegas, like Elton John or Celine Dion. Why not - he still has millions of fans."

Source: www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/07/07/nosplit/bfthriller10.xm

FRI JULY 06th 2007 Sony seeks M. Jackson's backing for move to sign songwriters

Sony is in talks with Michael Jackson to renegotiate the terms of their music publishing joint-venture, which would allow Sony BMG, the sister company, to sign songwriters for the first time.

A clause in the existing agreement between the Thriller singer and the Japanese electronics giant prevents Sony backing a music publisher to rival their Sony/ATV venture, which has the copyrights to all 252 Beatles songs in its catalogue.

If Sony can persuade its volatile and cash-strapped business partner to relax or even erase the clause as part of the negotiations, that would allow Sony BMG, the recorded music concern, to become a part-competitor.

Sony BMG is desperate to enter the music publishing market because it would help to offset the collapse in recorded music and would allow the record label behind Justin Timberlake and Bob Dylan to sign up songwriters in tandem with acts.

Recorded music sales are expected to be off by as much as 11 per cent this year, but publishing has been more stable because it generates income from growing areas, such as radio airplay and use of music in advertising as well as CD and download sales.

Rolf Schmidt-Holz, Sony BMG’s chief executive, said in May that “we will do everything to reenter the market for music publishing”. His remarks surprised rival executives, who knew that a decision to go into publishing was not within his power. However, the existence of the previously unknown discussions explains his confidence.

Discussions between Sony and Jackson are at an early stage and could collapse. Relations between the two have been strained in the past. Sony/ATV has faced problems making acquisitions because contacting the controversial star quickly enough to agree bids has been difficult.

Jackson recently agreed to allow Sony/ATV to expand aggressively under Marty Bandier, the newly appointed chief executive. The company now also has an option, which it has so far declined to exercise, to buy a further 25 per cent of the business from its partner.

It is unclear how far the shareholder agreement between the two parties will be relaxed. There are hopes that Jackson will not have to be paid, although if that is the case he is likely to insist that Sony BMG can only sign up a handful of songwriters.

Half-owned by Sony and Bertlesmann, of Germany, Sony BMG is the second-largest recorded music company in the world, but it is unique because the company does not include a publishing arm.

The music business is traditionally split into two halves. Recorded music operations find, develop and promote artists, while music publishing units handle and manage songwriter copyrights. Its rivals Universal, EMI and Warner Music all conduct both activities.

Sony and Sony BMG declined to comment.
SOURCE : TIMESONLINE