Dan Reed

His performance as Jackson is quite wooden otherwise.

He's a bit of a waxwork.

You don't get any insight into what made Jackson tick.

And the issue of his relationship with kids is kind of repeats all the tropes of like, well, he didn't have a childhood and he really liked Peter Pan and he was like nice to kids and he wanted to hang out with kids.

And so if you like, it just draws a veil over his relationship with children and it suggests that it's benign and he was just a strange man with this, you know, it doesn't show him as someone who had a sex life.

Well, I read an early version of the script that was leaked to me.

I believe it was genuine.

So the movie was framed through the optic of the Jordan Chandler story.

Now, Jordan Chandler was the...

The 13-year-old boy who made the first claims of sexual abuse against Jackson, he got paid off, I think, to the tune of like $25 million, a very large sum, in 1993-94.

So that story was central to the draft that I read.

The boy and his parents were represented as frauds, as gold diggers trying to extort Jackson, and Jackson was represented as the innocent victim of these cruel people.

And there was a legal issue in the settlement between, I believe, between the estate and Jordan Chandler and his parents, which said, okay, you know, the terms of the settlement mean that you cannot turn our story into a movie.

So they had to ax all of that, reshoot the whole movie, practically the whole movie, I think, which the estate paid for.

So big mess, big mess.

They tried to make a film that was like the rebuttal of my documentary story.

And they failed.

So they couldn't even try to refute the claims because of their legal settlement.

That's fascinating.

Jordan Chandler was the first known accuser, but there were many more that came after, and they could have written stories about them, but they didn't.