Mark Binelli

Live performance, he'd booked a series of dates in London at the O2 Arena, 50 dates, which had sold out nearly instantly.

They couldn't find a sponsor, a corporate sponsor for the shows.

The merch company that they contracted with to make t-shirts and the products, they refused to make any of the products until the shows actually started because they were worried that Jackson wouldn't go through with it.

A Q score is a measurement of a brand or a celebrity's consumer appeal, basically.

Yeah.

By the end of his life, Jackson's had dropped to zero.

So that tells you something.

Yeah, when we're talking about his personal reputation, the songs are something else.

You know, there was always going to be a potential value there because they're just such a huge part of our culture.

And so the ultimate project moving beyond the songs would be to rehabilitate the man in some way and stop that reputational bleeding into the rest of his IP, for lack of a better word.

So legal documents describe this really remarkable scene in the hospital where Jackson is pronounced dead and his family is surrounding his bed, mourning him.

And meanwhile, a group of advisors have commandeered a room nearby and they've turned it into a war room, essentially.

Their immediate task at hand is to figure out how to deal with this massive amount of debt and basically stave off bankruptcy.

Yeah.

And so the guy who ends up leading this process is a man named John Branca.

He was Jackson's lawyer throughout most of the 80s through sort of peak Jackson era.

And he'd just come back onto the scene literally eight days before Jackson died.

Mm.

And it turned out that Jackson's will had named Branca and a longtime family friend named John McClain as co-executors.

So now suddenly Branca was running the estate, essentially.