In a dark and dingy old elementary school auditorium, a pop star is being born.
Make that reborn, because thanks to the makers of the ABC mini-series
”The Jacksons: An American Dream,” we`ve been transported back to 1965, to a PTA meeting in Gary, Ind.
A tiny Michael Jackson stands alone and nearly motionless on a school stage, singing his big 6-year-old soul out. His angelic face is turned to the heavens, his arms and clenched fists rising slowly at his sides like little wings.
As his high but strong voice soars toward the climax of ”Climb Every Mountain,” the child`s body beneath the sports coat and bow-tie is still stage-stiff with inexperience. But Michael`s precocious musical maturity is filling the hall for all to hear.
When Michael finishes the first public solo performance of his career, the audience leaps to its feet as one proud parent and applauds. Michael`s mother, Katherine Jackson (Angela Bassett), wipes a tear from her eye, turns to her husband, Joseph (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs), and says, ”I guess you`ll have to make it the Jackson 5.”
Young Michael (played by 9-year-old Alex Burrall, who has been lip-syncing to a recording by 13-year-old singer/actor Anthony Harrell) has proven he`s ready to join the family band.
The rest, as they say, is history.
This scene will appear about 40 minutes into ”The Jacksons: An American Dream.” The four-hour mini-series is a family-oriented drama about the humble origins, multi-musical triumphs and intra-family squabbles of the Jackson parents and their famous children.
Scheduled to air Nov. 15 and 18 on ABC-Ch. 7, the movie finished four weeks of filming in Pittsburgh`s working-class environs in June, then moved to Los Angeles for another four weeks of work.
”An American Dream” is a complicated undertaking. Using three sets of actors to portray the six Jackson boys at three periods in their lives, it opens with the postwar courtship of parents Katherine and Joseph Jackson and continues through the early struggling days of the Jackson Five to the
”Victory” tour of 1984.
Co-executive producers Stan Margulies (”Roots”) and Suzanne De Passe
(”Lonesome Dove”) came to Pittsburgh for economic reasons, but also because the city could stand in well for working-class Gary, as well as for other parts of the Midwest.
De Passe, a former Motown executive who now heads her own film and TV production company, has the rare chance to be a character in her own movie. While at Motown in 1968 she brought the Jackson 5 to the attention of Motown boss Barry Gordy. She then worked closely with them during their formative years on everything from choreography to their touring needs. When the actress playing her was hired, she said, she made sure she was ”adorable and a good actress.”
”American Dream,” said De Passe, is going to be an entertaining, romantic, dramatic, accurate, family-oriented story with a lot of good music, but it isn`t going to be all ”nicey-nicey.”
”It`s got teeth in it,” she said. ”It`s not painting a rosy picture all the time.”
The mini-series also will deliver an important and especially timely message too rarely told on TV or in movies, De Passe said.
”American Dream” will tell the tale of ”a lower-income black family that employs all the middle-class values that I think all of us sort of altruistically hope would always be the case-that life could be a place where hard work, teamwork and discipline pay off.
”It`s important for kids of all races today to see that the Jacksons didn`t start off with Rolls-Royces and Cadillacs and that their father and mother worked hard, really hard, and kept them together.”
In light of the recent riots in Los Angeles and elsewhere, De Passe said, ”American Dream`s” middle-class message of hope ”becomes valuable if only to round out the spectrum of entertainment available to the people who are expressing rage and are searching for things to be inspired by.”
”American Dream” has been in the making for three years. It took a year for all the Jackson brothers and sisters and their lawyers and managers
(except La Toya, who is a minor character during the years covered) to approve the screenplay, which was researched and written by Joyce Eliason
(”Small Sacrifices”).
It ends with the ”Victory” tour in 1984, not to avoid any of the controversies of the last eight years, Margulies said, but because that was the high-water mark for the Jacksons. It also involved the six boys being on stage together, and it marked a time when the family patched up a number of rifts and became a whole family again, he said.
Michael, who had final say over the three actors who would play him at 6 to 8, 13 to 14 and in his early 20s, quickly OKd all three of the producers`
choices. Director Karen Arthur and others on the set invariably refer to the actors as Michael 1, Michael 2, Michael 3, Tito 1, Tito 2, etc.
Ther`ll be enough music from the Jacksons and others like the soulful a cappella group Boyz II Men to fill a sound-track CD.
Among the children, the heaviest focus will be on Michael`s career. But the real stars of the movie are not Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon, Michael, Randy, Rebbie, Janet and La Toya. It`s their parents, Katherine and Joseph.
The genesis of the movie came from Katherine Jackson`s lament that too few people know how tough the family once had it. Jermaine Jackson, 37, who with his wife Margaret Maldonado is producing ”American Dream,” clearly remembers how rough things once were. He remembers his mother working part-time jobs, his dad working overtime at the steel mill and the family sometimes having only potatoes to eat.
Jermaine, whose 15-year-old son Jermaine Jr. is one of the actors playing him, credits his parents with bringing them up right. They instilled solid values that have kept them working hard and away from things such as drugs.
”We had a good, sound foundation,” Jermaine said.”We had direction. My father and mother did the right things. They wanted it to happen for us, and it did.”
