Michael Jackson listened to every word the director said — then walked on stage and changed history D
The director of Motown 25 called Michael Jackson’s team 2 hours before showtime and said the moonwalk could not be performed on live television. His concern was that it would look wrong on camera. Michael listened to the entire explanation. Then he went on stage and did it anyway. It was May 16th, 1983 and the Pasadena Civic Auditorium was running the particular controlled chaos of a major television production in its final hours before broadcast.
Motown 25 Yesterday, today and forever was a celebration of the label’s 25th anniversary. A variety special that had assembled an extraordinary lineup of artists, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross, The Four Tops, The Temptations into a single evening that NBC was broadcasting live to an audience estimated at 47 million people.
The production team had been working the event for months. The camera positions had been mapped, the lighting designed, the running order locked and every performance rehearsed to the standard that live television required. Every performance except one. Michael Jackson had agreed to perform Billie Jean, a song from Thriller, which had been released 5 months earlier and was in the process of becoming the best-selling album in history.
The performance had been rehearsed in the conventional sense, the staging, the blocking, the lighting cues. What had not been rehearsed because Michael had not revealed it during rehearsals was the specific movement he intended to perform during the bridge section of the song. He had been developing the moonwalk for 2 years.
He had refined it in private in his room at Havenhurst in the spaces between rehearsals and performances where the work that never appears in public gets done. He had shown it to no one in the context of the Motown 25 special. The camera crew did not know it was coming. The lighting team did not know it was coming.
The director, a television veteran named Don Mischer, who had produced major live events for 15 years, did not know it was coming. What Don Mischer knew 2 hours before broadcast was that something unrehearsed was planned. He had received word through Michael’s team, not specific information, but enough to trigger the concern of an experienced live television director who understood that unrehearsed movements at live events created camera problems.
If the performer moved in a direction the camera operator wasn’t anticipating, the shot could be missed. If the lighting wasn’t positioned correctly, the movement could be lost in shadow. Live television was an environment where the unexpected was the primary enemy of quality and an unrehearsed dance move in the most watched portion of the most significant performance of the evening represented a specific and identifiable risk.
He called Michael’s team at 6:47 in the evening. The conversation was routed through Michael’s manager at the time and the message that arrived was direct. The unrehearsed element needed to be removed from the performance. Don Mischer’s concern was technical and professional and entirely reasonable within the framework of live television production.
He wanted the performance to look good. An unrehearsed move risked looking wrong, missed by the camera, lost in the lighting, rendered awkward by the gap between what was planned and what was actually executed. Michael was in his dressing room when the message arrived. He listened to the full explanation as it was relayed to him by his manager.
He did not interrupt. He did not argue. He asked one question, whether the concern was primarily about the camera coverage or primarily about the lighting. And when told it was both, he nodded and said he understood. He said he would think about it. His manager relayed this response to Don Mischer’s team, which interpreted it as the beginning of a negotiation.
Live television productions negotiated these things regularly. An artist with concerns about a requested change would say they would think about it and then further conversations would happen and a compromise would be reached and the broadcast would proceed with everyone’s interests accommodated to the degree possible.
No further conversation happened. Michael spent the remaining time before the broadcast in his dressing room, which he used as a space for the specific interior preparation that live performance required. He was not, by multiple accounts, thinking about Don Mischer’s concerns. He was thinking about the performance, about the 8 seconds during the bridge of Billie Jean when he intended to demonstrate something he had been developing for 2 years in front of 47 million people for the first time.
He [snorts] had thought carefully about this moment, not in the way that performers think about moments they are uncertain of, working through scenarios and contingencies and fallback positions, in the way that performers think about moments they have already decided, going over the mechanics, confirming the sequence, inhabiting the movement of the room where it would happen.
The moonwalk had been practiced so many times that the uncertainty had been removed. What remained was the execution. Don Mischer was in the production truck when Michael walked onto the stage. The production truck was positioned outside the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, connected to the broadcast via the camera feeds and the audio system and the communication channels that allowed the director to speak to camera operators and stage managers and lighting controllers simultaneously.
Don Mischer watched Michael’s entrance on the monitors and gave the standard cues. Camera two for the wide shot, camera one for the close as Michael began to sing. The first section of the performance went exactly as rehearsed. Michael moved through the staging in the positions that the camera crew had mapped, hit the marks that the lighting had been designed around, delivered the vocal with the intensity that 47 million people would remember for the rest of their lives. Don Mischer was tracking it from the truck, calling cues, managing the broadcast with the practiced efficiency of someone who had done this many times. Then the bridge arrived. Michael slid backward across the stage on the toes of his loafers in a movement that the camera operators had not been briefed on, in a direction that the lighting had not been designed for, for a duration of approximately 8 seconds that no one in the production truck had anticipated. Don Mischer said later that his first response was technical, the immediate assessment of a director watching
something happen that he had specifically tried to prevent, calculating the camera coverage in real time, evaluating whether the shot was working or failing. He said camera one had caught it from the front, which was the correct angle, and that the lighting, while not optimally positioned for the movement, was adequate.
The stage wash caught enough of the footwork to make the mechanics visible. He said the shot worked. He said it worked in a way that he had not predicted it would work because he had been thinking about the movement as a potential camera problem and the camera had solved the problem without being asked to. He said by the fourth second of the eight, he had stopped thinking about the camera coverage.
He said, “I was just watching it like everyone else.” The production truck, which during a live broadcast is a room of constant low-level communication, directors calling cues, producers managing logistics, engineers monitoring levels, went quiet. Don Mischer said he became aware of the quiet at some point during the 8 seconds and did not try to break it because breaking it would have required him to speak and speaking would have required him to stop watching and he was not able to stop watching. He called the cues that the remainder of the performance required. He completed the broadcast. He did his job because his job was what he had come to do and the broadcast was still happening and 47 million people were watching and the work continued regardless of what had occurred in the middle of it. Afterward, standing outside the production truck in the Pasadena night, he said something to his assistant producer that his assistant producer wrote down because it seemed worth writing down. He said, “I’ve been
directing live television for 15 years. I’ve never seen a camera problem into a historic moment in 8 seconds.” He paused. Then he said, “I should have let him rehearse it.” His assistant producer, a 27-year-old named Sandra Chew, who would go on to produce major live events of her own over the following three decades, said she had thought about those two sentences many times since.
She said the first sentence was the professional assessment of a director who understood what had happened classified as a risk had produced an outcome that exceeded what any amount of preparation could have guaranteed. She said the second sentence was something different. She said it was the rare admission of someone in a position of authority acknowledging, without qualification, that the person they had tried to stop had been right.
She said that in 30 years of live television production, she had heard that admission perhaps four times. She said each time she heard it, it involved someone trying to prevent something that turned out to be exactly what the moment needed. She said the lesson she had taken from the Motown 25 production truck was the lesson she returned to most often in her own career, that the most dangerous word in live television was not the unexpected. It was the prevented.
Michael Jackson performed the moonwalk publicly hundreds of times after May 16th, 1983. Each performance was rehearsed, lit and covered by camera crews who knew exactly what was coming and where to be when it arrived. None of them produced the specific quality of the 8 seconds in Pasadena, the quality that came from 47 million people seeing something for the first time, from camera operators catching something they hadn’t been told to catch, from a production truck going quiet in the middle of a broadcast because the director had stopped calling cues and started watching. Fred Astaire watched the Motown 25 broadcast from his home in Beverly Hills. He was 84 years old and had spent 60 years being the standard against which popular dance was measured. And he watched the broadcast and with the attention of someone for whom watching dancers was not a casual activity but a professional one. The eye that had been
trained by a lifetime of practice continuing to work even when the body it belonged to had retired from the work itself. He called Michael Jackson the following morning. The call was brief and direct in the way that calls from Fred Astaire tended to be brief and direct because Fred Astaire had not lived 84 years by being indirect about things that mattered to him.
He told Michael that he had watched the performance. He said the movement during the bridge was the most astonishing thing he had seen a dancer do in the last 30 years. He said he was not given to that kind of statement and that Michael should understand it was not offered lightly. Michael said he appreciated it.
He said it coming from Fred Astaire meant more than he knew how to express. Astaire said he had one question. He asked whether the movement had been rehearsed with the camera crew. Michael said it had not. There was a pause. Then Astaire said, “Good.” He said that the quality he had seen in those 8 seconds was the quality that disappears when something is rehearsed for the camera.
The specific aliveness of something happening for the first time in front of people who are seeing it for the first time. He said he had spent his entire career trying to preserve that quality in his own filmed performances and had succeeded intermittently at best. He said Michael had achieved it completely in 8 seconds on live television in front of 47 million people by simply not telling anyone it was coming.
He said, “That was the right decision. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.” Michael kept this conversation private for many years. He mentioned it in interviews occasionally, always briefly, always with the specific quality of someone referencing something that mattered more than the words available to describe it.
He said Fred Astaire had called him the morning after Motown 25. He said Astaire had been kind. He did not repeat what Astaire had said about the 8 seconds or about the decision not to rehearse for camera or about the quality of aliveness that the unrehearsed produces. He didn’t need to repeat it.
The 8 seconds were on tape. The tape was available to anyone who wanted to see what Fred Astaire had been describing. The description was the performance and the performance was the answer to every concern that Don Mischer had raised in his 6:47 phone call. And the answer had been given not in words but in movement, not in argument but in execution, not before the broadcast but during it in 8 seconds that started when no one was ready and ended when everyone in the building understood that something had changed. That quality was unrepeatable. It existed once in 8 seconds on a stage where the director had specifically asked for it not to happen. The asking made no difference. The 8 seconds happened anyway. And the 8 seconds are what remained. The camera operator who caught the moonwalk from camera one was a man named Pete Rollins who’d been working live television for 11 years and who, by his own account, had no idea what was
happening when it started. He said his briefing had described a performance of Billie Jean with standard staging, center stage, front facing, no significant lateral movement. He said when Michael began moving backward, his first instinct had been to widen the shot to maintain the full figure in frame, which was the standard response to unexpected performer movement.
He said widening the shot had been the correct instinct because the footwork was the thing. The specific relationship between the feet and the stage surface was what produced the visual impossibility of the movement and widening the shot kept the feet in frame. He said he had made that decision in approximately 1 second without knowing what he was looking at, without understanding what the movement was going to do or where it was going to end up.
He said 11 years of live television had produced the instinct and the instinct had been right and he had no more sophisticated explanation for it than that. He said he had watched the playback the following morning and had found it difficult to connect footage to his memory of being behind the camera. He said the footage showed something he had not experienced while it was happening because while it was happening, he had been too occupied with the technical act of catching it to perceive what he was catching.
He said this was common in live television that the most significant moments were often the ones you were least present for because presence required attention that the work itself consumed. He said, “I was there for 8 seconds and I missed them. The tape caught them. That’s the job.” He paused.
Then he said, “I’m glad the tape caught them. I’m glad the shot worked and I’m glad nobody told me what was coming because if they had told me, I would have prepared for it and preparing for it would have changed what I did and what I did was the right thing. Sometimes not knowing is the camera position you need to be in.
” He had been in live television for 31 years by the time he said this. He said it was the truest thing he knew about the work. He said he had learned it in 8 seconds in Pasadena in 1983 from a performer who had specifically not told him what was coming and he had been applying it ever since.
