Bubbles with Isaac Adamson | Development Hell

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Before we do any talking, I just want you, can you just read the opening scene?

Exterior, ape sanctuary, day.

Bubbles, a grizzled, muscular 33-year-old chimpanzee lazily knuckle walks across the floor of a large domed enclosure nestled in a verdant Florida woodland.

Superimposition, Center for Great Apes, Wachula, Florida, present day.

There are many kinds of kingdoms in this world, and many kinds of kings.

Bubbles scoops up a hunk of sweet potato from the ground.

I have known more than most, though all here have served outside these castle walls in some capacity.

He comes upon a cluster of three chimps and acknowledges them.

Butch and Chipper served the Ringling Brothers, as did Petunia.

Moving along, he passes two other chimps.

Ellie and her friend Kodua were both in a Super Bowl commercial.

A third chimp runs over, whacks Ellie on the head, and then runs off.

That's Jonah.

He starred in a Planet of the Apes film.

Unfortunately, it was the one people didn't enjoy.

Bubbles effortlessly ascends a wooden jungle gem and then sits perched on top of it, overlooking his domain, munching his sweet potato.

Now this is their kingdom, and I am their king.

But it was not always so.

I was once heir to the greatest kingdom on earth, one ruled by a king like none before him.

But every kingdom, great or small, has its boundaries, its walls.

Every kingdom is itself a kind of cage.

I have,

in my life,

become a student of cages.

Welcome to episode three of Development Hell, our series about the Hollywood that never was.

I heard about this script from Franklin Leonard, who runs something called the Blacklist.

It's a Hollywood institution that polls movie executives every year, asking them to name their most liked unproduced screenplays.

The project we're going to talk about today hit number one on the blacklist.

It was called simply Bubbles.

A story told through the eyes of the most unreliable of all unreliable narrators, a chimpanzee, who rose as high as a chimp can rise and then fell.

And the entire town.

The entire community of development executives, studio, honchos, producers, everyone in Hollywood agreed that this was the best thing they had read.

But do you know when Bubbles hit number one on the blacklist?

2015.

Nine years ago.

Hollywood decided as a group that a story about a chimp called Bubbles was the absolute best script of 2015.

And yet, in the decades since, Hollywood has decided that they did not want to make a movie told through the eyes of a chimp called Bubbles.

Why?

This is why all of us at Revisionist History decided the world needed development help.

A series devoted entirely to the stories that Hollywood loves, but will not share with the rest of us.

So I called up the creator of Bubbles, Isaac Adamson, screenwriter, novelist, thwarted chronicler of the inner lives of large primates.

You may hear in Isaac's voice a certain resignation about the fate of his screenplay.

But that's not how I feel.

I read Bubbles and I thought,

I have to do something.

First they came for the chimpanzees and I did not speak out because I was not a chimpanzee.

You know how that ends.

So here we have a middle-aged chimp

who

is clearly in some kind of retirement, has been pastured out to this sanctuary in Orlando.

But he speaks in this grandiose, formal manner about this life.

Tell me, give me a little more in your own words about the character of this, of Bubbles,

this majestic, aging chimp.

Yeah, well, I think of Bubbles kind of as a would-be king in exile.

You know, he's had this amazing, adventurous life, and now he's kind of been, he's been removed from,

and now he's, he's sort of biting his time away from the life that he thought he was going to have and from the kingdom that he felt that he was going to inherit he's a tragic figure yeah definitely yeah but he has and what's hilarious this is a comedy

let's be yeah at its core at its core yes it has core it's many other things as well but it's fundamentally a comedy i i must say parenthetically isaac that i love this script so much you know how in your world in hollywood it's always x meets why a movie is always described as X meets Y.

You know what this is.

You probably, I'm sure you've thought,

this script is

Remains of the Day meets Puff the Magic Dragon.

I actually had never thought of it that way.

That's one I hadn't heard before either.

But you see,

you know what I'm getting at?

Yeah, I definitely get it.

That makes sense.

So let's explain.

Bulbles was a real chimp.

Yeah, correct.

He is a real chimp.

He's still alive and living at this uh ape sanctuary in florida and he

he is famous you know he's probably one of the most famous chimps of our generation

yeah i would i would think so for sure i mean he's up there with like

cheetah from previous generations i suppose oh cheetah you mean like a tarzan psychic in those tarzan movies and tv shows um so bubbles is on cheetah's level he's famous uh he is famous because he was Michael Jackson's chimpanzee during the height of Jackson's fame.

Yeah.

And he was more than a kind of pet.

He was like Michael Jackson's companion.

He was.

When Michael Jackson went on tour, he took him all over the world.

You know, he tried to take him to Europe.

He had some trouble getting him into the country because of

the animal quarantine laws.

But he did.

He took him to Japan.

He took him famously to a meeting with the mayor of Osaka.

So you had this idea of doing a movie about Michael Jackson seen through the eyes of his chimp bubbles.

Yeah, I guess the genesis of it happened a long time before I actually sat down to write the script.

You know, it was right around the time Michael Jackson died, and there were all sorts of articles about every aspect of his life.

And

I happened across something in like People or, you know, one of those magazines that you kind of flip through at the dentist's office.

And it was just a little blurb about, well, whatever happened to Bubbles, you know, remember Michael Jackson's chimpanzee?

And I thought, oh, that's kind of interesting because I sort of remembered bubbles being around and everything.

And then a couple of years later, there was a, there was a book that was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in the UK called Me Cheetah.

And I thought it was like the Tarzan story told from Cheetah's perspective.

That it turns out I was totally wrong.

I didn't actually actually read the book.

I just read about it.

I'm like, oh, that's an interesting idea.

And yeah, so a certain point, I just decided to try to write a Michael Jackson story told from the perspective of this, you know, of this chimpanzee.

But it was really important to me to make the chimpanzee the lead character, though, the real protagonist, not just have it be he's kind of a fly on the wall witnessing all this crazy stuff going on.

And how did you come to give the give Bubbles the persona that he has?

I I mean, there's a million directions you could go with a chimp.

If we're going to live inside the mind of a chimp, the chimp could be a rascal.

He could be a partier.

He could be a, you know, I mean,

he could be an immature adolescent.

I mean, there's a million chimps.

And you chose this kind of

formal, self-serious,

grandiose kind of character to be how where did that where did that notion come from?

well there was a couple things really because yeah although this is a comedy i did see it you know as a tragedy from from bubbles perspective he sort of has this notion that michael jackson is a real king you know like a monarch and chimpanzees are very hierarchical animals there's definitely a pecking order there once i sort of had this idea of it's almost a shakespearean tragedy about a king and his son the would-be king then i started thinking well it'd be really funny if if bubbles spoke in this kind of pseudo-shakespearean language, just to elevate it a little bit.

So that's kind of where a lot of that came from.

But it gives him an enormous amount of dignity.

If he was, if he was a, this is one of the first things that struck me about this.

I was like, why am I, why do I feel Bubbles' pain?

Because he eventually will go through a great deal of pain.

I was asking myself, why do I feel it so keenly?

And I realized it's because

he has this very precious dignity, which he's going to enormous lengths to preserve.

And if he was just the stereotypical chimp who's just out to eat bananas and jump around, then there's no stakes if he's humiliated.

But in this case, there's enormous, I mean, his pride,

Bubbles just has this enormous amount of pride in his position and his status and his accomplishments,

which is just

deeply hilarious.

Yeah, I know, I think, you know, it would have been a fun too, just the visual juxtaposition of this chimpanzee, which I think we all associate with that kind of, you know, wacky hijinks and slapstick and whapping its head and, you know, blowing raspberries and all those things we've seen in all kinds of movies and TV shows and commercials and even nature documentaries.

But then, you know, having that sort of goofy, funny exterior aspect to it, but this really sort of deep, kind of sad interior thing going on at the same time.

I thought that was an interesting juxtaposition.

Yeah.

And he's a non-he not only does he,

he misunderstands who Michael Jackson is.

So

when Michael Jackson is referred to as the king of pop, Bubbles thinks that means he is the king,

actually the king of pop.

And not only that, he consistently misunderstands all these things that we understand about Michael Jackson.

I'm wondering if you could read.

There's that incredibly lovely scene where he's talking about the first time he discusses Michael Jackson's cosmetic surgery.

Could you?

There's a number of times where he does, but I'm wondering whether you can find that section.

I've forgotten what page it's on.

Oh, here we are.

13.

Interior, Havenhurst Mansion, Michael's bathroom, night.

Michael looks at the man in the mirror, unhappily inspecting his face for a moment before picking up a bottle of porcelain skin bleaching cream.

Bubble sits on the stool next to him, watching as Michael rubs the cream into his face.

Before venturing forth to the battlefield, he would don warpaint that turned his face a spectral, phantasmic shade meant to strike fear into the heart of his enemies.

Later, Michael faces the mirror again.

A bandage covers his nose.

Often he would return from these battles with bandages covering wounds received in combat.

Michael peels the bandage away to reveal a noticeably narrowed nose.

But he had remarkable powers of self-healing.

Each time recovering from such injuries without so much as a scar.

He's such a hilariously unreliable narrator about his king.

That's like half the fun of this.

This why, you know, when I said it's

half Remains of the Day.

Remains of the Day is a novel about a butler to an English lord who's sympathetic to the Nazis in the years before the Second World War.

And the butler thinks that his master is one of the great statesmen of his day instead of just being a groveling neo-Nazi, you know, and the whole, that's a sit, that's a tragic novel, but the whole thing is the butler never understands

who his master is.

Yeah.

But this is the same thing.

Bubbles is like the butler in Romans of the day.

He just doesn't, he never, ever cottons on to the kind of

hollowness in Michael Jackson, I guess.

Yeah, I think, you know, because he is a chimpanzee and he does, he misinterprets a lot of what he sees, I think it sort of allows him to retain an innocence too that, you know,

a quote-unquote normal person that was seeing some of the things that Bubbles was exposed to would,

You know, wouldn't come to the same conclusions that Bubbles does for sure.

But Bubbles does,

there are certain things he, there's a lot in this,

in this screenplay about

Joe, Michael Jackson's tyrannical father.

And

Bubbles does understand that there is something deeply kind of corrosive and tragic about that relationship.

Yeah, it's true.

I mean, he does, I think one thing that he's good at sensing is sort of power dynamics.

And he can kind of understand that, yeah, Michael's maybe the king, but here's this other figure who is unkind to him, but clearly has power over him, you know, in some sense.

You have an enormous amount of fun in the script with populating it with every single pop culture

person of the moment.

I lost track.

I was keeping track of all of the cameos.

We get Elizabeth Taylor, we get lots of Quincy Jones, we get Bon Jovi in a hilarious scene when Bon Jovi basically co-opted Bubbles for

a crazy night on the town.

Latoya, obviously,

a Corey Feldman, Prince.

Yeah.

Prince in a memorable scene.

When we see Prince encounter Michael Jackson through Bubbles' eyes, Bubbles tries to make sense of

that.

I mean,

this part of the scripture sounds like you must,

I pictured you laughing out loud as you were writing these scenes.

Oh, yeah, definitely.

Pretty much every scene, there was something that just made me giggle.

And even before I was writing it, when I was just researching it and coming upon all these stories, I mean, Bon Jovi tells that story on a clip and I think it's on YouTube about how when he was in Osaka, yeah, he basically

they gave him bubbles for the night and they just had a big hotel party.

And the Prince story, that's another one that was based on, you know, a true thing that happened.

I mean, Michael Jackson being the massive figure he was at that time, he did interact with pretty much everybody who was everybody, you know, in pop culture during that period.

What's also interesting is that there's things happening inside Bubbles, which you made up yourself.

Everything that happens outside, it seems like, so basically, we're covering Michael Jackson's life when he's writing and touring for

bad is it bad was the album called bad yeah it was bad yeah yeah yeah you're just fishing through all of the true accounts of that era and taking out stories

basically yeah there's other stories that i've heard you know since since the script got out and i talked to so many people about it and everybody was sharing their michael jackson stories and rumors and all kinds i've heard a lot of other just kind of wild stories since then you know involving madonna and michael jackson and some involving bubbles um and people that that saw him when he was at Neverland.

And

yeah, I've heard a couple where Bubbles was probably not as well-behaved as he generally is in the script.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, that goes without saying we have to give him, if we're going to give him some dignity, he can't be throwing his feces at the wall every five minutes.

Right.

Yeah.

Of course, there are all kinds of things about Michael Jackson's story that are not funny.

When we come back, Isaac hits a roadblock as he tries to get the Bubbles movie made.

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We're back.

Michael Jackson dies in 2009, but Baubbles is still alive.

And nearly six years later, Isaac Adamson writes the biopic we're talking about, the story of the king of pop from the point of view of his pet chimpanzee.

He's thinking of using stop-motion animation to tell the story, for obvious reasons.

Hollywood is used to dealing with prima donnas, but a chimp as a star of a movie would be on a whole nother level.

And Isaac isn't ignoring the pedophilia allegations against Michael Jackson.

The Leaving Neverland documentary that exposed Jackson's behavior isn't out yet, but there's been investigations in the 1990s that have become headline news.

So around 2015, Isaac takes his admittedly unusual project and starts shopping it.

And studios like it.

In 2017, Netflix bought the project.

And Isaac entered Development Hell.

You know, when Netflix bought the project, I had to do a pretty lengthy annotation for them citing anything in the script, I had to basically cite a source for.

Yeah.

Just to get clearance from their legal department.

And we ended up, you know, in the latest versions of the script, some of the names changed

in certain cases or a few characters kind of got squashed down into one character.

Who did you lose in

the legal review?

Well, the biggest change had to do with a lot of the stuff related to legal charges that Michael Jackson faced.

And we just changed some of the names there because there were a few things that were included in the script that were a little bit,

there wasn't a whole lot of proof, or the only stories about it were like disreputable British tabloids and stuff like that.

Yeah.

So this brings up this crucial thing, which is

what begins as this kind of

strange,

kind of light-hearted romp takes a dark turn in the second act.

And we actually get into,

you know, Michael's

well-known allegations around Michael Jackson's pedophilia.

Only this time we're seeing it through the eyes of a kind of jilted,

of our jilted chimp,

whose place of prominence next to Michael has been

supplanted by

a young boy.

Yeah.

I think

Isaac, this is like, it gets heavy.

It does.

Yeah, it does.

I mean, it's a heavy, it's a heavy kind of story.

I feel like the Michael Jackson story is a heavy story.

And Bubbles' story within that story is kind of a heavy story.

But yeah, I think he views these kids at first as just sort of these annoying sort of interlopers that

are taking Michael's attention away from him.

And then he sees them kind of as rivals and even comes to fear like, well, maybe they're actually part of the succession now and not me.

Once again, the one way in which Bubbles

sees the world clearly is through

the prism of hierarchy.

And so he understands accurately that

in Michael Jackson's hierarchy, these boys are now higher up than he is.

Correct.

They occupy a place in Michael's heart that he does not.

And this is, like I said, this is why I said this is Remains of the Day Day meets Puff the Magic Dragon.

It's the puff story.

Then, one day it happened.

Jackie Paper came no more.

That's what happens to him.

He gets pushed aside.

And it's like,

it broke my heart when that happened.

Yeah,

it's a tough moment.

It's a tough thing for bubbles.

And I think, you know,

if you talk to the kids who were around Michael Jackson a lot at that time, I think a lot of them went through similar experiences with him when, where, you know, he, they were his favorite.

And then some and then someone else came along, you know, and they were just sort of jilted out of, out of Neverland.

And I think, you know, in certain cases that that hurt these kids a lot, even some of the ones like Corey Feldman, you know, who says that Michael Jackson never touched him or, you know, did anything sexually untoward, but he was just hurt by that whole experience of feeling like they were buddies and he was the favorite.

And then one day he's just out.

What does it do to our understanding of

that part of Michael Jackson's life

that we're viewing it through the eyes of a chimp?

Yeah,

that's a good question.

I feel like, you know, in a certain sense, it gives us Bubbles interpretation and often misinterpretation of these things that he sees

it works almost as a distant distancing device that allows us to sort of see things through

a different viewpoint that wasn't necessarily our own you know like or the way i experienced michael jackson when i was a kid growing up in the 80s i mean when i when i was growing up and where i was

it didn't really matter what kind of music you listened to you liked michael jackson like if you were into you know iron maiden and heavy metal and all that stuff, you still like Michael Jackson.

If you were listening to Duran Duran and a bunch of new wave, you still like Michael Jackson.

Everybody liked Michael Jackson.

You know, I remember seeing the thriller video a thousand times on MTV when I was a, when I was a little kid.

So yeah, and I was definitely a fan of yeah.

I'm trying to kind of figure out why years later, the kind of psychological dimensions of this story would have

would have been so kind of clear to you, right?

It's sort of weird, like, you know, an entire generation of seventh graders kind of encounter Michael Jackson.

Yeah, for sure.

I mean,

I'm sure a lot of people were jealous of the those real life kids at the time because they'd be like, oh my God, you know, Jimmy's getting to go to Neverland, getting to go on vacation with Michael.

And it looked like the greatest life ever.

You're just eating ice cream and watching movies and, you know, riding on a Ferris wheel at Michael Jackson's house and all that kind of thing.

And just the sort of, you know,

the darkness that was actually going on and even in just the sort of hollowness of those kind of fake friendships too,

was something that I don't think a lot of people certainly knew at the time.

Do you think that

seeing Michael through Bubble's eyes makes Michael a more sympathetic character to us or less?

Yeah, that's tough.

I mean,

I think he probably comes off as a little bit less sympathetic because we are, we're told the story from kind of a quote-unquote victim's viewpoint, you know, because it is, it is Bubbles telling the story.

But at the same time, Bubbles can't really, especially in the early, you know, version of the script, can't really bring himself to

hate Michael Jackson.

He's still, even in the last, you know, that first scene I read and the last scene of the script, he's hoping one day Michael Jackson is going to come again.

He's still waiting for michael to return you know so they can rule the world together once more um

but yeah it's tough i don't i i think maybe different audiences would have different reactions you know everybody has a lot of different reactions to michael jackson in general yeah what was hard about writing the script

um you know honestly just from a technical point of view the the hardest thing was keeping bubbles as the protagonist and not letting michael take over too much of the script just because he is such a compelling figure.

And, you know, finding ways to include the moments that I wanted

from Michael Jackson's life, but how have Bubbles somehow be there for them?

Hopefully, in more than just, like I was saying before, fly on the wall capacity where he's just sort of reporting what he's seen.

To give him stakes in some of those instances, too.

But he can't, the thing about Bubbles is he can't grow, can he?

He,

If you have an unreliable narrator, as in Remains of the Day,

the pathos comes from the fact that the world outside the narrator changes and the narrator is blind to it, right?

So if the unreliable narrator becomes reliable at the end,

then it kind of ruins it.

Am I wrong?

Yeah,

that's a good question too, especially as it relates to sort of

versions of the script script that

we

revised after Leaving Neverland had came out, I think I felt and the producers felt that we couldn't allow Bubbles to be quite as

ambiguous or,

I guess, agnostic about what happened at Neverland

because he is telling our movie and then therefore it makes the movie feel like we're agnostic about it and you know trying to question well maybe all those terrible things didn't happen which was not our intention at all.

So, in later versions of the script, um, and there's the changes are pretty small, but I think Bubbles does display a clear understanding, a clearer understanding of what's going on there.

And it kind of loses his innocence a little bit, and his parting with Michael Jackson is a little more final.

We don't really see him longing to, you know, to see Michael again in those last moments.

Um, I do feel like we kind of needed to write it that way, um,

based on everything going on, but it is a good question whether that sort of undermines

a lot of the other things in the script about his unreliable narration and his innocence overall.

I think he became a little bit less innocent character

in the final versions of it, as I think everybody became less innocent after Leaving Neverland hit and really had the impact that it did.

I don't think people could pretend,

you know, pretend anymore about Michael Jackson, who really was, at least in certain aspects of his life.

Talk a little bit more about Leaving Netherlands, which comes out when.

Look, I believe it was January 2019.

It premiered at Sundance.

Yeah.

And so you

wrote your script.

First draft was written when?

I originally, yeah, this the first draft of this script was written in March 2015.

And when do you see it?

Do you see it right away?

I didn't see it right away.

It's funny.

My manager was in Sundance and he went to the premiere of it and he called me immediately.

And he's like, I think we got a problem.

Then I saw the film and the thing that I really underestimated was just the power of hearing these guys tell their own stories in their own words.

And, you know, they really become

real people in a way that they're not when you're just looking at.

court documents or a magazine article or something like that.

And you really heard them, you know, expressing the hurt and the pain and of the things that they had been through.

Yeah, I mean, that had a huge impact on the project for sure, in a negative sense for me.

When your manager said you had a problem, what did he mean exactly?

Did he mean that the script as it presently is

doesn't work anymore because it's too ambiguous about?

Michael Jackson's kind of

sinister side?

Or

did he mean that just that you had to rewrite it?

I mean, how dire was your manager's kind of perspective?

I think the real problem and the thing that he saw coming was that Michael Jackson was just going to be toxic.

And I think once Leaving Neverland came out, it was going to be hard to make this sort of whimsical, fun movie that I think a lot of people thought they were signing up for coming on to this project.

I think that's what he meant by we're in trouble, just because almost overnight, just sort of the perception around Michael Jackson changed, and nobody wanted anything to do with any Michael Jackson project at that time.

So, prior to leaving Neverland, was this script on track to be made into a movie?

Yeah, it was.

We had Tycha YTD, you know, attached to direct it.

And there was another director, Mark Gustafsson, who was going to work on all the stop-motion animation because that's how we had decided to do it.

Dan Harmon at Starburns was producing it.

So we had all his company was on it.

Netflix bought the project at Con, and I think it was 2017.

So yeah, it was kind of ready to go.

The two things that killed it were, well, Tycho Waititi

had this other movie that he wanted to do kind of in the meantime called Jojo Rabbit.

So yeah, you know, he went off to do that.

And then in the meantime, Leaving Neverland came out.

And I think we got to a point and we're pretty deep in pre-production.

They'd already hired all the department heads.

We had 40-some animators working on it.

And it was kind of getting to the point where

we needed Tyka to really engage and start making some directorial decisions.

And he was just not engaged in the project.

We knew something was up.

And finally, he just, you know, he made the call to his agent or whatever, get me out of this.

I can't do this anymore.

And that's when it sort of died.

Netflix had said, Well, you've got two months to find another director for this.

And then three days later, they completely changed their minds and went, No, we're killing it.

Everybody's fired.

Go home.

So, yeah, that was not a good day.

We'll be right back.

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Do you, do you, did the script revert to you at any point or did it, do they own it?

It has recently.

Yeah, I own it now.

Yeah.

Do you think it's dead?

I don't know.

You know,

things kind of never die.

It's funny.

People bring it up to me all the time, but we haven't really pursued any serious avenues towards getting it going again.

But who knows?

I will say it's pretty obvious to me that Michael Jackson, just as a public figure, is not.

I mean, you know, they're making a Michael Jackson biopic right now.

Just yesterday, Usher on the on the Super Bowl was wearing, you know, like a Michael Jackson glove.

I don't think we would have seen that in the immediate wake of leaving Neverland.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I, it's funny because I,

to take a contrary position, I feel like this is more interesting post Neverland than pre-Neverland.

I mean, it goes from being, if you do this in this movie at a time when we think of Michael as a talented eccentric,

then the movie is fun and whimsical, but there's nothing at stake.

It's just another log on the fire of Jackson celebrity.

It's a clever log.

And the fire, you know, is wonderful, but it's not deviating in any...

But now it's like,

now that I know going in that Michael Jackson is this kind kind of complicated twisted

deeply problematic figure then the fact that Bubbles is straining through his chimp eyes to see him clearly and failing is like it's gun it's heart-wrenching

this movie now has kind of it's got stakes now that it didn't have before it's like

It's important for us to know what we know about Michael Jackson for this to move us emotionally.

And what you're saying, you know, this idea that Michael Jackson is toxic or is more toxic than he used to be, is absolutely right, but this is not a Michael Jackson movie.

It's a bubble movie.

It's a sneaky.

It's a movie about bubbles, right?

A naive

underling with this kind of

self-deception, powerful self-deception, trying to make sense of a world that he has no understanding of.

It's like

it's heartbreaking but yeah i mean to me it is i don't think anything what we've learned about michael jackson

it's been funny to me because i say we learned it but everybody kind of knew it anyway and that's what's been odd about the the reaction to me is that there wasn't anything new in these revelations but suddenly had been gone through me too and all the stuff that came with it.

I think we just as a culture learn to take a lot of that stuff stuff a lot more seriously and, you know, give it the weight that it deserves.

And I think that's what sort of changed about, you know, the public perception, at least, of, of Michael Jackson.

But for me, I mean, I always

kind of believed that the kids were telling the truth.

You know, Bubbles becomes a stand-in for us.

We all looked the other way with Michael Jackson.

for years, right?

Because we were in love with his talent and his music.

And Bubbles is just, he's just representing our own kind of uh willful blindness

bubbles just wants thinks he's the king and because he's the king he's not willing to entertain any idea that his monarch might be flawed um at least until the very end or and i think that's like

like i said is such a stronger better

more more powerful movie after that stuff's come out.

Yeah, I mean, I would agree.

I think what frightens a lot of people, or at least did, you know, a few years ago when this was all, when the movie sort of fell apart, it's just the sort of moral panic around anything related to pedophilia

in our country currently, you know, whether it's stuff like

Pizzagate or Elon Musk just using pedo as a broad insult.

I know Netflix had gone through some things too with the controversy surrounding cuties.

I just think that

it just became

it became a word that you know nobody really wanted to be associated with in any form whatsoever you know they don't even want it coming out of their mouths when they're talking about a movie and i can understand too why why if you're you know a big name director you don't want to spend a whole lot of time at con or wherever answering questions about michael jackson's pedophilia you know i can understand wanting, you know, not just not wanting to deal with it.

But I agree.

I think it would, it does make the story a little bit deeper a little bit more interesting and i think it does implicate the audience in some interesting ways

i mean this is the story of what happens to the script is this kind of the the the the the meta story is about kind of hollywood abandoning its

position

as a kind of cultural authority.

I mean, you would think that a medium as powerful as film would

feel free to address the most complex of topics and kind of force us to think about them in new ways and confront our own complicity and all that kind of thing.

And, you know, I feel that at various times in Hollywood's history, film has done that.

There's been these moments when,

but like, this is a classic example of

an opportunity to kind of address that.

And the fact that nobody wants to do that breaks my heart.

Yeah, I mean, it's possible it could see the light of day, you know, again sometime.

Who knows?

It's funny because sometimes you can see it.

You know what's interesting about it.

The director, actors, and producers, you know, the people that are sort of intimately involved with it

on a creative level.

But then when you're just talking to marketers or publicists or whoever else like that, or, you know, financial people.

It's just another product.

Can you, one last thing, Isaac, can you read a little bit of where

bubbles struggles to come to terms with what he is observing at neverland yeah let me find a good one here

um okay

i found a good one

exterior neverland amusement park day

bubbles glowers as michael leads a delegation of kids down a path towards the amusement park there's a manic quality to michael's movements.

He was as some mad pied piper,

determined not to drive the snakes away, but lead them instead to the very heart of his kingdom.

Michael laughs a little too brightly as he rides atop the carousel horse with all his noisy little friends.

Bubbles continues.

Determined to lower the drawbridge for these pint-sized Trojan horses and let them carry him away in a stampede of frivolity.

I knew then that no ordeal would change him, no brush with ignominy, no humiliation, no torture, no trial, no punishment.

He had waded so far into a sea of infamy that returning was as tedious as continuing to the other side.

And a troubling notion arose.

Was what I had taken for reckless folly masking something darker?

My loyalty had found its limit, and I could serve no longer.

This episode was produced by Nina Bird Lawrence and Tali Emlin with Ben Nadaf Haffrey.

Editing by Sarah Nix, original scoring by Luis Guerra, engineering by Echo Mountain.

Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.

And our special guest voice actor was the old Pushkin friend, Ethan Hirschenfeld.

An extra special thanks to Franklin Leonard at the Blacklist for bringing Bubbles to the attention of the world.

I'm Malcolm Glabo.

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