So why is the Spike Lee-directed video for Michael Jackson's "This Is It" arriving now, in the holiday media doldrums, instead of October, when the song was first released, or a few weeks after that, when the movie named after the track finally came out? Perhaps because of the controversy that the song first engendered! This is recent history: The single, an "unreleased" song from the Michael Jackson vaults, was initially deemed exciting enough to provide the title for both the posthumous concert documentary and the big-money greatest hits soundtrack that accompanied it.

​Sometimes one must just bow to the bounteous fruits of the Freedom of Information Act, a request via which has led the FBI to unveil their epic file on Michael Jackson, wherein the twin salient facts relevant to the law--the threats and stalkers and extortion schemes that accrue to the very, very famous, and the complex and unending investigations relating to someone who may or may not have been a pedophile--meet in a kind of perfect storm of sordid details and horrific privacy invasions.

​Also available: "A painting of Charlie Chaplin done in the hand of Michael Jackson at the age of 9 years old," the acoustic guitar he played on the set of the The Wiz, "chocolate from Jackson's wedding to Lisa Marie Presley," and other memorabilia of the same disturbingly bodily ilk. Tomorrow, Times Square, Hard Rock Cafe New York, 10 a.m. Those interested a crumpled golden ticket inside an envelope with my name on it from the one-time-only New York premiere of This Is It are encouraged to reach out as part of a separate private sale of Jackson memorabilia I'm hosting under the Brooklyn Bridge at 1:45 a.m. next Tuesday night.

​So if you're following along: Michael Jackson's Number Ones is already on pace to have a shot at becoming 2009's bestselling record; This Is It, the film, has done $103 million in ticket sales and counting; and now the documentary's companion record has debuted with 373,000 copies sold, "the fifth-best sales week for an album in the U.S. this year," according to Billboard, and Mike's sixth overall #1. This is big, fanatically huge business--in total, Jackson is going to end up outselling the next closest artist by something like 2:1 in 2009. This despite Thiller already being the best-selling album of all time, which is to say a lot of these people almost surely had a spare on the shelf when they went back to the store this week. Joe Jackson is basically a complete fucking monster but today, he's right. [Billboard]

​Not that well. And yet, absurdly well! The Kenny Ortega directed rehearsal doc sold $21.3 million in tickets this past weekend, bringing the film's total in the U.S. to $32.5 million. Overseas was a different story: out there in the world, This Is It has done $68.5 million and counting in sales. By the perverse logic of Hollywood, this was all deemed a failure, given all the marketing and promotions muscle Sony put behind the film, and the high expectations the studio generated in doing so. (Two week run only! Tuesday night opening! All of those posters!) That said, do the addition: after not quite a week, the film's taken in $101 million dollars, well past what Sony paid AEG Live ($60 million) to acquire the film. Everyone involved is going to get a handsome check off of this little venture. Not least because--surprise, surprise--This Is It will be in theaters for far longer than the originally announced two weeks. The film, Sony announced over the weekend, has been granted an extended run, through Thanksgiving. [NYT]

​That is, if you include the $2.2 million it made the day before, via various advanced screenings. (The breakdown went $7.2 domestic, and $12.7 internationally.) But the number to keep an eye on? $60 mill, the amount Sony paid AIG for the footage and the rights to it. They appear, to these naive eyes, very likely to recoup, although the mind reels at what Sony must have shelled out in promotional costs. According to the Times' Brooks Barnes, these numbers are actually a disappointment: "A $20.1 million weekday total is certainly impressive -- the studio noted that the North American gross was the highest for a Wednesday in October -- but it isn't the immediate smash many predicted." Sony goes on to cite "surprisingly upbeat reviews" as a reason to be hopeful about word of mouth and even better weekend ticket sales; ours was not one of those reviews.

​The New York premiere, anyway. Out in LA, the red carpet was besieged by what looked to be the Santa Ana winds, in mourning--gales of dust, lots of celebrities frantically attending to their own disheveled hair, and one noble but helplessly overmatched red carpet interviewer, whose stammering queries about the "importance" of Michael Jackson to deep thinkers like Adam Lambert were unfortunately beamed live into the theaters of all 17 simultaneous world premieres. In New York, Sony merely snatched up every theater in the cavernous Regal E-Walk and Times Square and crammed hundreds of ushers into sparkly hats and single gloves to greet the thousands of theatergoers who came out to salute Kenny Ortega's posthumous concert (rehearsal?) doc. As for the film itself? Our review is over here.

​Those (presumably few) who doubt the rampant cynicism of the post-MJ death blitz would do well to read Ben Sisario's piece in the Times today, which spells out the haste with which the Jackson camp brought "This Is It" to market. The song, it emerges, is not only 16-years-old, but not entirely Jackson's to begin with--he co-wrote it with Paul Anka, then took the tapes and later gave the song to the '80s freestyle starlet Sa-fire, who called it "I Never Heard" when she released it 1991. No one saw fit to mention this to Anka and his lawyers, or to Rob Stringer, the chairman of the Columbia/Epic Label Group, who found out when "Mr. Jackson's fans discussed it online over the weekend." How John McClain, the producer responsible for posthumously arranging the song, expected this to pass without comment or outcry is unclear. (Or he himself didn't know, which is probably worse.) Anyway, now Anka will be paid. By late afternoon yesterday, Sisario writes, McClain had called Anka "to acknowledge his co-authorship and promise 'all due credit and royalties.'" Glad to see everyone is taking such good care of Jackson's estate. Meanwhile, a simple YouTube search for "Michael Jackson" might've easily headed this one off. To wit:

Pic by Tahhdd

​Extremely well done, this. A better caretaker of MJ's memory than that new song, maybe, possibly. Credit here, thanks to Fluxblog.

How we're meant to take a new Michael Jackson song so thoroughly disconnected from any intelligible context relating to the man, his life, his music, etc.--i.e., anything but his death and subsequent (re) deification--well, who knows. This is it, as it were. Slated for the October 28th theatrical film of the same name and the accompanying double-disc CD, which will have a different, less polished version of this same song on it, along with the usual suspects and that still ominous sounding spoken word poem, "Planet Earth." [This Is It]