Past Opinion Articles

Article for the week of 6/19/05

Credit where Credit is due: The Michael Jackson Trial
By, Grey Entertainment

With the conclusion of “The Michael Jackson Trail”, the biggest entertainment bonanza to date (which should be three months if Paris Hilton signs Fox’s deal to film the conception of her first child comes to fruition) many are patting themselves on the back.
Naturally the defence team is pleased with itself, gaining not only a verdict of innocent on all ten charges, but also managing to field a lead lawyer with a ridiculous hairstyle without too many jokes being made.
However is this sort of thing really the work of the legal eagles?
Of course not. Michael Jackson’s lawyers didn’t just get up with perfectly reasonable laughable hair, that was the work of a crack team of stylists.
Similarly those same lawyers did not dress themselves. Neither did the prosecution for that matter. Both sides hired top designers and fashion consultants to ensure that they all appeared brilliantly dazzling.
This leads us to the single, maybe even the only, injustice of the whole trial, the lack of appropriate credit to those who made the trial the experience it was.
And no this has nothing to do with Michael Jackson. After this odds are that nothing in entertainment will have anything to do with Michael Jackson without involving some sort of courtroom.
No one knows the names of the dove trainers, the pyrotechnics experts of the choreographers, odds are that many of their efforts were barely noticed compared the special guest appearance of Jay Leno as a witness.
Forgotten are the caterers, the makeup artists, the sculptors and the professional basketball team masquerading as the world’s biggest dwarves.
Missing among the thank yous are small children dressed up as innocent woodland creatures, the producers of E!, slaving away to make sure that the re-enactment segments were of moderate quality and that they were ready on time, no matter how many writers burned out after seven straight hours of typing.
Though to be fair this is where the line blurs and no amount of official thanking can quite seem right. The undertakers who had to cope with the large number of writer corpses, the guys who had to clean up after the doves – they were only city employees, apparently someone forgot to hire someone else to take care of that and the hundreds of now exhausted hookers who had to relieve the tensions of legal teams and journalists alike as pressure regarding the case mounted.
Sure, Michael Jackson thanked his attorneys, his legions of loyal fans and the children of the world, only at the cost of the legitimate consideration others have earned through their hard work putting up the most sensational trial since O.J.
While this might not seem to be the most pressing issue at hand, when they start selling the tickets for “The Michael Jackson Trial II: Culkin’s Career Bounces Back” they will be looking for able bodies to fill those rolls again, and unions have long memories.