Stop us if you’ve heard this one before, just when Hollywood decided a movie about Michael Jackson told from the perspective of his pet chimp Bubbles was too ridiculous to make, Johnny Depp scraps at the bottom of the barrel and threatens to produce a stage musical about the late pop singer’s sequin glove.
You heard that right, we’ve got ourselves a bit of a Michael Jackson stand-off. Instead of “twin films” which happens when two films with the same or very similar plots are produced or released at the same time by different studios, we got instead a movie versus stage play competition. Joining the ranks of other famous twin projects like “Armaggeddon” and “Deep Impact,” or more recently the two documentaries about the Fyre festivals, we now it seems like it’s all about competing Michael Jackson projects. Just a couple of days ago we heard that the producer of “Bohemian Rhapsody” got approval from the Michael Jackson estate to make a new biopic, but we can probably guess that one won’t have as ridiculous a premise as what Johnny Depp has planned.
The news comes from playwright Julien Nitzberg, who both wrote the book “For the Love of a Glove: An Unauthorised Musical Fable About the Life of Michael Jackson, As Told By His Glove” (that is indeed the title) and told Page Six the inception of this ridiculous project. As Nitzberg says it, he first came up with the story 17 years ago after a major TV network asked him to write a movie about Michael Jackson, but negotiations fell when Nitzberg and the network couldn’t agree on how to handle the child-abuse negotiations. Instead, Nitzberg offered a different idea “ said, how’s this? Everything MJ has been accused of has actually been caused by his glove, which is actually an alien from outer space [and] feeds on virgin boy blood. They laughed and said, can you do the normal version?”
The final project is described as a “look into the strange forces that shaped Michael and the scandals that bedeviled his reputation” as narrated by a talking, singing glove,” with actors starring with life-size puppets of the Jackson 5, Donny Osmond, Emmanuel Lewis, Corey Feldman and Bubbles the chimp.
For some reason, “For the Love of a Glove: An Unauthorized Musical Fable About the Life of Michael Jackson, as told by his Glove” debuts January 25, 2020 in Los Angeles.