From golf ads to filmmaker: The unlikely odyssey of ‘This Is It’
HOLLYWOOD — On June 25, just hours after Michael Jackson died, Tim Patterson drove 40 miles from his home to downtown Los Angeles with $60 million worth of film footage in his trunk.
As he sped down Interstate 5, Patterson carried virtually all of the 140 hours of rehearsal footage from Jackson’s planned “This Is It” concert series that would eventually be whittled down to the 112-minute movie now playing in theaters around the world.
Patterson, 53, a commercial director whose biggest regular gig is making ads for a golf equipment company, was one of two camera operators hired by concert promoter AEG Live to record “This Is It” rehearsals. Every night after work, he transferred hours of video shot by himself and collaborator Sandrine Orabona to two hard drives in his home office. The afternoon that Jackson died, Paul Gongaware, a producer of the concert and movie, called Patterson with an urgent request: The footage, which had suddenly become uniquely valuable, had to be delivered to AEG’s downtown offices immediately.
Thus began an unlikely odyssey in which a commercial director who had never worked on a feature film before became the only person, besides Jackson’s close artistic collaborators, involved in “This Is It” from beginning to end.
Together with longtime collaborator Brandon Key, Patterson worked on every cut of “This Is It,” from the original footage given to the media days after Jackson’s death to DVD extras recently completed. “This will be the most important and incredible thing I do in my career,” he said.
Patterson’s involvement began in May when he e-mailed Gongaware to ask whether there might be some role for him in preparations for the “This Is It” concert. Gongaware was looking to start compiling behind-the-scenes footage. He hired Patterson and Orabona and put together a budget of $80,000. Over the next six months, using two $6,000 Sony cameras Patterson bought for the project, they worked six days a week, often until midnight, shooting performances and candid moments and interviewing dancers and others working on the concert.
Since the footage was intended only for promotional Internet videos and Jackson’s private archives, many important moments were shot by only one person. When performers’ body microphones were turned off, fuzzy sound was captured with a boom mike attached to the camera. “If we had known it was going to be a movie,” said Patterson, “we would have shot with nine or 12 cameras and gotten coverage on everything.”
The week after Jackson died, Patterson and Key were at AEG headquarters, with equipment strewn on the floor, trying to figure out just what they had. Within a week of the singer’s death, they cut together the initial 97-second clip from “This Is It” that became an Internet sensation. By mid-July, top executives from studios including 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures, Paramount Pictures and Sony Pictures came to look at what they had come up with. Soon after, Sony agreed to pay $60 million to turn the footage into a movie.
Patterson and Key worked with Don Brochu, who edited director Kenny Ortega’s “High School Musical 3: Senior Year,” to assemble a first cut. Patterson and Key then worked seven- day weeks for about a month, tweaking the first cut into the finished movie. “We could have shown more behind- the-scenes stuff, but Kenny felt strongly that Michael would have wanted to include more songs for the fans,” said Key.
After the movie was done, Patterson and Key went on to edit additional content for the DVD, due for release in January or February. “I never imagined that I’d ever work on a project where I would break down and cry in the edit bay,” said Patterson.
Log into MyBuffalo to post a comment
MyBuffalo is the new social network from Buffalo.com. Your MyBuffalo account lets you comment on and rate stories at buffalonews.com. You can also head over to mybuffalo.com to share your blog posts, stories, photos, and videos with the community. Join now or learn more.
Reader comments