Michael Jackson hosts a private screening of Thriller on November 14, 1983


Los Angeles - November 14, 1983:

Twenty-three hand-picked souls have been summoned to the Crest Theater on Westwood Boulevard, a modest little palace usually reserved for sneak previews of pictures nobody will remember by breakfast. Tonight, though, the marquee is dark. No title. No stars. Just a velvet rope, two security men built like Michelin Men in Brioni, and the low throb of anticipation that feels like the bass line to something unholy.

Inside, the chosen glide down the aisle in a hush that is almost ecclesiastical: Fred Astaire in a navy blazer sharp enough to shave with, looking like a man who has seen the future and is mildly amused; Jane Fonda, fresh from a workout that cost more than most people’s rent, her cheekbones still humming from the Nautilus; Diana Ross in silver lamé that catches the projector beam and throws it back like a disco ball in heaven; Eddie Murphy, twenty-two years old and already owning the room simply by refusing to sit still; Marlon Brando, mountainous and inscrutable, munching on what appears to be an entire roast chicken wrapped in a napkin; and, of course, the host himself, Michael Jackson, floating rather than walking, white glove flashing like a semaphore of the gods, face half hidden behind aviators even though the theater is darker than the inside of a coffin.

They have been told only this: You are about to see something that will change everything. No title. No plot. Just fourteen minutes that cost half a million dollars (more than most feature films of the era) and required the services of Rick Baker, the makeup magician who turned David Naughton into a wolfman, and John Landis, the animal who unleashed An American Werewolf in London on an unsuspecting world. 

The lights drop. A single red eye glows on the screen (the old MGM logo, but wrong, corrupted). Then Vincent Price’s voice, that stately baritone dipped in graveyard chill, begins to narrate the night he came to suck your blood, or whatever it is Vincent Price does when he’s not hosting PBS pledge drives. And there, in the front row, you can actually feel the collective intake of breath when Michael, in a red leather jacket the color of fresh arterial spray, starts to dance with the dead.

The title track of Michael's groundbreaking album Thriller was coming alive on screen. This wasn't just a music video, oh no. This was a movie. A short film. A declaration of war on the mundane, on the expected, on everything that came before.

The ghoulish transformation! The werewolf howls! The graveyard rising, the dust motes dancing in the eerie green light! The walking dead, shambling, lurching, their vacant eyes fixed on a terrified Ola Ray and a transforming Michael. The sheer, audacious chutzpah of it all! Landis, with his cinematic sorcery, and Jackson, with his unparalleled charisma, had fused horror and pop into an alchemical masterpiece.

And then it happened. As the final, spine-tingling frame faded to black, a voice roared out from the darkness. It was Eddie Murphy, the rising comedy king, utterly captivated, yelling for the projectionist to “Show the g*ddamn thing again!”

And they did! Twice!

Outside, later, the valet line is a circus of white Rolls-Royces and limousines idling like patient predators. The word is already out, whispered from car phone to car phone (this new thing people are starting to use). By morning, the rest of the world will be begging to see what these twenty-three people saw tonight. MTV, that newborn cable beast, will play it into the ground. Children will practice the zombie dance in schoolyards from Watts to Warsaw. And Michael Jackson, the shy kid from Gary, Indiana, will have completed the most audacious status leap in the history of American popular culture: from mere superstar to something bordering on deity.

November 14, 1983. A private screening in a little theater in Westwood. The night the moon walked backwards.

Location: Los Angeles, CA, USA

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