Bubbles with Isaac Adamson | Development Hell

Pushkin.

Exterior Ape Sanctuary Day Bubbles A grizzled, muscular, 33-year-old chimpanzee lazily knuckle walks across the floor of a large, domed enclosure nestled in a verdant Florida woodland.

There are many kinds of kingdoms in this world, and many kinds of kings.

Bubbles scoops up a hunk of sweet potato from the ground.

I have known more than most, though all here have served outside these castle walls in some capacity.

He comes upon a cluster of three chimps and acknowledges them.

Butch and Chipper served the Ringling brothers, as did Petunia.

Moving along, he passes two other chimps.

Ellie and her friend Kodua were both in a Super Bowl commercial.

A third chimp runs over, whacks Ellie on the head and then runs off.

That's Jonah. He starred in a Planet of the Apes film. Unfortunately, it was the one people didn't enjoy.

Bubbles effortlessly ascends a wooden jungle gym and then sits perched on top of it, overlooking his domain, munching his sweet potato.

Now this is their kingdom and I am their king. But it was not always so. I was once heir to the greatest kingdom on Earth, one ruled by a king like none before him. But every kingdom, great or small, has its boundaries, its walls, every kingdom is itself a kind of cage.

Welcome to episode 3 of Development Hell, our series about the Hollywood that never was. I heard about this script from Franklin Leonard, who runs something called The Blacklist. It's a Hollywood institution that polls movie executives every year, asking them to name their most-liked unproduced screenplays. The project we're going to talk about today hit number one on the blacklist. It was called simply Bubbles.

Yeah, well, I think of bubbles kind of as a would-be king in exile, you know? He's had this amazing, adventurous life and now he's kind of been removed from. And now he's sort of biding his time. Away from the life that he thought he was going to have, and from the kingdom that he felt that he was going to inherit.

He's a tragic figure.

Yeah, definitely.

Yeah, but he has, and what's hilarious, this is a comedy.

Let's be fair, yeah, at its core.

At its core, yes, at its core, it's many other things as well, but it's fundamentally a comedy. I must say parenthetically, Isaac, that I love this script so much. You know how in your world, in Hollywood, it's always X meets Y. A movie is always described as X meets Y.

I actually had never thought of it that way. That's one I hadn't heard before either.

But you know what I'm getting at?

Yeah, definitely, I get it, that makes sense.

So let's explain Bubbles was a real chimp.

Yeah, correct, he is a real chimp. He's still alive and living at this ape sanctuary in Florida.

And he is famous, he's probably one of the most famous chimps of our generation.

Yeah, I would think so, for sure. I mean, he's up there with Cheetah from previous generations, I suppose.

Oh, Cheetah, you mean, like Tarzan's sidekick in those Tarzan movies and TV shows, so Bubbles is on Cheetah's level, he's famous.

He is famous because he was Michael Jackson's chimpanzee during the height of Jackson's fame.

Yeah, and he was more than a kind of pet, he was like Michael Jackson's companion.

He was when Michael Jackson went on tour, he took him all over the world, he tried to take him to Europe. He had some trouble getting him into the country because of the animal quarantine laws, but he did.

So you had this idea of doing a movie about Michael Jackson, seen through the eyes of his chimp bubbles?

Yeah, I guess the genesis of it happened a long time before I actually sat down to write the script. It was right around the time Michael Jackson died and there were all sorts of articles about every aspect of his life. And I happened to cross something in People. Or one of those magazines that you kind of flip through at the dentist's office. And it was just a little blurb about, well, whatever happened to bubbles.

How did you come to give Bubbles the persona that he has? I mean, there's a million directions you could go with a chimp. If we're going to live inside the mind of a chimp, the chimp could be a rascal, he could be a partier.

Well, there was a couple of things, really, because, yeah, although this is a comedy, I did see it, you know, as a tragedy from bubbles perspective. He sort of had this notion that Michael Jackson is a real king, you know, like a monarch. And chimpanzees are very hierarchical animals. There's definitely a pecking order there. Once, I sort of had this idea of it's almost a Shakespearean tragedy about a king and his son, the would-be king. Then I started thinking, Well, it'd be really funny if Bubbles spoke in this kind of pseudo-Shakespearean language, just to elevate him a little bit.

But it gives him an enormous amount of dignity.

I think it would have been a fun to just the visual juxtaposition of this chimpanzee, which I think we all associate with. That kind of wacky hijinks and slapstick and whapping its head and blowing raspberries, and all those things we've seen in all kinds of movies and TV shows and commercials, and even nature documentaries. But then, you know, having that sort of goofy, funny exterior aspect to it, but there's really sort of deep, kind of sad interior thing going on. At the same time. I thought that was an interesting juxtaposition.

Yeah, and not only does he misunderstand who Michael Jackson is. So when Michael Jackson is referred to as the king of pop, bubbles thinks that means he is the king, actually the king of pop. And not only that, he consistently misunderstands all these things that we understand about Michael Jackson. I'm wondering if you could read.

Interior Havenhurst Mansion. Michael's Bathroom Night Michael looks at the man in the mirror, unhappily inspecting his face for a moment before picking up a bottle of porcelain skin bleaching cream. Bubbles sits on the stool next to him, watching as Michael rubs the cream into his face.

Before venturing forth to the battlefield, he would don war paint that turned his face a spectral, phantasmic shade meant to strike fear into the heart of his enemies.

Later, Michael faces the mirror again. a bandage covers his nose.

Often, he would return from these battles with bandages covering wounds received in combat.

Michael peels the bandage away to reveal a noticeably narrowed nose.

But he had remarkable powers of self-healing each time recovering from such injuries without so much as a scar.

He's such a hilariously unreliable narrator about his king. That's like half the fun of this. That's why, you know, when I said, it's half. Remains of the Day. Remains of the Day is a novel about a butler to an English lord who's sympathetic to the Nazis in the years before the Second World War. And the Butler thinks that his master is one of the great statesmen of his day, instead of just being a groveling neo-Nazi. You know, that's a tragic novel, but the whole thing is, the butler never understands who his master is.

Yeah, I think, you know, because he is a chimpanzee and he misinterprets a lot of what he sees. I think it sort of allows him to retain an innocence, too. That, you know, a quote-unquote. Normal person that was seeing some of the things that Bubbles was exposed to wouldn't come to the same conclusions that Bubbles does, for sure.

But Bubbles does, There are certain things. He, there's a lot in this screenplay about Joe Michael Jackson's tyrannical father, and Bubbles does understand that. There is something deeply kind of corrosive and tragic about that relationship.

Yeah, it's true. I mean, he does. I think one thing that he's good at sensing is sort of power dynamics and he can kind of understand that. Yeah, Michael's maybe the king, but here's this other figure who is unkind to him but clearly has power over him, you know, in some sense.

You have an enormous amount of fun in the script with populating it with every single pop culture person of the moment. I lost track, I was keeping track of all of the cameos. We get Elizabeth Taylor, we get lots of Quincy Jones. We get Bon Jovi in a hilarious scene when Bon Jovi basically co-opt bubbles for a crazy night on the town.

Oh yeah, definitely, every, pretty much every scene. There was something that just made me giggle. And even before I was writing it, when I was just researching it and coming upon all these stories. I mean, Bon Jovi tells that story on a clip. I think it's on YouTube about how when he was in Osaka, yeah, he. Basically, they gave him bubbles for the night and they just had a big hotel party. And the Prince Story, that's another one that was based on, you know, a true thing that happened. I mean, Michael Jackson being the massive figure he was at that time, he did interact with pretty much everybody who was everybody, you know, in pop culture during that period.

What's also interesting is that there's things happening inside bubbles which you made up yourself. Everything that happens outside. It seems like, so, basically, we're covering Michael Jackson's life when he's writing and touring for B.A.d. Is it? B.A.d? was the album called B.A.D.?

Yeah, it was B.

Yeah, you're just fishing through all of the true accounts of that era and taking out stories.

Basically, yeah, there's other stories that I've heard, you know, since the script got out. And I talked to so many people about it. And everybody was sharing their Michael Jackson stories and rumors and all kinds. I've heard a lot of other just kind of wild stories since then, you know, involving Madonna and Michael Jackson, and some involving bubbles. And people that saw him when he was at Neverland, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, well, that goes without saying. We have to give him. If we're going to give him some dignity, he can't be throwing his feces at the wall every five minutes.

Right, yeah.

Of course, there are all kinds of things about Michael Jackson's story that are not funny. When we come back, Isaac hits a roadblock as he tries to get the Bubbles movie made.

You know, when Netflix bought the project, I had to do a pretty lengthy annotation for them, citing anything in the script I had to basically cite a source for.

Yeah.

Just to get clearance from their legal department. And we ended up. You know, in the latest versions of the script, some of the names changed in certain cases, or a few characters kind of got squashed down into one character.

Who did you lose in the in the legal review?

Well, the biggest change had to do with a lot of this stuff related to legal charges that Michael Jackson faced. And we just changed some of the names there because there were a few things that were included in the script that were a little bit. There was a whole lot of proof. Or the only stories about it were like, disreputable British tabloids and stuff like that.

Yeah, so this brings up this crucial thing, which is what begins as. This kind of strange, kind of lighthearted romp takes a dark turn in the second act. And we actually get into, you know, Michael's well-known allegations around Michael Jackson's pedophilia. Only this time, we're seeing it through the eyes of a kind of jilted, of our jilted chimp, whose place of prominence next to Michael has been supplanted by a young boy.

Yeah, I think bubbles.

ISAaC This is like it gets heavy.

It does, yeah, it does. I mean, it's a heavy, it's a heavy kind of story. I feel like the Michael Jackson story is a heavy story, and Bubbles story within that story is kind of a heavy story.

Once again, though, the one way in which Bubbles is sees the world clearly is to the the prism of hierarchy.

Right?

And so he understands accurately that in the in Michael Jackson's hierarchy, these boys are now higher up than he is correct. They can. They occupy a place in Michael's heart that he does not.

Yeah, it's, it's a tough, it's a tough moment. Something for bubbles. And I think, you know, if you, if you talk to the kids who were around Michael Jackson a lot at that time. I think a lot of them went through similar experiences with him. When, where you know he, they were his favorite. And then and then someone else came along, you know, and they were just sort of jilted out of, out of Neverland. And I think, you know, in certain cases, that that hurt these kids a lot. Even some of the ones like Corey Feldman, you know, who says that Michael Jackson never touched him, or, you know, did anything sexually untoward?

MM Hmm. what does it do to our understanding of that part of Michael Jackson's life that we're viewing it to the eyes of a chimp?

Yeah, I.

I'm trying to kind of figure out why. Years later, that kind of psychological dimensions of this story would have would have been so kind of clear to you, right? Sort of weird, like, you know, an entire generation of seventh graders kind of encounter Michael Jackson.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I'm sure a lot of people were jealous of those real life kids at the time. Oh, my god, you know, Jimmy's getting to go to Neverland, get to go on vacation with Michael, and it looked like the greatest life ever.

Do you think that seeing Michael through bubbles eyes makes Michael a more sympathetic character to us or less?

Yeah, that's tough, I mean.

Yeah, what was hard about writing the script?

You know, honestly, just from a technical point of view. The hardest thing was keeping bubbles as the protagonist and not letting Michael take over too much of the script just because he is such a compelling figure. And, you know, finding ways to include the moments that I wanted from Michael Jackson's life. But have bubbles somehow be there for them? Hopefully in more than just like I was saying before, fly on the wall capacity. Where he's just sort of reporting what he's seeing, so to give him stakes in some of those instances, too.

But he can't, the thing about bubbles is he can't grow, can he if you have an unreliable narrator, as in Remains of the day? The pathos comes from the fact that the world outside the narrator changes. And the narrator is blind to it, right? So if the unreliable narrator becomes reliable at the end, then it kind of ruins it. Am I wrong?

Yeah, that's a good question, too, especially as it relates to, sort of, you know, versions of the script that we revised. After leaving Neverland, it came out, I think I felt, and the producers felt, that we couldn't allow bubbles to be quite as ambiguous. Or, I guess, agnostic about what happened at Neverland. Because he is telling our movie, and then therefore it makes the movie feel like we're agnostic about it. And, you know, trying to question, well, maybe all those terrible things didn't happen, which was not our intention at all.

Talk a little bit more about leaving Neverland, which comes out when.

I believe it was January 2019.

Yeah, and so you wrote your script. First draft was written when?

I originally, yeah. The first draft of the script was written in March 2015.

And when do you see it? do you see it right away?

I didn't see it right away. It's funny. My manager was in Sundance and he went to the premiere of it and he called me immediately. He's like, I think we got a problem. Then I saw the film and the thing that I really underestimated was just the power of hearing these guys tell their own stories in their own words.

When your manager said you had a problem, what did he mean exactly? Did he mean that the script, as it presently is, doesn't work anymore? Because it's too ambiguous? About Michael Jackson's kind of sinister side? Or does it mean, did he mean that just that you had to rewrite it? I mean, how dire was your manager's kind of perspective?

I think the real problem and the thing that he saw coming was that Michael Jackson was just going to be toxic. And I think once leaving Neverland came out, it was going to be hard. To make this sort of whimsical, fun movie that I think a lot of people thought they were signing up for, coming onto this project, I think that's what he meant by. We're in trouble. Just because, almost overnight, just sort of perception around Michael Jackson changed, and nobody wanted anything to do with any Michael Jackson project at that time.

So, prior to leaving Neverland, was this script on track to be made into a movie?

Yeah, it was. We had Taika Waititi, you know, attached to direct it. And there was another director, Mark Gustafson, who was going to work on all the stop motion animation. Because that's how we had decided to do it. Dan Harmon at Starburns was producing it, so we had all.

We'll be right back.

It has recently, yeah, I own it now.

Yeah, do you think it's dead?

I don't know, you know, things kind of never die. It's funny, people bring it up to me all the time. But we haven't really pursued any serious avenues towards getting it going again.

Yeah, yeah, it's funny because I to take a contrary position, I feel like this is more interesting post-Neverland than pre-Neverland. I mean, it goes from being, if you do this in a this movie at a time. When we think of Michael as a talented eccentric, then the movie is fun and whimsical. But there's nothing at stake, it's just it's just another log on the fire of Jackson Celebrity.

Yeah, I mean to me, it is, I don't think anything. What we've learned about Michael Jackson.

Bubbles becomes a stand-in for us. We all looked the other way with Michael Jackson for years, right? because we were in love with his talent and his music. And Bubbles is just he's just representing our own kind of willful blindness. Bubbles just wants, thinks he's the king.

Yeah, I mean, I would agree. I think what frightens a lot of people. Or at least, did you know a few years ago, when this was all, when the movie sort of fell apart? It's just the sort of moral panic around anything related to pedophilia in our country currently. You know whether it's stuff like Pizzagate or Elon Musk, just using Pedo as a broad insult. I know Netflix had gone through some things, too, with the controversy surrounding cuties.

I mean, this is the story of what happens to the script, is this kind of? The meta story is about kind of Hollywood abandoning its position as a kind of cultural authority? I mean, you would think that a medium as powerful as film would feel free to address the most complex of topics? And kind of force us to think about them in new ways and confront our own complicity and all that kind of thing. And, you know, I feel at various times in Hollywood's history, film has done that. There's been these moments when, but like, this is a classic example of an opportunity to kind of address that.

Yeah, I mean, it's possible it could see the light of day, you know, again sometime, who knows?

Can you one last thing, Isaac? Can you read a little bit of where Bubbles struggles to come to terms with what he is observing at Neverland?

Yeah, let me find a good one here.

He was, as some mad pied piper, determined not to drive the snakes away, but lead them instead to the very heart of his kingdom.

Michael laughs a little too brightly as he rides atop the carousel horse with all those noisy little friends.

Bubbles continues, determined to lower the drawbridge for these pint-sized Trojan horses and let them carry him away in a stampede of frivolity. I knew then that no ordeal would change him, no brush with ignominy, no humiliation, no torture, no trial, no punishment. He had waded so far into a sea of infamy that returning was as tedious as continuing to the other side. And a troubling notion arose was what I had taken for reckless folly masking something darker.

This episode was produced by Nina Byrd-Lawrence and Tali Emlin, with Ben Nadaf-Hafri, editing by Sarah Nix. original scoring by Luis Guerra. Engineering by Echo Mountain. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith, and our special guest voice actor was the old Pushkin friend Ethan Hirshenfeld. An extra special thanks to Franklin Leonard at the Blacklist for bringing bubbles to the attention of the world. I'm Malcolm Glaubo.