The image is simple, stark and deeply sinister: James Safechuck, 41, places a small gold band, inlaid with diamonds, over the top of his ring finger; it won’t even fit past his first joint. The tiny ring, he says, was given to him by Michael Jackson, as part of their secret mock wedding ceremony, in which they made vows to one another when Jackson was 30 years old, and Safechuck just 10. Hands trembling, he then places the ring back in a box with several others; the late singer would often buy him jewellery, he alleges, as a reward for performing sexual acts upon him. The gruesome allegations are just two in a barrage of revelations made in British director Dan Reed’s hotly anticipated documentary, Leaving Neverland, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. The four-hour, two-part film, to be broadcast in the UK on Channel 4 on Wednesday night, was always expected to be controversial, exploring the claims of extensive abuse from Safechuck, a former musician, now a computer programmer, and 37 year old choreographer, Wade Robson, both of whom previously testified in court in Jackson’s defence. The Jackson estate has called the film "yet another lurid production in an outrageous and pathetic attempt to exploit and cash in on Michael Jackson", who died in 2009.<doc-sep>Michael Jackson arrives at the Santa Barbara County Courthouse for his trial on child molestation charges in 2005. (Aaron Lambert/Pool/via Reuters) From early reviews and reports, the documentary Leaving Neverland corroborates what has long been apparent. It has been apparent since the mid 1990s that Michael Jackson was a child molester. A great entertainer, yes, but almost certainly a serial abuser of little boys. That his attorneys managed to cast doubt on witnesses in a notorious 2005 criminal trial doesn’t inspire much confidence. As was the case with Bill Cosby, the pattern of grotesque allegations has become impossible to ignore. Advertisement Wade Robson, 36, and James Safechuck, 40, have previously stated under oath that they weren’t victimized by Jackson when they were children. They are now saying their previous testimony was untrue and that it resulted from direct pressure by Jackson himself, who told them that he and they would be jailed if he should be convicted of sexual abuse. “I want to speak the truth as loud as I spoke the lie,” Robson says in the four-hour documentary Leaving Neverland, which has just premiered at the Sundance Film Festival ahead of being broadcast on HBO later this year. In the film, he and Safechuck tell their stories in gruesome, indeed sickening, detail. (A statement from the Jackson estate dismissed the allegations as uncorroborated “tabloid character assassination.”) I haven’t yet seen Leaving Neverland, but those who have report that the film paints a damning picture. Safechuck was a child actor who says he met Jackson at age ten while filming a Pepsi commercial. Starting when he was eleven, he says, they engaged in sex acts many times at Jackson’s Neverland compound — in a castle, in an attic, in a pool, in a train station. Safechuck says the pop singer used to hold drills in which he would train the boy in putting his clothes on quickly in case any witnesses should appear. Jackson also told him that “if anyone ever found out that we were doing these sexual things, we would go to jail for the rest of our lives.” “I was terrified.” When Safechuck was 14, he says, Jackson staged a mock wedding with him, complete with vows and a diamond-encrusted wedding ring. Advertisement Robson, a Brisbane-born dancer who grew up to be a choreographer for Britney Spears and others, says he also met Jackson in 1987, when he was just five and performed in a dance contest that led to him meeting the singer during the Bad tour in Australia. When he moved to Los Angeles, the pair had sexual contact starting while he was seven, he claims. Jackson advised the boy to throw away his underwear after the first sexual encounter, Robson says. Jackson, who would marry Lisa Marie Presley in 1994, said his ostensibly heterosexual relationships with women were purely a public-relations exercise. This too was obvious to all at the time. Why did the parents allow their children to spend so much time alone with Jackson? The film “captures how the parents found themselves under the spell, and the Mob-like pushiness, of Michael’s celebrity,” wrote Owen Gleiberman in Variety. “They thought he was creating opportunities for their children that might otherwise be taken away. And once inside their homes, he seemed the soul of gentleness.” Advertisement Robson and Safechuck filed civil suits against the estate of Jackson in 2013 and 2014. Both cases were thrown out for technical reasons; there was no ruling on the merits of their claims. The stories they tell are of a piece with other stories we’ve been hearing about for a quarter of a century. In 1993, the father of a 13-year-old boy named Jordy Chandler accused Jackson of engaging in sexual acts with the boy. The criminal case was closed for lack of evidence, but Jackson agreed to pay out a sum reported by Court TV to be nearly $25 million. In 2004–05, Jackson was accused in an 18-month trial of molesting and otherwise abusing Gavin Arizo, a 13-year-old boy. Jackson was acquitted of all charges, but the evidence that emerged was disturbing. Several adults claimed to have witnessed acts of molestation, but Jackson’s lawyers were able to raise reasonable doubts about their credibility for various reasons. Some were disgruntled former employees; some had previously testified that they had seen nothing. To some extent, we as a society have set aside the many horrific and entirely credible claims against Jackson simply because we want them not to be true; for the same reason, Bill Cosby got a pass for a surprisingly long time. Jackson’s unfortunate early demise, his apparent closeted homosexuality, and his wounded, childlike nature have made fans fiercely protective of him, with the media largely sidestepping the issue since he died in 2009. What punishment can be visited upon him posthumously? Should he be erased from the culture the way Cosby has been? Should radio stations and deejays stop playing his many great records the way broadcasters have stopped airing The Cosby Show? I’m not sure they should. But the label of serial child molester must be forever attached to Michael Jackson’s name. It should be reiterated constantly like an anti-honorific, the way we take care to refer to President Carter or General MacArthur.<doc-sep>“They Shall Not Grow Old” is a tribute paid by the present to the past, and what a gorgeous gift it turns out to be. The past is the army of invariably anonymous British soldiers who brought bravery, stoicism and grit to the years of trench warfare on the Western Front that made World War I a cataclysm unlike any seen before. The present is the kind of extraordinary state of the art computer generated special effects typically used to make invented superhero antics feel more real they have a right to. Orchestrating this exceptional past-present hookup is Peter Jackson, director of “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit” trilogies, a master narrator who uses his feeling for visual detail and interpersonal drama to make those departed men feel as alive as you and me. Advertisement Playing two days only (Dec. 17 and 27) at some 60 Fathom Events theaters across Southern California, this documentary began because of Jackson’s love of and devotion to his own grandfather, who served with the 2nd South Wales Borderers during the conflict. Himself very much a World War I buff who even collects vintage aircraft, Jackson was immediately energized when Britain’s Imperial War Museum asked him if he would be interested in doing a film to commemorate the 2018 centenary of the armistice. In fact, as it developed, the project so involved Jackson that what was to be a 30-minute short developed into a 99-minute feature that earned an impressive $730,000 at the box office during its one-night-only debut in Britain in October. In case you’ve never seen rickety black and white World War I era newsreel footage, “They Shall Not Grow Old” starts with a glimpse of it, which makes what it ends up with that much more impressive. The years-long project, which involved both the Park Road Post Production company in New Zealand and Stereo D in the U.S., was enormously complicated on both a visual and audio level. After receiving hundreds of hours of footage from the museum, whose archive is among the world’s largest, the first order of business for Park Road Post was cleaning the film up, removing dust, scratches, tears and other flaws. Then there was the tricky question of timing, of getting footage that was hand cranked at a variety of speeds to all sync up to today’s 24-frames-per-second standard without looking speeded up or slowed down. Next came colorization, a process that went to extraordinary lengths to achieve accuracy, including trips to actual footage locations to take thousands of reference photos. No detail, not even the color of a button, was too small to get right. Advertisement The same kind of meticulousness went into the soundtrack, where sounds like horses hooves and footsteps in the mud were layered in. Where soldiers could be seen talking to the camera, lip readers were employed to figure out what they were saying and local actors hired to make sure the accents were correct. Also on the audio side, once Jackson and his team decided against conventional narration, they reached out to the BBC archives, which had 600 hours of WWI veterans talking. All of it was painstakingly listened to, with the voices of more than 100 men used extensively in the film. Once the last step, the conversion to stereoscopic 3D, was taken, the creaky footage was so transformed that the lifelike realism that resulted is little short of reincarnation. Advertisement Instead of feeling like we’re looking at ancient times, we see these men as our contemporaries, flesh of our flesh. Jackson has said that he feels that “restoration is a humanizing process” and you can unmistakably see why. Persuasively edited by Jabez Olssen, who makes what must have been an impossible job look easy, “They Shall Not Grow Old” tells this story chronologically, starting with eager young enlistees and ending with inevitably wiser veterans. One of the fascinating through lines is that almost all the young soldiers — and some were as young as 14 or 15 — enlisted because they thought it would be an adventure, over within months and too exciting to be missed. They soon found out differently, and we hear about the desolation, the dead bodies, the rats, the lice and the poison gas. Advertisement We hear about things rarely mentioned, like the existence of brothels in almost every French town, and also see images rarely seen before, such as a row of men sitting on a log over an open pit that functioned as a one-size-fits-all latrine. We also, perhaps most poignantly, hear what these men thought after the war, when civilians had so little idea of what they’d experienced that talking to them proved futile. One of the gifts of this exceptional film is that we in the future can see their wartime lives more vividly than their contemporaries ever could. ----------- ‘They Shall Not Grow Old’ Rating: R, for disturbing war images Advertisement Running time: 1 hour, 39 minutes Playing: Dec. 17 and Dec. 27, Fathom Events theaters across Southern California ----------- ALSO Advertisement Justin Chang’s best movies of 2018: ‘Burning’ and ‘First Reformed’ lead a year of mystery Mark Olsen’s best movies of 2018: ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’ stands out in a year that tried to make sense of madness Kenneth Turan’s best movies of 2018: ‘Black Panther’ and ‘Leave No Trace’ top a banner year kenneth.turan@latimes.com Advertisement @KennethTuran<doc-sep>
With the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies already under his belt, director Peter Jackson is someone who seems to love nothing more than a challenge. The more daunting, the better. With his latest project, he’s taken on another epic one: How to make World War I – an event that’s now 100 years in the past – seem fresh to moviegoers who regard it as history as ancient as the Pharaohs. With his haunting and vibrant new documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old, Jackson was tasked by the Imperial War Museum to rummage through their vast World War I archives and present them in a way that speaks to a 21st-century audience. He accomplishes his mission beautifully, bringing the fading past to life with extraordinary urgency. Jackson and his team digitally restored 100 hours of footage of British soldiers on the Western Front – a harrowing theater of combat marked by physically and psychologically grueling trench warfare, horrific Mustard Gas attacks, and an entire generation’s loss of innocence. By coupling century-old footage with the voice-over accounts of veterans recorded in the ‘60s and ‘70s, he has come up with a sort of magic trick that hits you in the gut. Nowhere is this feat more stunning than 25 minutes into the film, when the jerky, hand-cranked black-and-white images we’ve been watching transition into 3-D color. In that moment, you experience an uncanny sensation, where suddenly these young soldiers – some just naïve, eager boys in their early teens – seem to come alive, speaking to us directly and with immediacy, closing the gap of time. It’s a totally immersive experience unlike anything you’ve seen before. There is a sort of gee-whiz beauty in the technical feats Jackson has pulled off. But also ugliness – the ugliness of war: Dead bodies piled one on top of another being swarmed by rats; amputations to stave off gangrene; lice, dysentery, and the everyday horrors of life on the front that few civilians back in England would ever be able to truly comprehend. Now, 100 years later, the dead speak to us. And finally, we can understand…to a degree. That is the miracle of They Shall Not Grow Old. Even after sitting through the film’s 99 minutes, we may not truly know what these baby-faced soldiers went through. But there’s at least a better understanding. And, in that, Jackson has provided an admirable service that never, not even for a second, feels like a dry history lesson. A