Jacko's star rises again

NEW YORK - You would hardly know Michael Jackson is no longer with us. Certainly, it is a long time since he has been so successful.

Only four months after his death, the King of Pop has a new single, a movie coming out and new accounts of his life hitting the bookshops of America.

It seems that the period of mourning for the tragic star's untimely death, apparently caused by an overdose of painkilling medication, is well and truly over.

But the period of cashing in on his talents has only just begun. Paradoxically, it has already reaped the sort of success and rewards that eluded Jackson in the final years of his life.

Few stars have had an afterlife so high-profile as Jackson has had since he was declared dead in a Los Angeles hospital on June 25.

His song This is It is getting huge radio airplay. A movie about his preparations for his doomed farewell concert tour could end up becoming one of the biggest box-office hits, some forecasters predicting it will make US$250 million ($330 million) in its first five days.

He has been nominated for four American Music Awards.

Half a dozen books have been released or are pencilled into publishers' lists.

This Halloween, as America dons fancy dress for the biggest party night of the year, the most popular costume is expected to be Jackson.

"For all but his biggest fans, the mourning is over," said Professor Dann Pierce, an expert in popular culture from the University of Portland.

"He is now settling into the same list of great names that contains Frank Sinatra and Elvis. It is all about his legacy and, of course, there is a lot of money in that."

Nothing sums that up more than the buzz surrounding This is It, the movie that shares a title with Jackson's current new song.

Nikki Finke, founder of the Deadline website and one of Hollywood's best-known journalists, revealed that executives with AEG - the concert promoter that had been working with Jackson on his comeback tour - expect the film to earn US$250 million in ticket sales.

Such figures might seem laughably optimistic to some. But pre-release sales have been impressive - thousands of cinemas across the US and the world are already sold out for its release next week.

When it opens, the movie will be showing on 3000 screens in the US alone and 8000 more worldwide.

"It would be extraordinary if they are right and it makes $250 million that quickly. But that does not mean it is impossible," said Finke.

"He's big in Asia. He's big in Europe. He's big in many places that we just don't know about. There is no precedent for a movie like this."

Nor is there precedent for the potential profits.

The film is being released for a limited run of two weeks in a canny marketing move aimed at squeezing as much interest - and as many box-office dollars - out of the project as possible. The content of the film has been kept a closely guarded secret, but Finke has spoken to people who have seen it.

They say it is more than just a film for Jackson fans but also a genuine study of how a famous artist crafts his work.

"This is not just Michael Jackson worship. It is an attempt to look at the artist's creative process. This is much more than a concert movie."

The final judgment on that will be for the public to decide when the movie comes out. But no one can deny that Jackson's death, while a tragedy for his family and friends, has turned out to be one of the world's greatest ever marketing opportunities.

At a stroke, his demise wiped out the legacy of child abuse allegations, his bizarre personal appearance, his freakish personality and his ill health.

Needless to say, a soundtrack album to go with the film is also being produced. As AEG president Randy Phillips said after Jackson's death: "He was our partner in life and now he's our partner in death."

If the film is a box-office success, that could prove to be a very lucrative partnership. In the week after his death Jackson's music was snapped up across the globe.

A similar pattern emerged with book sales. New ones have been released and old ones reissued and updated.

One of them, The Michael Jackson Tapes, has had a print run of 400,000 copies. It is made up of tapes made by a New Jersey rabbi who met Jackson in 1999 and later recorded numerous conversations with him.

Other books include reissues of biographies and one called Michael Jackson: Before He Was King.

Like the film and the rabbi's book, it consists of material - in this case photos - that would have been unlikely to see the light of day until Jackson's death suddenly turned it into a potential goldmine.

Indeed, the cashing in on Jackson's body of work does not require quality to sell in large numbers.

His current song was apparently recorded in sessions for the 1991 album Dangerous, but wasn't used then, and now . critics have been markedly tepid.

But the demand for the song is so great that Sony has refused to release it as a single, instead putting it on an album to boost sales.

Yet that song is likely to be just the tip of the iceberg of unreleased material.

Considering Jackson's long career, there are probably many such songs lurking in the vaults, each one a potential big pay day.

Of course, America has a long history of exploiting its celebrity icons, especially those who died prematurely.

New photos of Marilyn Monroe still turn up and generate headlines.

Rapper Tupac Shakur released only four studio solo albums while he was alive, but - with the new release Shakurspeare set for next year - will have produced a seven albums since being shot dead in 1996.

But no one has been capitalised on quite so quickly after death as Jackson.

He went from a cash-desperate freakish figure to a money-making icon overnight.

"None of this [success] would have happened had he been still alive and able to just go on tour," said Pierce.

But amid all the hype, the money-making excess and the continuing legal battles over his estate and the guardianship of his children, a genuine cultural shift on Jackson is taking place.

When he was alive, his bizarre lifestyle and legal tangles overshadowed his musical contributions to American cultural life.

For many years, Jackson was more of a pop-culture joke than a musical genius.

Stories about his reclusive Peter Pan existence at his Neverland ranch filled newspapers.

His surgically altered appearance made him a butt of jokes and fodder for gossip blogs.

His court cases turned him into a pariah and prompted endless speculation about his sexuality.

Now his death has erased much of that and allowed his talent to shine through.

Now there is no snicker or bemused look when critics mention Jackson in the same breath as other musical heroes such as Elvis, Buddy Holly, Jim Morrison and John Lennon.

This month, a series of events, dubbed Thrill the World, will be held in honour of one of his greatest hits, Thriller.

In at least 400 cities around the world, from Kodiak in Alaska to Qingdao in China, people will gather on the same day to perform dance routines taken from the Thriller video. Organisers hope to get 270,000 people participating.

Few other stars - dead or alive - could ever hope to inspire such a thing.

"There are very few people who can stand in the same corner as him when it comes to being a songwriter and a performer," said Pierce.

Yet perhaps that is also the ultimate tragedy of Jackson's life.

It is hard to not to sympathise with a lonely man who spent his life in an unrelenting spotlight and for whom it took an untimely death for people to forget his dark side and love him once again for his music.

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