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22 May 2026, 5:19 am
Earlier this Friday, filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma explained why he has a love-hate relationship with pop icon Michael Jackson. The long post starts with a seemingly incendiary statement: “I hate Michael.” Then, he shared an incident that came to his mind after his recent viewing of the pop legend’s biopic, starring the singer’s nephew Jaafar Jackson.
Ram Gopal Varma wrote, “After watching Michael film , my memory went back to that horrible day June 25 th , 2009 when I slept late with the television still murmuring like a ghost in the darkness of my room , and as I groggily woke up in the morning and my eyes went to the screen to see those terrible white letters against black: “Michael Jackson is Dead.” For several long seconds,this must be a nightmare, I thought. Why the hell would I even dream something so horrible? But the banner on the tv stayed and the news ticker kept crawling.”
The fact that Jackson was indeed dead dawned on the filmmaker a while after seeing the headlines from back in the day. “I finally realised the impossible had happened,” the filmmaker wrote, reminiscing about the sad day in the world of entertainment.
Then, Ram Gopal Varma recalled an incident from back when he was pursuing engineering. “Back in my engineering college days in Vijayawada, on January 2nd 1984 , a friend dragged me into a dingy video parlour, insisting I had to see something. The lights got switched off, and then THRILLER hit me like a punch in the gut It was not just a song or a dance. It was an invasion. My eyes, conditioned by a lifetime of mediocrity were violently pried open. The production, the choreography, the seamless ecstasy blended into one single divine entity .. it was spectacle on a level I had never imagined possible and at the centre of that storm was him. MICHAEL JACKSON,” the filmmaker wrote.
The director expressed
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