Upsetting Day: Miss Castaway 🌭

One of the inadequate ways we describe our hot dog site is “we create joy by excavating the debris of a broken world.” That’s not what we’re doing today. This isn’t one of those times where I find a wonderful catastrophe, where an artist’s ambitions and talents disagree hilariously. This is heartache translated into madness. Today I excavated only tragedy. Let’s talk about 2004’s Miss Cast Away and the Island Girls.

The movie is a spoof of seventy things across all genres, and I doubt I need to explain any further. It is random references to whatever with an almost cruel lack of jokes. It has the plot of every fourth grader’s first movie and the tone of that movie screened at their memorial service. The actors in it had no prayer of knowing which words from the script were meant to be the funny ones, so they deliver every line with a mix of boredom and wild guess. And it doesn’t help that their co-stars are untrained bikini girls and the future site of Pakistan’s most affordable CGI monsters. It’s worse than you could ever imagine, and some of that is failure, but a lot of it is foundational. If you were born after 1970, your sense of humor is simply too sophisticated to accept God from the Bible meeting the Incredible Hulk and R2D2 as a complete joke.

Let me see if I get my point across faster.

The auteur behind it, Bryan Michael Stoller, has directed four films starring Eric Roberts. One of them is about a Christmas dog, and another one is about a president dog. If you met someone who directed four Eric Roberts movies (two non-dog, two other) and also someone who married their 12-year-old niece, you’d remember it as the day you met two perfectly equal pieces of shit. But I bet there’s something on those movie posters you have questions about. Computer, enhance quadrant sector Michael Jackson.

What the fuck is Michael Jackson doing in this. There is no point in Michael Jackson’s career where you could approach him with a half-finished bikini script and say, “We still need to add a few Chewbaccas, somehow find $14,000, and come up with a name for our dinosaur pig, but this is a part you were born to pl– oh my god, JURASSIC PORK. Looks like shooting can start tomorrow! I assume you’re available, Michael Jackson?”

In the movie, Michael Jackson plays “Agent MJ” who is also the regular Michael Jackson and is… probably a spoof of his role in Men in Black II where he very briefly appeared as an alien named Agent M. It doesn’t matter. Michael wouldn’t know, and Bryan Michael Stoller wouldn’t know how or try to make it funny if it was. Maybe I should just show you; here’s 80% of Michael Jackson’s appearance in the film:

As I said, Agent MJ is also Michael Jackson, so when he appears in the sky, everyone’s reaction is “Hey, there’s Michael Jackson.” One of the bikini girls spurts, “Can you teach me how to moonwalk!?” Michael reads his lines like someone bought a Mark McGrath Cameo to tell you your grandfather got moved to hospice. And if it looks like Michael recorded it from an armchair in his den it’s because he did. But even still, how? Why!? Michael Jackson had been the most famous person on the planet for over 30 years. He may have acted like a squeaky little innocence sprite, but he was also a hard-working sex criminal who never met anyone who didn’t want something from him. You couldn’t trick him into this kind of gig, and he surely turned down things much better than this a million times. Why finally say yes to this unspeakable no-budget fart comedy written and directed by a man who argues with Eric Roberts’ manager about dog karate scenes?

I promise I’ll explain, but first, take a look at this fucking movie’s finale:

It’s frantic, inept shapes. A vomit of submediocre impulses. Michael Jackson could do anything he wanted, and he proved that by dying nowhere near any prison, so it is insane he chose to be a part of this. Did he get threatened? Blackmailed? No, Bryan Michael Stoller lured Michael Jackson into this trap by honeypotting him with his main weakness– childhood trauma. And I know this because Bryan accidentally confessed to it in the DVD extras. We’re done talking about the movie, by the way. Absolutely fuck that movie. We’re going to look at the dark manipulations that spawned it.

In the DVD extras, Michael Jackson and Bryan Michael Stoller share the same chemistry as Michael Jackson and someone who chased him into an airport bathroom. And that’s fine, there’s no way around that. If I was hanging out with Michael Jackson for the fiftieth time, I would say “Holy shit, you’re Michael Jackson; what’s it like being Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson!?” This is a real story: When I was a freshman in college I got second place in a fraternity beauty contest and my talent was Michael Jackson impersonation. I have been Michael Jackson at 19 costume parties. I took my wife and 18 less historically important women home dressed as Michael Jackson. I loved him so much, and the world will fall into the sun before we get another Michael Jackson, but my point is this: it is brutally obvious Michael wasn’t doing this movie as a favor for a close friend. He’s four thousand plastic surgery procedures being held on with aviator glasses, so it’s hard to read any of his expressions, but he does not seem to know or like this Bryan Michael Stoller guy.

Bryan tries to explain the complicated special effects they used to make it look like the Michael Jackson in the movie was not a frustrated, poorly lit man in his own library. It is a fascinating look behind the scenes at Hollywood magic. A real eye-opening treat for movie fans. Then they play all three of the lines Michael lazily recorded a few times. Not different takes, just the exact shots viewers saw in the movie, over and over. Bryan Michael Stoller took this seven seconds of footage and turned it into twenty minutes of DVD featurette and one third of the movie poster. Miss Cast Away and the Island Girls is a tiny morsel of Michael Jackson pulled tightly around the shattered bones of an idea, which is confusing because that’s also how you would describe Michael Jackson’s face in 2004. Again, I loved him.

This making-of featurette also lets us see a little of Bryan and Michael’s creative process. For instance, Michael sees his lines for the first time and Bryan goes, “I was thinking here, where you’re saying ‘she’s out of your life’ you could sing it, like in your hit song ‘She’s Out of My Life’?” Then Michael rehearses it, and because he’s a cute pixie baby with no clue how people behave, he fakes a little giggle. It’s brutal. It’s the same pity laugh you would give if a child’s last words were a knock knock joke. If you, as a writer, gave Michael Jackson a joke and he let out this condescending snicker, you would not only throw that joke away, you would vow to never write again. And yet Bryan Michael Stoller used this exact take, this rough footage of a cold script read-through that ended in his devastating humiliation, in the final film.

I don’t want to explain how hard the joke doesn’t land in the finished scene or how much a sudden Michael Jackson quip undoes the movie’s logic. It all sucks. Every time Michael Jackson appears it’s like they stopped the movie to play a slideshow of the director’s awkward trip to Neverland Ranch. But here in the extras, after they replay each second from that trip many times, from the same angle, we finally get an answer as to what the shit Bryan was doing in the King of Pop’s house. There’s no gentle way to put this, so here we go. Bryan says he wrote a screenplay based on They Cage the Animals at Night, an autobiography of a traumatized orphan, optioned by Mel Gibson to be co-directed by Michael Jackson. If I spelled everything right there, you should now feel the touch of Many’KinToo, Dark Lord of Bad Ideas.

So Bryan brought the author of the book, Jennings Michael Burch, out for a meeting with him and Michael. And surprise: it was so goddamn weird.

Jennings’ only friend as a child was a stuffed dog named Doggie, who he still had and brought with him to this business meeting. He introduced the filthy old thing to Michael Jackson who, to his credit, had no idea what to do with it. Jennings really thought Michael would be excited to meet it, but sentimental value doesn’t translate even to a magical love imp like Michael Jackson. He looked at it like it was somebody else’s birthday card and their name was Hitler Williams. If he still had lips we might have been able to read them, but his body language seemed to be saying, “Did you need one of my guys to throw this away for you, or…?”

The two men sat down to talk sadness, and Jennings gave Michael a second chance to give a fuck about his old stuffed dog. “Seriously, no thank you,” repeated the then-living legend. And this is where the fun ends. For all his talents, Michael Jackson did not know how to run a meeting, or have human conversations. The next words out of his mouth were, “I have a question. Um, with all the pain. And the stress, and the pressure. That you had to cope with.. did you ever? In your childhood… think about… it’s not worth it. Did you ever try and…”

Jennings finally understands what Michael Jackson is getting at in this casual meet-and-greet. He blurts out, “Suicide.”

Michael Jackson shrugs. “Suicide, yeah.”

Jennings says, “Definitely. Definitely.”

Michael Jackson patiently waits for his conversational skills to kick in. And after they don’t, he goes, “Yeah.”

And that’s the end of this fun behind-the-scenes look at the making of Miss Cast Away and the Island Girls, because Jennings has an emotional breakdown. Not about his attempts at taking his own life, but about the 1972 song about Michael Jackson’s pet rat, “Ben.”

“You brought me Ben. You brought me Ben,” he cries into the stuffed dog that failed to impress the King of Pop. And I’m not making fun of Jennings. Take away the toy and pick a better song, and this is identical to how most people probably talked to Michael Jackson. I simply want to remind you that every vanishingly precious Michael Jackson moment from this Eric Roberts sex “comedy” was shot right after this and from the same chair.

There are no right words to say to a man blubbering into a stuffed animal about the Jackson Five at work, so Michael hugs him and tells him, “That’s beautiful. That is so beautiful.”

With the hug complete, Michael tries to leave, but Jennings clings to him and whimpers, “Will we always be friends? Will we always be friends? Will we?” This is one question into their first fucking sit-down, and they have already Timecop-touched into a sadness blob. No production meeting has ever gone worse, and I was there when I asked Bas Rutten if he thought we should kiss. It is too much emotional trauma for a DVD extra on a straight-to-video titty romp by the writer/director of The Amazing Wizard of Paws. And I don’t know if this makes the story more or less tragic, but they never got around to making the film. Michael got groped by a hysterical man and coerced into the worst movie of all time for nothing. It would arguably be the saddest Michael Jackson story if Corey Feldman hadn’t written a chapter about their friendship in his book, Coreyography.

What is this story? Corey Feldman could have lied! We’ve seen pictures of him and Michael Jackson together! Corey could have said, “Yeah, we hung out a lot, I taught MJ how to navigate difficult conversations.” Or even, “We spoke on the phone, on a number I knew and did not have to guess by process of elimination.” He didn’t need to spend two pages detailing the process of going through every number, one by one, to find the one that reached Michael Jackson. Corey Feldman was friends with Michael Jackson the same way I was friends with exciting insurance rebates in 1998. This is a story about how one clever mathematician stopped The Cold Call Strangler, not a story of two best pals on the phone. Oh no, it’s not done.

If I’m understanding this, there’s a really good chance Corey Feldman has never spoken with Michael Jackson on the phone. By his own admission, Corey tried every number and most of them were not Michael Jackson, but if he did get lucky and someone picked up, he only knew it was Michael Jackson after 15 minutes of silence. And if the person who picked up started smashing the phone? That was Michael Jackson’s chimpanzee. Unless it was Michael Jackson himself, which Corey Feldman did not appreciate. It would arguably be the saddest Michael Jackson’s chimpanzee story if La Toya Jackson hadn’t visited Bubbles in 2010 to tell it Michael had died. Oh damn it, I carefully transcribed the whole thing.

In her 1089th desperate grab for Michael-adjacent attention, La Toya Jackson filmed herself shrieking for his chimpanzee to remember her, and it refused. It’s every kind of sadness at once, but its tragedy is eclipsed by the segment title Entertainment Tonight chose. “The Queen of Pop Visits Bubbles,” they called it. This is like saying “The Queen of Pop Pays Her Respect” to describe Michael’s nose glue lady dialing random numbers to find out where they’re holding the funeral.

After threatening to spit on her and then pointedly ignoring her, the ape has run out of ways to tell La Toya Jackson to fuck off. “Bubbles! Bubbles, bubbles!” she screams. “Bubbles!”

As panic sets in, La Toya tries screaming her own name at the chimp. It doesn’t work, and some long forgotten feeling, something close to self-awareness triggers inside her. “People can see you,” it tells her. “Make an excuse for this,” it pleads. “He– when Michael called my name he would– h-he… LA TOYA!” she stammers.

After screaming her own name doesn’t work, and her excuse for doing it trails off into gibberish, La Toya tries one more cope. She claims the chimpanzee, like many humans it is so like, is too shy to remember La Toya Jackson. It is not going at all how she pictured it. She is La Toya Fucking Jackson and was expecting the full ape enclosure celebrity treatment. These chimps and their bizarre game of pretending not to be familiar with La Toya Jackson disarmed her so much she completely forgot to tell her brother’s chimp he died.

Bubbles needs to hear this terrible news from a friend, so La Toya decides she can’t leave without doing what’s important. She goes back to the cage alone, and…

… grovels for Bubbles to remember her. Bubbles, you remember her. You remember her. You do, Bubbles. You do. Tell her, Bubbles. Bubbles? Are you not listening to me either, Bubbles? Bubbles? Bubbles. Bubbles.

Bubbles, don’t do this, Bubbles.

Bubbles.

Bubbles.

No one knows what La Toya was looking for that day. Maybe she expected the chimpanzee to turn to her and say, “La Toya, of course. I remember you from several head shapes and nine faces ago.” But it never happened. She begged, cried, and demanded, but the ape refused to remember her. She worried there was something she was forgetting to do, something having to do with this fucking dick monkey, but whatever it was couldn’t be that important. You remember her, right, Bubbles? It’s La Toya, Bubbles. La Toya!!! You remember her, Bubbles. Bubbles? Alright, forget it, Bubbles. Bye, Bubbles. You remember her, Bubbles. Bubbles. Anyway, that’s my review of Miss Cast Away and the Island Girls! ★ ⯨

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: SpaceJamFan, who legally cannot discuss their time on the Miss Castaway island.