Mick Jackson, the Palisadian Director Behind “LA Story” and “The Bodyguard,” Reveals the Terrible Truths behind “Big Lies,” Past and Present
By JOHN HARLOW | Editor-in-Chief
All photos courtesy of the Jackson Family
In one of the most harrowing scenes ever shot for television, in the monumental 1973 series “The Ascent of Man,” presenter Dr. Jacob Bronowski dips his hand into a shallow pond at Auschwitz and emerges with a damp fistful of weed and ashes.
This, he said, is the final remains of some of the four million people who were murdered at the Polish death camp.
These days you can catch the scene on YouTube. Bronowski’s febrile melancholia, reliving the loss of his family in such camps, still resonates painfully.
Unknown to viewers, one day before the scene was shot at Auschwitz, a future Palisadian filmmaker, then a junior at the British Broadcasting Corporation, “marked out” the scene by also sifting the cremains amid the bulrushes.
Mick Jackson was, with tender respect, preparing the way for the famed moral philosopher’s final monologue on the tangled nature of man. One that is still discussed in colleges today.
That dark shadow has never quit Jackson, even after he went on to direct blockbuster entertainments such as “LA Story” and “The Bodyguard.”
It was one reason why, a couple of years ago, Jackson returned to Auschwitz with actors Rachel Weisz and Tom Wilkinson to shoot key scenes for his latest film, “Denial.”
A circle was closed, Jackson told the Palisadian-Post last week.
Auschwitz is, said Jackson, who has lived in Upper Chautauqua for 27 years, as potent a monument to grotesque brutality as the human mind can encompass.
It is why he spent eight years steering “Denial,” about the Nazi legacy and the danger of “fake news,” to the silver screen.
And why the film, which got lost on its initial release last July, is now being released for the first time across Europe and Australasia.
In the era of the political “Big Lie,” a phrase invented by the Nazis, critics say “Denial” has become even more important since it was shot two years ago.
“The parallels between bare-faced lies told then and now have never been so obvious. From anti-vaxxers and climate deniers to Birthers, it’s insane,” said Jackson.
The Big Lie at the heart of “Denial” was promoted by David Irving, a British historian who crossed a professional line by distorting facts to “prove” that the Holocaust was a liberal fantasy, that “claims” about a systemic slaughter of maybe 11 million Jews, Roma and homosexuals between 1941 and 1945 were a slight on the reputation of Adolf Hitler.
The film recreates a British high court case where Irving, wounded that New York historian Deborah Lipstadt would accuse him of bending truth to his own agenda, sues for libel.
Written by famed playwright David Hare, critics have said Weisz is tone-perfect as the Brooklyn scholar battling not just Irvine but her bewigged barrister, played by Wilkinson.
The 1996 verdict hinged not only on outrageous “fake facts” but also whether Irving knew they were fake—a question more frequently asked today.
During filming, the real Irving lambasted the project, braying that Lipstadt should have been played by Ernest Borgnine, calling on fans to “watch out” for the movie.
Jackson became wary, looking over his shoulder every time he left his London apartment for a Sunday stroll through Mayfair. He has been here before.
When directing the 1995 HBO movie “Indictment: The McMartin Trial,” about Manhattan Beach parents accused of child molestation, a colleague’s house was burglarized, gasoline poured onto a writing desk and set alight.
Producer Oliver Stone insisted everyone had bodyguards after that.
That is only one incident in the biography of Jackson, a tall lean figure in a leather jacket with an ear for music and an eye for what he called “the poetry of the imperfect moment,” hiding visual elements in a shot to build intensity.
Born to working class parents in Essex east of London, Jackson was hooked on visual storytelling as a child as he listened to Wagner and created “storyboards” bringing the gods to life.
His scrambled education—an electronics degree followed by film school—prepared him for making documentaries at the BBC, including, in 1984, at the height of the Cold War, “Threads.”
This drama, exposing the fragility of social connections after a nuclear bomb, skirted around a 20-year ban on such dramas as a science film—and was met with silence.
“Usually if you make a successful TV show, that evening you get friends phoning you up. I got nothing. Nothing! Until the next morning, when they started saying they had not slept that night, which is what ‘Threads’ set out to do.
“Over the next few weeks, there was media discussion about whether Ronald Reagan saw ‘Threads’ because afterward he de-escalated the Cold War—that was hinted in a cartoon in The Times of London anyway. I know Reagan’s Secretary of State, George Schulz, saw it.
“We made ‘Threads’ for £400,000. Then ABC made something similar, ‘The Day After,’ with Jason Robards, for $7 million. At the BBC, we made spectacle on a budget.”
His next three TV dramas, “Yuri Nosenki, KGB” (with his old friend Tommy Lee Jones: “He has an incredible BS detector.”), “Life Story” with Jeff Goldblum as a co-discoverer of DNA (“Goldblum had a piano on set on which he would play ragtime with one hand while reading a paperback to get himself ready for a scene,” Jackson recalled.) and “A Very British Coup” (where the British left take power: a fantasy) all won major prizes.
So, inevitably, Hollywood started calling.
The first offering was Steve Martin’s sweetly mocking ode to the city, “LA Story.”
“I turned it down because I hated LA, everything it stood for. But Steve liked my ‘visual vocabulary’ and took me for a drive around his LA, showing me sights such as a pink marble palace built in a style he called ‘Urinal.’ And I saw LA through his eyes.”
One sign that he got LA? Angelyne, blonde performance artist, is in two of his movies.
“We mixed cinematic references—in one garden scene there are nodding statues, from Cocteau’s (1946) ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ I have one of the statues in my front yard today—with slapstick and romance. We shot it like an Impressionist painting.
“In the restaurant scene, where everyone is asking for different coffees, we shot through Dior stockings imported from Paris. And it worked. Steve is a very smart guy.
“During filming, the studio put me up on Mulholland, with views over both sides of the mountains. But there was nowhere to walk, and so I started looking for a place for the family.
“And on one perfect day, when everything worked, I found Pacific Palisades.”
Since then, the family—Jackson, Hilary Henson, a fellow BBC documentary maker, and their daughters, Holly and Poppy—have reinvented themselves.
Hillary became a noted sculptor and psychotherapist. His daughters, after Wildwood and Crossroads schools, run successful creative businesses.
And Jackson kept on working.
Kevin Costner recruited him for “The Bodyguard,” which generated the biggest selling movie soundtrack of the 1990s—Whitney Houston uplifting Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You.” She was, in those days, he recalled, a blazing talent.
Like “LA Story,” “Volcano”, too, is a lopsided paean to Jackson’s newfound city—although his BBC science colleagues may have blanched as a volcano erupts in the middle of Fairfax and Wilshire. It was created on the biggest “fire set” in history: a half-mile long parking lot of burning rubber in Torrance, deploying 2,000 people on set, half of them real firemen.
It was a romp, with Anne Heche coming out as gay at the premiere, but clashed with Pierce Brosnan’s volcano movie “Dante’s Peak.”
And in Hollywood no one can be unlucky. It’s contagious.
Jackson returned to his first love, becoming a first-call director on TV pilot shows where he got to create visual styles that would last longer than most cinematic releases; “Numb3rs,” “The Practice” and “In Justice” were all turned into serials.
He also continued to make thoughtful TV dramas, such as HBO’s 2010 “Temple Grandin,” with Claire Danes playing a gifted mathematician living with Asperger’s. It won Emmys galore.
So, after all this road, what are Jackson’s trade secrets?
“Television can give you more freedom to chase big ideas, but once the camera rolls and 200 people are looking to you for direction, there is no difference between TV and cinema. You want to tell the story in the most telling way possible,” he said. “I prefer to work with a handheld camera, which dates back to my documentary days. It gives you a flexibility and saves the budget.”
He likes to work with pairs of actors with contrasting styles.
“Like Jeff Goldblum and the classically trained Tim Pigott-Smith on ‘Life Story,’ or Gary Oldman and the more laid-back Dennis Hopper on ‘Chattahoochee,’ or Michael Keaton and David Suchet on HBO’s ‘Live from Baghdad.’
“They were bemused at first, and then they fed off each other.”
Also, as someone who often makes films about real living people, limit their access to the set. “When Gary Oldman was playing a penal reformer [who helped change Florida mental health laws], the real person would turn up at the side of the set smiling and waving. Not helpful.
“Rachel loved talking to Deborah Lipstadt on the set of ‘Denial,’ taking advice, but in the end had to say, politely, she was going her own way.”
And Rachel Weitz and Tom Wilkinson in “Denial?” There are some meaty clashes there.
“They work in different ways, but together, you can see that intensity that the story deserves. It is an important story for these times.
“I am so glad, and so sad, that in today’s climate, ‘Denial’ has become so relevant.”
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