On June 25, just hours after Michael Jackson died, Tim Patterson drove from his home in the Santa Clarita Valley to downtown Los Angeles with $60-million worth of film footage in his trunk.
As he sped down Interstate 5 in his green Lexus convertible, Patterson carried virtually all of the 140 hours of rehearsal footage from the late singer's planned "This Is It" concert series that would eventually be whittled down to the 112-minute movie that opened last week to a decent $34.4 million domestically and a much stronger $69.5 million overseas through Sunday.
Patterson, a commercial director who has occasionally worked in music over his 29-year career, was one of two camera operators hired by concert promoter AEG Live to record "This Is It" rehearsals.
Every night after work, he transferred hours of video shot by himself and collaborator Sandrine Orabona to two hard drives in his home office. The afternoon that Jackson died, Paul Gongaware, a producer of the concert and movie, called him with an urgent request: The footage, which had suddenly become uniquely valuable, had to be delivered to AEG's downtown offices immediately.
"I could have easily gone to TMZ and made a few million dollars," Patterson recalled with a laugh.
Instead, he began an unlikely odyssey in which a commercial director who had never worked on a feature film before became the only person besides Jackson's close artistic collaborators involved in "This Is It" from beginning to end. Together with longtime collaborator Brandon Key, also a commercial director and producer, Patterson worked on every cut of "This Is It," from the original footage given to the news media days after Jackson's death to DVD extras just recently completed.
"This will be the most important and incredible thing I do in my career," the 53-year-old said from his home office in the rustic environs of Castaic. "I never imagined I would get involved in concert rehearsals and end up making a motion picture."
Patterson's involvement began in May when he e-mailed Gongaware, whom he has known since the early 1980s, to ask whether there might be some role for him in preparations for the "This Is It" concert while he was on a break from other work.
Gongaware was by chance looking to start compiling behind-the-scenes footage. He hired Patterson and Orabona and put together a budget of $80,000. Over the next six months, using two $6,000 Sony cameras Patterson bought for the project, they worked six days a week, often until midnight, shooting performances and candid moments and interviewing dancers, musicians and others working on the concert.
