Naming Neverland: Michael Jackson, Peter Pan and the Lawsuit That Never Was

What do a notorious $28 million home, a $450,000 oversized check presented to Princess Diana, and a $150,000 wire transfer for a witch doctor to curse Steven Spielberg... have in common? Correspondent Yourgo Artsitas wondered if Michael Jackson — rejected by Hollywood in his prime — made a deal with the palace, for the perpetual rights to re-brand himself as Peter Pan. The answer involves a Spider-Man tombstone, sacrificial cows, Rufio, the Bible, the very idea of innocence, and lots and lots of lawsuits. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

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• 2:56Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.

• 3:08Pablo Torre?

  Right after this ad.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  You're listening to Giraffe Kings Network.

• 3:27Pablo Torre?

  We have been trying to figure out the best way to tell this particular story, Yorgo.

• 3:32Speaker 03

  Yes, quite challenging, for sure.

• 3:34Pablo Torre?

  I think it has to start with one of my favorite things, which is a video I had previously never seen before.

• 3:42Speaker 03

  Well, you have to go through a significant rabbit hole to find it. And yeah, it has two of the biggest icons of the 20th century.

• 3:51Pablo Torre?

  If the sales pitch on this episode is, briefly, "Do you want to see a video of the biggest celebrity in the world in a way you've never seen him before?", I'm like, "Okay." So let's hit play.

• 4:05Pablo Torre?

  So, explain what we're seeing here.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  We are seeing Michael Jackson, dressed in his most Michael Jackson-ness, leather everywhere.

• 4:15Pablo Torre?

  Military-style regalia.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  A jerry curl.

• 4:20Pablo Torre?

  Michael Jackson, making his way down this hallway, past this receiving line of greeters.

• 4:26Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 4:27Pablo Torre?

  You think, when you watch this video, that, oh, they're here to see Michael.

• 4:32Speaker 03

  Yes. You would assume so, because he's the most famous person on planet Earth at this time.

• 4:37Pablo Torre?

  This is 1988?

• 4:39Speaker 03

  1988, yes.

• 4:41Pablo Torre?

  He has had already the number one album of all time, Thriller.

• 4:45Speaker 03

  Followed it up with Bad, and he is currently touring Bad around the world.

• 4:51Pablo Torre?

  And so everybody's like, teetering, on edge.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Just standing in line like it's like this high school lunch.

• 4:58Pablo Torre?

  Michael Jackson is fidgeting. Hello, happy to be here. How does it feel to be meeting the royalty tonight?

• 5:07Pablo Torre?

  Very exciting.

• 5:13Pablo Torre?

  His feet look like they are nervously tapping on the brown wood floor of this long hallway in England, because who is now arriving?

• 5:22Speaker 03

  Boom, we got Prince Charles then, now King Charles, just arriving and glad-handing immediately.

• 5:29Pablo Torre?

  Great, great double-breasted suit, purple tie. And behind him, by the way, an even bigger star than a literal king, who is now dwarfing, by the way, the king of pop.

• 5:40Speaker 03

  Yes, the iconic Princess Diana. Just looking like the epitome of grace.

• 5:50Pablo Torre?

  Michael Jackson almost seems to be auditioning.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 5:53Pablo Torre?

  For a role of some sort.

• 5:55Speaker 03

  He's so sheepish.

• 5:58Pablo Torre?

  It all raises the question of like, what are they here to do?

• 6:02Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 6:02Pablo Torre?

  In this hallway in England? And there's, you'll go, a true childhood memory giant check.

• 6:12Speaker 03

  Be the Happy Gilmore big checks, as it were.

• 6:14Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  They had just a big one with the Bad logo from his album, and a Pepsi logo, and it is worth $450,000.

• 6:24Pablo Torre?

  Yes, and there's his, Michael Jackson's autograph, bottom right corner, in blue, cursive.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:33Pablo Torre?

  But the most curious detail that we are pausing this video to zoom in on is the recipient of this giant $450,000 check.

• 6:44Speaker 03

  Which would be the Prince's trust, which supports a building that houses and controls Michael Jackson's favorite thing in the entire world.

• 6:56Pablo Torre?

  Which is?

• 6:58Speaker 03

  Peter Pan.

• 7:01Speaker 04

  Because Peter Pan, to me, represents something that's very special in my heart. You know, he represents youth, childhood, never growing up, magic, flying, everything I think that children and wonderment and magic, what it's all about. And to me, I just have never, ever grown out of loving that or thinking that it's very special.

• 7:30Speaker 05

  Do you identify with him?

• 7:31Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 7:32Speaker 05

  You don't want to grow up?

• 7:34Speaker 04

  No, I am Peter Pan.

• 7:36Speaker 05

  Are you not your Michael Jackson?

• 7:38Speaker 04

  I'm Peter Pan in my heart.

• 7:40Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, the reason you reached out to me is because you have a theory that you're positing that this video, that nobody else has noticed in this way, happens to be the scene of a quid pro quo that enabled the most infamous celebrity home in America to be named Neverland Ranch.

• 8:01Speaker 03

  Allegedly.

• 8:03Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 8:20Pablo Torre?

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• 11:53Pablo Torre?

  All right, so before we dive into this Michael Jackson theory, I need you to understand the roots of the fascination on the part of our correspondent today, Yorgo Archides, who last appeared on our program to expose the fake democracy that was MTV's Total Request lot. And more recently, asked me a pretty weird question.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  Have you heard the story of the tombstone that had a Spider-Man on it?

• 12:21Pablo Torre?

  And I had not.

• 12:24Speaker 03

  So in this case, there was a boy who died, who was four years old, from a rare genetic condition.

• 12:31Pablo Torre?

  And this boy, it turned out, named Ali Jones, loved Spider-Man more than anything else in the world. And so after Ali died in 2018, just a couple of days before Christmas, actually, Ali's father attempted to honor him with a special gravestone etched with the image of Ali's all-time favorite Marvel superhero. At which point, Ali's father learned that his family needed permission, permission from the company that owns Marvel, to do this.

• 13:01Speaker 03

  Disney, despite them writing for Request to use it, denied them to preserve the innocence and magic of its characters.

• 13:10Pablo Torre?

  And that quote about innocence and magic comes from the letter that Disney's permissions department had sent Ali's family, according to a viral article from the BBC, which also noted that this was simply policy. Disney extended their sincere condolences to Ali's family. But what this letter explained is that Walt Disney himself had once ruled that Disney characters could never be featured on headstones or memorial markers or funeral urns.

• 13:41Pablo Torre?

  And this got your go thinking for years now about the use of litigation on the part of these brands to protect the purity of their characters, of their intellectual property, and how, in at least one extremely conspicuous case, this somehow did not happen.

• 14:04Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 14:05Pablo Torre?

  And you were like, I wonder what the most obvious example of this would be.

• 14:11Speaker 03

  Of this would be. And it 100% would be Neverland Ranch.

• 14:15Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 14:16Speaker 03

  And why did they never pursue it?

• 14:17Pablo Torre?

  Which struck me as a really good question to find out about, because why did the entity tasked with defending Peter Pan not do the thing, the Spider-Man logic thing? Why wouldn't they demand that this radioactive global superstar with a traumatic childhood stop honoring and arguably corrupting this character that he loved to the point where he embodied it across the world?

• 14:46Speaker 03

  It was one of the most publicized celebrity pet hobbies, interests slash obsessions that was out there, and this was pre-Neverland. He's doing interviews and starts singing songs from Peter Pan halfway through.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  And I like creating magic. (singing) I'm in the cloud, soaring up so high. Watch me now, watch me now. I'm Peter Pan.

• 15:28Speaker 03

  He was very, very obsessed with it to the point that it was so well-known that South Park made an entire episode based on it.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  Dan, what you doing? Mr. Jefferson Hall, it's 1:30 in the morning. Look at me, I'm Peter Pan. Shumon, I'm a little boy forever. Hey!

• 15:50Pablo Torre?

  I mean, we should point out psychologically speaking, like, the diagnosis here is pretty on the nose.

• 15:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:55Pablo Torre?

  Michael Jackson didn't want to grow up, and here in Peter Pan is the embodiment, the literary embodiment, of a guy, a man, who never had to. That's the, that's the promise and the potential of Michael Jackson's love affair with this character.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  And on top of that, where do you go to become Peter Pan?

• 16:15Pablo Torre?

  Michael, according to the LA Times, in March 1988, paid $28 million for a 2,700-acre ranch in the Saint Inez Valley.

• 16:24Speaker 03

  Yes. It used to be called Sycamore Valley Ranch, and he recorded the music video for Say, Say, Say with Paul McCartney there earlier in the decade.

• 16:37Speaker 03

  And he just fell in love with it, and he wanted to purchase it and create his own little theme park.

• 16:43Pablo Torre?

  Right, named after the, the place in Peter Pan that is known as the Haven Where the Lost Boys Live, and are free from the meddling and the impurity of us adults.

• 16:59Speaker 03

  Yes, and Captain Hook, aka Joe Jackson.

• 17:02Speaker 04

  I like the Ferris wheel. It's a traditional, um, very old, you know, amusement exhibit. And it's, and it's soothing. It's not, you know, anything that's dangerous or anything. It's, it's just comfortable. Makes you wish and dream and...

• 17:19Pablo Torre?

  So we should establish here that, per your theory, nobody knows how Michael Jackson got the legal rights to call it Neverland.

• 17:28Speaker 03

  Yes, and it feels like one of those things that would obviously need to be a deal or some kind of contract.

• 17:35Pablo Torre?

  Well, Michael Jackson's estate, let's just also catch people up on this.

• 17:38Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 17:38Pablo Torre?

  Famously litigious.

• 17:40Speaker 03

  In a myriad of different ways.

• 17:42Pablo Torre?

  Right, Michael Jackson's estate sued his own mom at one point.

• 17:45Speaker 03

  It's just the culture that we live in. You have to keep it close to the vest and not allow anybody to use your intellectual property in any way.

• 17:52Pablo Torre?

  So Neverland, and Peter Pan, which again is the work of art that Neverland is inside of.

• 17:58Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 17:58Pablo Torre?

  Who owns the rights to that?

• 18:01Speaker 03

  The Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, England.

• 18:04Pablo Torre?

  Children's hospital, very famous over in England.

• 18:07Speaker 03

  Super, one of the most famous in the world.

• 18:09Pablo Torre?

  It's been around for, like, ever, basically.

• 18:12Speaker 03

  Charles Dickens was a big fundraiser for it, which just kind of puts it in perspective.

• 18:16Pablo Torre?

  You want to know how old this [BLEEP] is?

• 18:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:18Pablo Torre?

  Charles Dickens was...

• 18:20Speaker 03

  Was doing, yeah, the ink on the Magna Carta hadn't dried yet.

• 18:24Pablo Torre?

  But in this story, it turns out that Charles Dickens is not the writer that we are most interested in.

• 18:28Speaker 03

  No, not at all. Another very, very famous British author named J.M. Barrie, who was the author of the play Peter Pan, which was Peter Pan or the boy who would not grow up.

• 18:41Pablo Torre?

  And I thought this was a Disney movie the entire time.

• 18:43Speaker 03

  I think most people do. I did, certainly.

• 18:47Speaker 07

  My father actually did know...

• 18:50Speaker 03

  I spoke to David Barrie, the great, great nephew of J.M. Barrie.

• 18:55Speaker 07

  J.M.B., as we call him. He had this amazing flat overlooking the River Thames.

• 19:01Speaker 03

  So the play premieres in December 1904, and it truly is like nothing anybody's ever seen before.

• 19:07Speaker 07

  There's a moment in the play where Tinker Bell, you know, has taken the poison and is dying, and her little light is fading, and Peter Pan turns to the audience and says, "If you believe in fairies, you know, clap your hands, because that will save her life."

• 19:24Speaker 02

  If you believe, wherever you are, clap your hands, and she'll hear you. Clap! Clap! Don't let it die! Clap!

• 19:34Speaker 07

  And they didn't know whether the audience would respond to that. The audience instantly burst into a terrific round of clapping.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  She's all well now. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

• 19:55Pablo Torre?

  It was obvious from the first performance that, oh, this is gonna be a thing.

• 20:00Speaker 03

  Everybody got the idea of it. From there, it just went all around the world.

• 20:05Pablo Torre?

  So, as all of this business is mushrooming, the money, right? So like JM Barry is rolling in it, I presume, at this point.

• 20:13Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. It just kept ascending. Like, he met with Charlie Chaplin to potentially have him play Peter Pan. The snowball really started snowballing. I spoke to Andrew Birkin, who is the foremost expert on Peter Pan and JM Barry. He wrote a book called JM Barry and the Lost Boys.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  I'd spent probably about four months going through all Barry's notebooks. It's like, you know, 50,000 notes and his handwriting is almost impossible to read, but you gradually get used to it.

• 20:41Speaker 03

  And he also wrote a docudrama in the 1970s called The Lost Boys, and that was all about JM Barry. Birkin kind of explained very plainly how much he could give a [BLEEP] about the finances.

• 20:53Speaker 02

  They found all these uncashed checks in his drawers after he died. He'd been sent, you know, tens of thousands of pounds. He never even bothered to put them in the bank. He'd forgotten about them. So he was certainly not, um, you know, uh, adept at licensing and the financial side of it.

• 21:15Pablo Torre?

  So JM Barry is the Ricky Henderson of playwrights in like the 19th century.

• 21:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's a [BLEEP] nightmare for payroll accountants.

• 21:22Pablo Torre?

  He's framing his check.

• 21:29Pablo Torre?

  But this is where I should jump in to mention that the real-life inspiration for Peter Pan, for Neverland, for Wendy and Tinker Bell and the Lost Boys was JMB himself.

• 21:43Pablo Torre?

  JM Barry, it turns out, had lost his own brother in a tragic ice skating accident when they were young. And their mother was the one who said, quote, "Now he won't have to grow up to be an old man," end quote. And the Lost Boys, for instance, the kids who live in Neverland and never had to grow up, they were inspired by a family of orphans in Barry's neighborhood that JM Barry had taken in when he himself had grown up and become an adult. And that, in a nutshell, is why JM Barry was not obsessed with the profits of Peter Pan. This [BLEEP] was real to him. And this whole story had dark undertones that he had inserted for a very

• 22:28Pablo Torre?

  personal reason. And so what he cared about more than anything else was protecting the spirit of his actual play.

• 22:38Speaker 03

  But as it went around, went international, played everywhere, and then they eventually made a silent movie in 1924 of it.

• 22:53Speaker 03

  And after that, it seemed like he really gave up on all of the ownership of it because there became alterations to his actual play. And he's like, it's not my thing anymore.

• 23:03Pablo Torre?

  And according to Birkin, the JMB biographer, and Birkin's own life story, by the way, we'll figure into our story here a bit later, JM Barry starts workshopping an idea. I've had this idea. What do you think about me giving the rights of Peter Pan

• 23:23Speaker 03

  to the Great Ormond Street Hospital? And the great, great nephew, David Barry, actually confirmed that as well.

• 23:30Speaker 07

  The idea of giving the copyright to Great Ormond Street.

• 23:35Speaker 03

  Then one night, he's at a banquet with the Prince of Wales. He has a couple too many glasses of port.

• 23:39Pablo Torre?

  As one does.

• 23:40Speaker 03

  And he kind of gets the nudge that he needs. He was sitting next to the Prince of Wales. He said, you know what? I'd like

• 23:48Pablo Torre?

  to give Peter Pan to Great Ormond Street Hospital. And the Prince of Wales was the chairman or the president of the hospital at that point.

• 23:57Pablo Torre?

  Which explains why the Prince and Princess of Wales, Charles and Diana, in 1988, were in that video we started this episode with, receiving the giant $450,000 check from a nervous Michael Jackson. It had been a royal arrangement, famously, this donation thing that everybody knew to abide.

• 24:20Speaker 03

  Yes, except for there was one notable example that was kind of a nightmare, looking back.

• 24:25Speaker 07

  Because it was for the hospital, it was respected by everyone except Walt Disney. I mean, the Disney company, who always gave them Tuppence and, and really ripped them off quite badly in the early 50s with the cartoon.

• 24:39Speaker 03

  So I found out.

• 24:41Pablo Torre?

  I found out that Tuppence is a thing that I can say in everyday life.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:46Pablo Torre?

  What was that rooted in, that frustration with Disney?

• 24:49Speaker 03

  Walt Disney, you know, Birkin's best friend, went to go see the 1924 silent film that we've been talking about. And then later, when he was trying to make a movie, he approached the hospital and paid 5,000 pounds for the rights. If you look at how much money Peter Pan has made, it's made 87 million dollars at the box office. And then you think about the merchandising of it.

• 25:09Pablo Torre?

  Oh, man.

• 25:10Speaker 03

  And how many different iterations it is.

• 25:12Pablo Torre?

  So many green hats, you know, just Captain Hook swords, Tinker Bell, the fairy wings.

• 25:18Speaker 03

  And so like the value of Peter Pan to just make it for 5,000 pounds is just unbelievable. It's a hell of a deal for old Walt.

• 25:33Speaker 03

  Not only do they make just money hand over fist and continue to make money from it, but they Disney-ified it.

• 25:39Speaker 07

  You know, the Disney thing is, is, is a, is a bit of a travesty already. I mean, it just makes Peter Pan into this cute little cheerful chappie and all the dark undertones are eliminated. It's a very, very misleading version. I'm not saying it's a bad piece of animation, far from it. It's just that it, it is, it is not true to the real spirit of, of Peter Pan.

• 26:09Pablo Torre?

  It is familiar, this dynamic, insofar as a work of art has become, you know, commodified and become for popular consumption. This thing that now we forget the origins of, like, it's just now everywhere and we don't know why.

• 26:23Speaker 03

  Honestly, something that shocked me was that he popularized the name Wendy.

• 26:28Pablo Torre?

  So the name Wendy in the play originally, that was not a popular name?

• 26:33Speaker 03

  David Barry actually corrected me when I said that he popularized it.

• 26:37Speaker 07

  That's where the name comes from.

• 26:42Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, what I've found out already is that I can never eat a bacon double stack without thinking about JM Barry.

• 26:47Speaker 03

  If Peter Pan was not created, nobody would be able to have a Baconator.

• 26:50Pablo Torre?

  Thank you Barry family.

• 26:52Speaker 03

  The thing is about all this is that like, while those things did seep into culture and a lot of this stuff is just kind of omnipresent now, the hospital itself really was way more focused on the play productions.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  It was revived every Christmas except I think 1942 during the war, right up until the 1980s.

• 27:13Speaker 03

  So, in the 1980s, a movie adaptation of Peter Pan, another one, started going around Hollywood. And you will never believe the celebrity that was rumored to play old Peter Pan.

• 27:25Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I'm going to guess that his name may rhyme with, uh, Jekyll Maxson.

• 27:40Pablo Torre?

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• 29:30Pablo Torre?

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• 30:14Pablo Torre?

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• 31:00Pablo Torre?

  So this movie that you've been alluding to, I should disclose that this is my favorite rendition of all of the many, many, many, many renditions of Peter Pan that have seeped into culture. Hook.

• 31:20Speaker 02

  Let's fly! Oh my god, where are we going? To Never Never Land.

• 31:27Pablo Torre?

  This movie is my favorite. Uh, Rufio?

• 31:32Speaker 03

  Rufio?

• 31:33Pablo Torre?

  Rufio.

• 31:40Pablo Torre?

  I mean Dante Bosco, Filipino brother. I mean, this is my guy.

• 31:47Pablo Torre?

  Him being the leader of the Lost Boys, like, what was the development of this film like?

• 31:51Speaker 03

  Okay, so the development of this movie, which was essentially coming from Birkin himself, started in the early 80s, when he found out that Francis Ford Coppola, while he was editing Apocalypse Now, he's in the jungle, he's watching Marlon Brando, and he's like, "You know what? Let me escape through, uh, JM Barry."

• 32:10Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, "Let me tune out these exploding helicopters for a second."

• 32:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:13Pablo Torre?

  And "Let me crack open this biography of the guy who wrote Peter Pan."

• 32:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, "Let's go to Kensington Gardens, who cares." And so he ends up reading it and contacts Birkin, and they start like talking about developing it into a movie. And Coppola at that point is just hot [BLEEP]. Coppola, after Apocalypse Now, obviously he had done the Godfather movies, won Oscars, The Conversation, Patton, all of this [BLEEP]. He's coming in and he's like, "Okay, my, uh, production company, American Zoetrope, let's potentially do this." And so Birkin goes down to Hollywood and meets up with old Francis.

• 32:50Pablo Torre?

  And this is where Andrew Birkin's life story becomes quite relevant. And I alluded to this a bit earlier, but the guy isn't just some Peter Pan obsessive who wrote a book. Andrew Birkin was mentored by Stanley Kubrick, and had worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey. And he then became the first assistant director to The Beatles on their Magical Mystery Tour, and is also, by the way, the brother of the lady behind the Birkin bag. Uh, that's also true. And on and on and on. But in Hollywood, Francis Ford Coppola had invited Birkin to visit the enormous and fake Las Vegas that he had built for another film he was making called One From the Heart.

• 33:36Pablo Torre?

  And this Vegas set, didn't seem like a super logical business decision?

• 33:43Pablo Torre?

  And so Coppola asked Birkin, who again had these real Hollywood credits, what he thought.

• 33:50Speaker 05

  What do you think? What do you think? And I'm thinking, well, yeah, it's okay, but why didn't you just go to Las Vegas and shoot on location? Anyway, the film went belly up.

• 34:01Pablo Torre?

  Which meant that Francis Ford Coppola and his production company were no longer in the running, business-wise, to adapt the book, which became Hook. At which point, another director, who just happened to direct a production of Peter Pan at his own school when he was 11 years old, and also happened to be, at this point, a known friend of Michael Jackson as an adult now in the mid 80s, emerged.

• 34:29Speaker 03

  Enter Steven Spielberg. At the time, he was a good friend of Michael Jackson. And then rumors started flying around, no pun intended, that Michael would make a good Peter.

• 34:38Pablo Torre?

  Right. So there's a 1988 news report that we found. And the quote I'll just read here is that Michael Jackson has visited the great Ormond Street Hospital.

• 34:48Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 34:48Pablo Torre?

  The Peter Pan ward. And the article says, "He toured the rest of the ward tenderly kissing deformed babies on their feet. Michael, ringed by five burly minders, next went to the hospital's Peter Pan ward, named after the character he hopes to play in a film." Which is all to say that it sounds like the favorite to get this role of his lifetime is Michael Jackson.

• 35:14Speaker 05

  To put Steven Spielberg and Michael Jackson together would have made a huge amount of box office sense.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  And I like creating magic.

• 35:23Pablo Torre?

  If the algorithm was casting back in the 80s, this would definitely be the movie that we would have seen.

• 35:30Speaker 03

  Yes, and Birkin kind of dispelled any kind of notion that he might have actually been truly the favorite.

• 35:44Speaker 05

  I think Michael thought that if he told enough people publicly that he was Going to be Peter Pan, that somehow Spielberg would say, yeah, great, why not?

• 35:54Pablo Torre?

  So there's this article, this Entertainment Weekly article, 2011, in which Spielberg says to the magazine, quote, "Michael had always wanted to play Peter Pan, but I called Michael and I said, quote, "This is about a lawyer that is brought back to save his kids and discovers that he was once, when he was younger, Peter Pan," which is to say that, uh, Michael Jackson didn't get the job.

• 36:14Speaker 02

  That's enough! Okay, Mr. All right, show's over. Now you put that thing away. Now put it down before you poke somebody's eye out. You're not old enough to shave. What are you doing with a sword? And flying around with this? This is an insurance nightmare. What is this, some sort of Lord of the Flies preschool? Where are your parents? Who's in charge here?

• 36:37Pablo Torre?

  Robin Williams plays adult Peter Pan.

• 36:39Speaker 03

  And he's like a yuppie workaholic dad who needs to go to Neverland to figure out what's important in life.

• 36:46Pablo Torre?

  So how, how did Michael react to the news that he was not getting this role?

• 36:52Speaker 03

  If we smash cut to the early aughts, uh, there's a Vanity Fair article that sets a scene that's quite wild. Michael wired $150,000 to a bank in Mali, to a witch doctor named Baba, who, uh, would sacrifice 42 cows in a ceremony to curse Michael Jackson's enemies.

• 37:15Pablo Torre?

  The article, uh, it quotes the witch doctor, the voodoo chief, Baba, saying, "Steven Spielberg, begone."

• 37:24Speaker 03

  So if you can't be Peter Pan, what do you do? You live like Peter Pan.

• 37:29Pablo Torre?

  Man, and so this ranch that he again bought for almost $30 million that he named Neverland, the status of the naming rights, such that he can legally have the clearance to, to, to, to rebrand himself and his home in the image that he wants to be, is what? Where are we at with the status of the rights?

• 37:48Speaker 03

  So Jim Callahan, the former Prime Minister of England, has a wife, Audrey Callahan, who works on the Board of Gosh, and she proposes a new bill. That will make it so the Peter Pan royalties remain with Gosh in perpetuity.

• 38:03Pablo Torre?

  Whoa.

• 38:04Speaker 03

  Which I found out, there are only two works that have that distinction from David Barry.

• 38:10Speaker 07

  So Peter Pan became one of only two works that own permanent copyright in this country. And the other one is the Bible.

• 38:26Pablo Torre?

  So I know this episode is pretty bizarre at this point, on account of all the witch doctors and Spider-Man tombstones and Princesses of Wales and now the Bible. But this fact does need to be reiterated here, I think. Because what the great, great nephew of J M Barry says is actually true. In 1988, that historic bill was passed by English Parliament, and it granted the perpetual right to royalties for Peter Pan to Gosh, the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children.

• 39:01Pablo Torre?

  Which is just a remarkable testament to a remarkable play and a remarkable hospital. Because while copyright protection normally expires in Britain after 50 years, only the King James Bible and, yes, Peter Pan enjoy such protections forever. And so, speaking of timeline questions here, we should now recall what we have established already about the year that bill was passed, which was, again, 1988. Because 1988 was also the year that Michael Jackson bought the ranch that became Neverland.

• 39:40Pablo Torre?

  And 1988 was also the year that he nervously presented that giant cheque for $450,000 to Set Hospital via the Prince and Princess of Wales in that video Yorgo wanted to start this whole show with. Which is why Yorgo's theory about what Michael Jackson was trying to do there in that video, his whole theory about the quid pro quo that we're finally trying to fact check here,

• 40:05Pablo Torre?

  feels pretty linear.

• 40:10Speaker 03

  He's like, hey, let me hand this money out. Let me just kind of do this as a wink, wink, nod, nod. So when this does pass, you're not going to bother me if I decide to wear a whole, like a Peter Pan costume all the time, or if I want to name my ranch Neverland.

• 40:26Pablo Torre?

  Right. He is theoretically buying the protection. He's buying the, the role that Hollywood had denied him in perpetuity himself.

• 40:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's what corporations do, or really rich people do, when they donate to presidential campaigns. I'm going to give you this money now, but we kind of understand you're not going to get this money ever again if you don't help me out in the future.

• 40:47Pablo Torre?

  Right. The theory you have is that this is political favor trading.

• 40:51Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 40:52Pablo Torre?

  In broad daylight, and so this is a big allegation.

• 40:57Speaker 03

  Huge.

• 40:59Pablo Torre?

  Were you able to prove that your theory is true?

• 41:06Speaker 03

  It's complicated.

• 41:20Pablo Torre?

  So, Yogo, this is the part where we have to show people what's in the box.

• 41:24Speaker 03

  Yes, certainly.

• 41:25Pablo Torre?

  So, your theory again is that this is a quid pro quo. Michael Jackson is so deeply invested in being this version of Peter Pan that he is put towards this mission, $450,000 in his giant check, almost $30 million for the ranch. And in exchange, you theorize he gets the rights, the legal rights, in perpetuity. So the hospital, the children's hospital.

• 41:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:50Pablo Torre?

  What did they tell you when you confronted them with this massive theory?

• 41:55Speaker 03

  Well, I spoke to the appeal coordinator at that time, in the late 80s. How you doing, Robert? How's it going?

• 42:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm pretty good, Yogo. Except it's a Monday and it's quite late for me, and it's early for you, so I'm at the end of my day.

• 42:11Speaker 03

  His name was Robert Pike, and just to make it clear, the appeal coordinator, appeal means basically charity, fundraising.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  I was in right at the beginning of there being a concept of a Peter Pan office at Great Ole Miss Street Hospital.

• 42:27Speaker 03

  He told me the words I did not want to hear.

• 42:30Speaker 02

  No, not as far as I'm aware. I can't, I can't swear to that, but I'm pretty. I'm pretty sure I would know if that had been the case.

• 42:38Pablo Torre?

  So if the top authority at the hospital is telling you, is telling us, yeah, I didn't, I didn't see anything like that. What was this check for?

• 42:48Speaker 03

  Well, there are two options that I've come up with. One, that he was just being magnanimous. He's a very philanthropic person. That checks out.

• 42:57Pablo Torre?

  Right, and he'd visited the hospital before. So this is just like the general like, I want to support a good cause neutrally, without any sort of strings even vaguely attached. That's the one theory. But if you remember, Michael Jackson as the guy who paid a fucking witch doctor to curse Steven Spielberg, it sounds like, uh, theory number two, we can't rule out entirely.

• 43:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, there's just a chance that he was being proactive by donating this bunny, just in case litigation would eventually come up.

• 43:25Pablo Torre?

  Right. The through line through this entire episode has been litigation. There's been people suing each other. And so the next question is, a couple of years later, what's it like when the great Orman Street Children's Hospital, these good people you've been talking to, are watching from afar, Michael Jackson, become now the world's most famous alleged child molester?

• 43:47Speaker 05

  It was the sheriff's deputies who executed the search warrant of the Neverland Ranch.

• 43:52Speaker 04

  On the 18th of November, 2003, Neverland was raided by the police. Since Michael Jackson was accused of sexually molesting children, his dangerous tour has been plagued by controversy.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  In a four-minute statement, Jackson said allegations that he molested a boy are untrue.

• 44:09Speaker 05

  Michael Jackson says his accuser is among thousands of children. He's invited to his 2,600-acre Neverland Ranch in California to play in his amusement park, visit his zoo, watch movies, play video games, and feast on their favorite foods.

• 44:26Pablo Torre?

  What legal recourse did these people have? What did they consider, given that Michael Jackson was living at Neverland Ranch? The most famous manifestation of their whole trademark?

• 44:37Speaker 03

  I mean, this was by far the most interesting thing I got throughout all of my reporting. And that is that the hospital did not even consider it. And, uh, Robert Pike was nice enough to explain why.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  You'd rather be getting, uh, press coverage for, you know, groundbreaking treatments and this sort of thing, rather than the fact that you're chasing some, some music star. Because he's given his house the wrong name. You know. If you're going to chase somebody for calling their house Neverland, where would you end? You might have to go around the world and see who else had got a house called Neverland. There might be thousands of them, you know. I think in terms of litigiousness, we were far, probably still are far more relaxed than than you are in the States.

• 45:24Pablo Torre?

  This is mind blowing to me because this is the exact opposite of the Spider-Man graveyard logic.

• 45:31Speaker 03

  It's insane.

• 45:32Pablo Torre?

  That we talked about before.

• 45:34Speaker 03

  It's such a cultural blind spot that Americans are suey McSousersons and that we will just sue anybody.

• 45:41Pablo Torre?

  We are suey generous.

• 45:42Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 45:43Pablo Torre?

  When it comes to suing.

• 45:44Speaker 03

  We are super into suing.

• 45:46Pablo Torre?

  Robert Pike said, what am I gonna do? Sue all these people whose houses maybe, it's like, that is exactly what you would do.

• 45:53Speaker 03

  It's just what happens.

• 45:54Pablo Torre?

  It's remarkable that I did not consider it until this point in the investigation.

• 46:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like, hey, our intellectual property, we're going to make them stop or they're gonna have to pay for it.

• 46:06Pablo Torre?

  Because in America, we see these things like they're haunted houses, like bad things happen at a place that's bearing a certain name. We need to protect that place from being forever associated with Michael Jackson.

• 46:17Speaker 03

  Yes, I would say that in America, at the very least, there is an understanding that Neverland has negative connotations.

• 46:25Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 46:25Speaker 03

  But what I found out is that it might not be the case across the pond.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  You know, I think the fact that he named his ranch Neverland will probably quite quickly be forgotten. You don't think so?

• 46:38Pablo Torre?

  No.

• 46:39Speaker 03

  See, this is what I'm talking about.

• 46:40Pablo Torre?

  No, great, great nephew of J M Barrie, I do not think so.

• 46:44Speaker 03

  This is why we had to fight for our revolution because we just don't see the same way.

• 46:48Pablo Torre?

  No. Ever since we threw that teen to the ocean, it's very clear, we love representation.

• 46:53Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 46:58Pablo Torre?

  And we can quantify that love, it turns out, because a 2005 analysis that I found of legal fees by the esteemed Royal Economic Society in the UK found that the United States files roughly three times as many civil lawsuits as England does. And also, we spend roughly three times as much money on litigation overall. In fact, nobody on the planet spends more on lawsuits than, you guessed it, America. Which I think says less about Michael Jackson and Neverland and Peter Pan, and probably a bit more about Yorgo and his extremely incorrect theory,

• 47:42Pablo Torre?

  and the rest of us. Because we love lawsuits. We love torts. We love suing our fellow American for all sorts of things. Straight on till morning. But it does remind me, though, like, in a perfect sort of poetic way, like, the full circle nature of the story, which is that Neverland, this concept that represented a place where you are free from the concerns of adults.

• 48:12Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 48:12Pablo Torre?

  That then got co-opted by Michael Jackson to do allegedly terrible things, as we all know, such that it contaminated the concept of Neverland, in America at least.

• 48:20Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 48:21Pablo Torre?

  In London, in England, in Britain, the place where this originated, they are basically the Neverland of Neverland. A place where this never really mattered as much as it did out in the world of American adulthood.

• 48:38Speaker 03

  Peter Pan and Neverland are just still innocents and just living a terrific life. And everybody thinks of J.M. Barry when they hear Neverland, as opposed to here, when we think of some of the grossest allegations of all time.

• 48:50Pablo Torre?

  Yeah. Yorgo Archides, thank you for reminding all of us where all of this, both Peter Pan and this country, actually came from.

• 49:00Speaker 03

  Torts, baby, torts. That's where we're at. That's where the money's at.

• 49:05Pablo Torre?

  Please don't sue us.

• 49:15Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.

• 49:21Pablo Torre?

  And I'll talk to you next time.

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