Before the Biopic, There Was the Truth: Howard Bloom and the Michael Jackson Story That Came First

The world is buzzing. The trailers have dropped, the anticipation is building, and audiences everywhere are preparing to watch one of the most extraordinary lives in entertainment history unfold on the big screen. The Michael Jackson biopic Michael, released by Lionsgate and Universal Pictures, promises spectacle, emotion, and the kind of cinematic storytelling that only a $200 million production can deliver. With Jaafar Jackson cast to portray his legendary uncle , the film has already captured the imagination of fans across generations.

But before the cameras rolled, before the scripts were rewritten, before the reshoots and the legal negotiations and the studio announcements — one man had already told the real story. Not as entertainment. As truth.
His name is Howard Bloom.

Called “the greatest press agent that rock and roll has ever known” by Derek Sutton, the former manager of Styx, Ten Years After, and Jethro Tull, Bloom founded the biggest PR firm in the music industry and helped build or sustain the careers of the biggest rock-and-roll legends, including Michael Jackson, Prince, Bob Marley, Bette Midler, Billy Joel, Billy Idol, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, AC/DC, Aerosmith, Queen, KISS, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Run DMC, ZZ Top, Joan Jett, and Chaka Khan.  His client list wasn’t just impressive — it was the architecture of modern popular music itself.

And at the center of it all, in ways that no Hollywood production can fully reconstruct, was Michael Jackson.

Bloom’s memoir, Einstein, Michael Jackson & Me: A Search for Soul in the Power Pits of Rock and Roll, is not a celebrity tell-all. It is something far more rare and far more valuable — a firsthand account from the man who stood inside the machinery of superstardom and watched it operate up close. Bloom was not just an observer of fame — he helped shape it.  Where a biopic must imagine, speculate, and dramatize, Bloom simply remembers. He was there.

As Bloom himself has said, “When you’re at the center of the sort of attention-storm that hits when you’re working with a superstar, it’s as if the laws of physics change.”  That observation alone captures something no screenplay has yet managed to convey: what it actually felt like to be in proximity to that level of fame, at that particular moment in history, when Michael Jackson was not just a pop star but a force of nature rewriting the rules of culture in real time.

The result of Bloom’s career was staggering — $28 billion in revenues generated for companies like Sony, Disney, Pepsi Cola, Coca Cola, and Warner Brothers — accomplished not by chasing profit, but by focusing on passion and soul.  That philosophy, that insistence on finding the human truth beneath the commercial machine, is exactly what makes his book essential reading in this moment of renewed global fascination with Michael Jackson’s life and legacy.

The biopic will give audiences the spectacle. Einstein, Michael Jackson & Me gives them the soul.

Freddy DeMann, who managed both Madonna and Michael Jackson and produced twenty-two award-winning Broadway plays, said of Bloom’s writing: “It is amazing. The writing is revelatory.”  That endorsement, from someone who lived inside that same world, speaks louder than any studio press release.

As Michael ignites conversations in theaters around the world, Howard Bloom’s book stands as the indispensable companion — the document written by a witness, not a dramatist. For every audience member who walks out of that theater wanting to know what it was really like, the answer is waiting. Howard Bloom already wrote it down.

Einstein, Michael Jackson & Me: A Search for Soul in the Power Pits of Rock and Roll is available now on Amazon and wherever books are sold. For more information, visit howardbloom.net.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​