Why was the LaToya Jackson scene about Michael Jackson cut from the movie “Bruno”?”
The folks behind “Brüno” have suddenly grown a conscience – at least where LaToya Jackson is concerned. The raunchy movie, which stars Sacha Baron Cohen as a flamboyantly gay fashionista, relies in large part on ambush humor: Mr. Baron Cohen confronts unsuspecting people with wild behavior in hopes of eliciting a funny response. Ms. Jackson was one of his victims. Citing Michael Jackson’s death, Universal Pictures on Friday afternoon issued a statement saying that the “small” scene involving Ms. Jackson would be cut from the theatrical release. In the scene Mr. Baron Cohen (as Brüno) interviewed an unsuspecting Ms. Jackson to steal her brother’s phone number. He also pressured her to eat sushi off the torso of a naked man.
The folks behind “Brüno” have suddenly grown a conscience – at least where LaToya Jackson is concerned. The raunchy movie, which stars Sacha Baron Cohen as a flamboyantly gay fashionista, relies in large part on ambush humor: Mr. Baron Cohen confronts unsuspecting people with wild behavior in hopes of eliciting a funny response. Ms. Jackson was one of his victims. Citing Michael Jackson’s death, Universal Pictures on Friday afternoon issued a statement saying that the “small” scene involving Ms. Jackson would be cut from the theatrical release. In the scene Mr. Baron Cohen (as Brüno) interviewed an unsuspecting Ms. Jackson to steal her brother’s phone number. He also pressured her to eat sushi off the torso of a naked man. The edit was made in time for the Hollywood premiere of the movie last night, an event that inadvertently committed another Michael Jackson slight: his star on the Walk of Fame had been covered by red carpeting, flummoxing fans who had come to pay their respects.
Comedian Sacha Baron Cohen is a fearless, equal-opportunity offender, but when it comes to jokes about Michael Jackson in Cohen’s new film “Bruno,” there apparently are limits: At the last minute, the filmmakers have cut a sequence about Jackson and his sister, La Toya. When the film was shown to audiences several weeks ago, “Bruno” included a scene in which Cohen’s title character —- an Austrian fashion journalist —- conducts staged interviews with C-list celebrities, including La Toya Jackson. When Cohen’s Bruno character is interviewing La Toya, he asks about Michael Jackson and then takes La Toya’s personal digital assistant and begins looking for Michael’s telephone number. Cohen then begins dictating some numbers in German to an assistant (the suggestion is that they are Michael’s phone number) as La Toya becomes increasingly alarmed.
