Michael Jackson: No laughing matter in ‘Bruno’

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From our friends at Company Town:

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’ (July 10), there apparently are limits: at the last minute, ‘Bruno’s’ filmmakers have cut out a sequence about Jackson and his sister, La Toya.

When the film was shown to audiences several weeks ago, ‘Bruno’ included a scene where Cohen’s title character -- a flamboyant Austrian fashion journalist -- conducts staged interviews with C-list celebrities, including Paula Abdul and 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 by Cohen’s conduct, which includes using kneeling Mexican laborers as chairs). Soon thereafter, La Toya leaves in the middle of the interview.

But when ‘Bruno’ was shown to Hollywood insiders at the film’s Thursday night premiere, the scene was nowhere to be found. The sequence was apparently deleted between Michael Jackson’s death in the middle of the afternoon and the commencement of the screening around 8 p.m.

‘Out of respect for the Jackson family, the filmmakers have decided to remove a small scene involving La Toya Jackson,’ a Universal spokesperson said Friday.

-- John Horn