Us Magazine got an exclusive copy of footage shot the day Michael Jackson’s hair caught fire on the set of a Pepsi commercial he was filming with his brothers in 1984. The magazine says that the damage from the accident may have started Jackson off on a life of painkiller dependency.

Us has been promoting the footage widely; the NYT today ran a short story saying that Pepsi claimed no knowledge of how the footage was leaked.

Wherever could it have come from?

The accident is a footnote to a footnote (the Pepsi campaign) to the batshit craziness that surrounded Jackson and his ludicrous family in the year or two after Thriller came out. The Victory Tour embarked upon by him and his brothers was one of the biggest organizational debacles in entertainment history.

The allegedly in-control Jackson was pressured by his family to go on tour with his brothers. Fair enough. But instead of simply hiring a promoter and setting up a simple and potentially astronomically lucrative MJ/Jacksons tour, Jackson let his brothers be in charge of it.

The first thing they did was hire Don King, which set the tone for the events to follow. For some pointless reason, Jackson’s parents were enlisted as producers, allowing them to skim a percentage off the top. Jackson quickly grew to distrust King in particular (who started the process off with a buffoonish press conference) and the set-up in general, and started bringing in his own producers, which created the predictable organizational chaos.

King had sold the Pepsi commercials on his own. (The Pepsi deal is often cited as an example of Jackson’s alleged brilliant business sense.) Jackson didn’t want to do them, and apparently tried to get out of them, and when he couldn’t limited his appearances as much as possible.

The fire happened when a small incendiary device went off too close to Jackson’s head. The footage looks a little scary, and the Jackson camp played up the injury mightily. But J. Randy Taraborrelli’s The Magic and the Madness says that the third-degree burn that resulted ultimately turned out to be the size of a quarter. I’m not minimizing the danger to Jackson, just relating the facts as they’ve been reported.

Jackson held up Pepsi for a while, and finally settled for a payment that was double of what he was making for the Pepsi commercials. (Taraborrelli says he donated the money to charity.)

So, two points: One, Where did the footage come from?

Taraborrelli: “As soon as the accident occurred, [Jackson manager John] Branca’s partner, Gary Stiffelman, seized the tape from the cameramen and took them. Pepsi didn’t have any footage. Michael had it all.”

I have two theories. One, a member of the Jackson family had a copy of the tape and sold it, LaToya style, to Us. Two, Branca, back in the picture as the executor of the Jackson estate, slipped it to the magazine.

So who stands to gain from its release? The angle Us is taking in its coverage, that the Pepsi accident got Jackson started on painkillers, points toward Branca, who might have released it with an agreed-upon editorial angle to jump-start a campaign to repair the mightily tarnished Jackson image.

If, a year from now, tawdry details of Jackson’s drug use have been dribbling out from the various medical and police investigations, a meme floating around that it all goes back to a tragic accident will give Jackson’s fans something comforting to think about when the truth is a little grimy.

Finally, it should be noted that the commercial itself featured a rewritten “Billie Jean,” with words like “It’s a whole new generation” replacing “Billie Jean is not my lover.” Jackson was pimping out the best song he would ever write to sell his fans sugar water.