Hollywood Reporter.com reports that Sony's bid has increased for the Michael Jackson concert rehearsal footage shot by AEG before his death. With at least four other studios reportedly in the chase (Fox, Relativity, Paramount, Universal), Sony is offering $60 million for the rights, with plans to release it theatrically in October. Sony owns the rights to Jackson's music library.

Initial reports were that Sony intended to debut the quasi-concert flick around Christmas. Now that timetable has been moved up to Halloween weekend. You know, when the zombies rise up.

Meanwhile, B-movie filmmaker Bryan Michael Stoller claims that he and Jackson had worked for seven years on a movie adaptation of the book They Cage the Animals at Night by Jennings Michael Burch. The book is based on Burch's childhood experiences bouncing around foster homes, a situation to which Stoller claims Jackson felt closely connected.

You can hear Stoller telling his side of the story, plus Jackson asking Burch about his experiences in the video clip posted above.

"Michael told me often he felt like he grew up as an orphan, like a foster kid, because he never was in one home," Stoller told Hollywood Reporter. "To him every hotel was like a different foster home. He said he used to sit in the window and see kids playing outside and cry because he couldn't be part of that."

The movie approached production with a budget of between $12 million and $20 million through Icon Productions (home to another, umm, unusual artist, Mel Gibson) but was shelved. Details of when and why are sketchy, with Icon and Stoller each claiming various degrees of interest/disinterest. Stoller claims that three months before his death, Jackson proposed making They Cage the Animals at Night as an indle for $8 million.

Stoller previously worked with Jackson on the 2005 straight-to-video comedy Miss Cast Away and the Island Girls, starring Eric Roberts and Charlie Schlatter. Blockbuster Video briefly offered the movie but pulled it after Jackson's child molestation case blew up in the media. It's so obscure that I didn't notice it referenced in the postmortem orgy of Jackson memorials, much less hear of it before.

Miss Cast Away and the Island Girls is available for $14.99 plus shipping at Amazon.com.

The attached video clip also includes a chunk of Jackson's cameo appearance in that movie (as the world's savior, no less).