I'm guessing he backed out. Creating a documentary is a troublesome endeavor. I'm not very familiar with copyright laws (apart from the obvious: you can't use songs or pictures that don't belong to you to make profit etc), but the producers have to pay for the music they are going to use - what is MJ's fan documentary when there's not a sound of Michael Jackson's songs?
And the second option is that yeah, they were just looking for attention and approval. We might never know.
