|
IT WAS ALL A DREAM: The Making of Purple Rain.
He didn’t have enough star power to acquire funding and his director was barely out of film school. So how did Prince pull off one of the biggest gambles in pop culture history?
By Keith Murphy
It was ridiculous, really. Twenty-eight year-old Albert Magnoli, a young filmmaker fresh out of USC, had turned down the chance to direct his first feature film. Magnoli, whose only experience as a director was a short film on the Los Angeles music scene entitled Jazz, had been told that budding music star Prince Rogers Nelson wanted to make a movie entitled Dreams. But as he sat in a Los Angeles diner for a June 1983 meeting, Magnoli boldly told one of Prince’s managers Robert Cavallo that the dramatic musical—which centered around a talented yet troubled bandleader struggling to find redemption amid an abusive father and cut throat music scene—was too Hollywood. “I just told him, ‘What do you mean you pass…you can’t even get arrested.’” remembers Cavallo. “You don’t even have the money for the lunch that we are having. I asked him if he had a better idea and he said, ‘Yeah, give me a week.’"
A week later, on a seemingly endless, two-lane highway in Minneapolis, Magnoli was taking the ride of his life. A doe-eyed figure wearing a black trench coat, white flowery lace shirt and high heels sat silently behind the wheel of an otherwise nondescript BMW. Know this: the idea of Prince making a film was far-fetched. Aside from the Beatles and Elvis, Hollywood had little confidence in musicians to carry the expensive tab of a motion picture. The fact that this musician was Black, androgynous, X-rated and at times downright weird made the idea even more insane. Still, Magnoli had told Prince his vision of creating the greatest rock-n-roll movie ever seen on screen.
Suddenly the driver turned his head and said in a straightforward low voice, “Do you know me?” “I said ‘No,’ recalls a laughing Magnoli, who is speaking from his Los Angeles office a little more than 20 years after Prince crashed the Hollywood party with Purple Rain. “And Prince says, ‘Then if you don’t know me, how is that you’ve just told me my life story?’” Following the career-altering showdown, Magnoli moved to Prince’s hometown of Minneapolis and spent four weeks soaking up the artist’s personal and musical background to incorporate into the rough draft screenplay originally penned by veteran writer William Blinn.
Purple Rain was released in theaters on July 27th 1984 and promptly shook up the world. “Purple Rain is provocative…Prince is nothing if not an arresting figure,” praised The Washington Post. Moviegoers agreed. Shot on a meager budget of $7 million, the movie raked in a shocking $70 million dollars at the box office, becoming the 10th highest grossing film of the year. Equally impressive was its landmark soundtrack—which spent 24 weeks atop the Billboard charts. The Purple Rain album eventually sold over 16 million copies worldwide anchored by the omnipresent no. 1 single “When Doves Cry.”
Yet, the enamored fans that came in droves to get a glimpse of their hedonistic matinee idol had no idea of the struggles to make Purple Rain a reality. There was no news of Prince’s relentless fight for control on and off the movie set, which would inevitably lead to alienation amongst some of his co-stars. The public had no idea of the nervous script rewrites, budget hurdles, near-death accidents and filming in arctic Minnesota temperatures. But one way or another, Prince would become Hollywood’s most unlikely golden boy.
LINE BREAK
It was during April of 1983 of the 1999 tour that band and staff members began noticing Prince carrying around his ubiquitous purple notebooks.
“We didn’t know if it was song lyrics, love letters…we didn’t know what the hell he was writing,” says Prince’s former tour manager Alan Leeds. “Back then, he wasn’t the kind of guy you would ask, ‘What you writing, man?’ Prince stuck to himself except amongst the people he was very close to. But there was a little buzz that something was up.”
A focused Prince gave an ultimatum to his management crew of Robert Cavallo, Steven Fargnoli, and Joseph Ruffalo. The trio’s contract with the performer was due to expire and Prince wanted his handlers to deliver a movie or find a new client. “We knew as his managers at the time there was no way,” Cavallo remembers of his early conversations with Prince. “Prince was a platinum star but not a mega-star. It fell on me to find out how the hell we were going to get this kid a movie.”
With no acting or movie production credentials, Prince and his management were facing an uphill battle. A meeting with music mogul David Geffen to secure financing for the projected film ended when Geffen would only do the movie for $5 million. Legendary comedian Richard Pryor’s Indigo film company, headed by football great and community activist Jim Brown, was also approached to fund the film. “Purple Rain was brought to us and I told Richard that Prince was just about ready to explode,” Brown recalls. “The movie was budgeted at just under $6 million and we basically could have produced the movie out of Indigo. But Richard didn’t really know who Prince was. He turned it down.”
Finally, Warner Bros. Pictures agreed to bank roll the movie only after Warner Bros. Records chairman Mo Ostin—who first signed Prince six years earlier—went to bat for his young talent. Indeed, the reluctant movie executives held Ostin in high esteem (Ostin built the successful Warner Bros. Records empire virtually from scratch overseeing such music royalty as Jimi Hendrix and Earth Wind & Fire). Meanwhile, veteran screenwriter William Blinn was brought in to transform Prince’s notes into a respectable script following several meetings with Prince.
Plans were set to rent out a warehouse in the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park to rehearse live music and choreography as well as a crash course in acting classes. Joining the Revolution was hard-driving funk outfit The Time, led by charismatic frontman Morris Day, and sexy pin-up girl group Vanity 6—two acts created and produced under the watchful eye of Prince. Time member and Morris Day valet Jerome Benton recalls the marathon boot camp. “We’re up in the hall and we had a dance instructor who was very old,” says the Purple Rain actor. “He’s telling us how to do ballet and we’re like, ‘You can’t be serious.’ But it was different when Prince was there. When he was in class, I was trying to be Mikhail Baryshnikov *laughs*.”
However, before filming of Purple Rain could start, a series of roadblocks threatened to derail the production. Blinn backed out of the movie due to prior commitments, opening the door for Magnoli. Further threatening the future of Purple Rain was the bitter August ’83 walkout of Denise Matthews a.k.a.Vanity. The criminally gorgeous lead of Vanity 6 and Prince’s girlfriend figured prominently as the singer’s sexy love interest in the film.
When Vanity’s demands for a salary hike was not met by producers, however, the Toronto native left the production for an offer to appear in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. The on-again, off-again love affair between Prince and Vanity had grown increasingly volatile since the 1999 tour as the insatiable musician juggled a plethora of women that included Vanity 6 member Susan Moonsie and bubbly blond vocalist Jill Jones.
“By then her relationship with Prince was pretty much over,” Leeds says. “But he was trying to keep tabs on her. One time he even suggested that I go park in front of her apartment building and try to time her coming and going.”
After a Los Angeles audition, 22-year-old exotic California beauty Patricia Kotero was picked for the female lead. Prince immediately re-created the voluptuous beauty as Apollonia. Vanity 6 was now Apollonia 6. “It was clear from the auditions that Prince was looking for someone who favored Vanity,” Leeds says. “His whole vision for who this person was in the script was built on his vision of Vanity. And I guess Apollonia fit the bill. But she certainly didn’t have the charisma that V had.”
After non-stop rehearsals of Prince’s five-piece Revolution outfit, the timing was right to test his new musical vision of a multi-cultural, multi-racial and multi-sex band in public. On August 15, 1983 Prince & The Revolution officially made their well-received debut at Minneapolis’ First Avenue, the iconic club that became the primary backdrop in the Purple Rain film. The memorable show introduced 19-year-old white female guitarist Wendy Melvoin, and showcased six new songs including “I Would Die 4 U,” “Baby, I’m A Star,” and the album title power ballad “Purple Rain,” which were recorded live and later re-tracked for the movie’s soundtrack.
“It was electric,” says former Revolution keyboardist Dr. Fink of the show. “It was hot and muggy and the air conditioner couldn’t keep up. There was really a huge buzz about the project because at that time how many movies were getting shot in Minneapolis? And it was the native son who was getting to do this which was a pretty cool thing.”
GOAT of his era......long live Prince.....God is alive....
|
Printer-friendly copy 
Email this topic to a friend
The Lesson
