Let's Go Crazy (18 page)

“Prince would come in, and he was kind of overwhelmed by it, how three takes could be brought together in one. He would notice, ‘My shirt is unbuttoned in this shot and then buttoned in the next,' or ‘My spin there is not as strong as I did it in the third take.' Just a couple of things like that.”

The director also says that there was a brief debate with Cavallo about the opening of the movie. “He said Prince didn't want to open with music. It's a common mistake in rock movies; musicians want to establish credibility by showing acting chops. But I said no, we have to constantly honor the fans. If we do that, as soon as the movie starts, we will also be accumu
lating crossover fans. If you don't know who Prince is, you will by the end of those seven minutes.”

Yet another challenge arose when Magnoli discovered that the negative for the crucial scenes of the Kid and his parents fighting in the basement had been lost. For five shots, they had to use the work print, and this footage is visibly darker than the rest of the film. But the time had come to deliver a final edit.

“I got a call from [Cavallo],” says publicist Howard Bloom, “and he said ‘I've been editing this thing for weeks, and I just cannot make it into a film. It isn't working, and we're showing it to Warners at eleven o'clock tomorrow morning and I want you to be there.' So I flew out in the morning, arrived at Warner Brothers, and went into the biggest screening room I had ever seen. I sat way in the back, ten rows behind any other human being, to see how I would respond emotionally, without being inhibited.”

He says that his “conscious self” had no real idea what the movie was actually about, but that “the second self, the self below the floorboards” was knocked out by the visceral power of
Purple Rain
. When the screening ended, the execs and advisors all filed into a conference room.

“They started getting opinions, and they were funereal, timid, guarding their speech. But everything they were saying was, ‘This film is dead,' ” says Bloom. “When my turn came, I got up and gave the Moses-parting-the-Red-Sea speech. I said, ‘This is one of the most important movies in the history of film, and if you fuck this movie over, you are committing a sin.' I gave them a history of movies like
The Wizard of Oz
, which
had been done off-set and everybody was convinced it was going to be a failure.

“Then I got to the real point—up until 1964, if you were a singer, there were a bunch of people in Tin Pan Alley who wrote your songs; you had a manager who determined your image; you were an artificial creation. And then the Beatles came along and did something revolutionary. They took control of their own music. That seems normal now, but it was shocking back then. No artist in the history of the film business had ever done what the Beatles did with music, and that's what Prince has done. And I said, ‘If you kill this film, you are desecrating a piece of entertainment history.' And the tone of the meeting changed. I think it was extremely important to Bob to hear this speech, because they were saying they were going to give it a chance and roll it out in six theaters in Arizona, but he then went out and got this thing to open in hundreds of theaters.”

Magnoli remembers a meeting with the Warner Bros. business affairs and marketing people. “They said, ‘Our analysis tells us that this movie will play for one weekend, and the audience will consist of fourteen-year-old black girls in the inner city.' ” Cavallo claims that—without even challenging this premise, or making any assumptions about a crossover audience—by this point he knew it was going to work. “I told them that I thought we were gonna do $40 million. Bob and Terry were laughing at me. I said, ‘I'm just gonna do the numbers: you put an ad saying “Warner Brothers presents Prince in his first motion picture,
Purple Rain
,” in every city that has a
black community, everybody has to go see that fucking movie. When was the last time there was ‘some studio presents some black artist in his first motion picture'? I mean, it's a big fucking deal. Plus the fact, we're gonna have hits, and we're gonna do a radio campaign long before. We want to give the movie to the major station in each city, to throw a screening at midnight and all that shit.' So I added my numbers up and said, ‘We got a good $40 million.' ”

While the Prince team tried to keep clearing the marketing hurdles, the movie's technical challenges continued when it came time to do the final mix of the music. “The way Prince produces,” Magnoli explains, “he has a bunch of tracks, never takes any notes—like I would build a montage, step by step. But to mix the movie, the mixers needed all of the tracks that made up every song to place them properly in the Dolby system. We put up one song, and Prince just sat there saying, ‘How are you going to find the song in that?'

“It was a crucial moment, exciting but scary. After a day, we decided that we would leave the music alone, take the songs as they were, and bring in a music mixer to work side by side with the film mixer. We would take the music and ­harmonize—run the music on two or three tracks, add all the ingredients to those, offset out of sync to create a bigger sound. It created a wall-of-sound harmonic of the original track, so now we could add the crowd sounds, supporting and helping this idea that it happened in real time, in a real club. It wasn't perfect, it was a little ragged, but it sells the idea, making it sound even more live and present.”

At least one positive note came from the studio screenings. “When the studio saw the final cut,” says Magnoli, “they said, ‘Are you running credits over “Baby I'm a Star?” Let that play out, and then run credits after that.' I didn't anticipate they would want more, but that's what they asked for. I said, ‘That song is only three and a half minutes long, but Prince could add more music.' So they allowed me to shoot more to elongate the song properly. They gave me one more shoot in LA.”

“We had to simulate First Avenue, and it's not quite working,” says Rogers. “The cameras have to be in really close, we've got a few audience members there, but it was kind of nasty. They were shooting the fog onto the stage, but this stage was smaller than what the First Avenue stage would be, so the fog machines were closer to the dance floor, and they're leaving this oily residue in the place where people are dancing. Prince was slipping, and he said, ‘We've got to fix this,' but the movie people were just standing around. So I ran out to the parking lot and went to a planter, and I grabbed up handfuls of dirt and I came running in and, without asking, scattered dirt all over the floor and got on my hands and knees and rubbed it around, and it absorbed the oil.

“Alan Leeds told me afterward that Prince was very happy with that, so I learned that that's what he wanted from us. He wanted us to think for ourselves. He wanted us to see his world through his eyes and do what needed to be done. Having some empathy with him went a long way. I think those of us who lasted, who stayed with him, had that mind-set.”

SEVEN

Something That You'll Never Comprehend

Warner Bros. may have been convinced to release
Purple Rain
, but they still didn't really know what it was (and they still had not determined whether they were going to put their name on it or not). The next order of business was to see how a real audience responded. The studio set up a screening in Culver City, California, an area that could produce a multiracial crowd.

They showed the movie in a big theater, with a capacity of six hundred or so. The young audience went wild watching the film. Afterward, following the usual protocol, they filled out cards that offered their scores on different aspects of the movie. What came back were, according to Cavallo, the best numbers Warners could remember ever seeing. “The numbers were so high from that first screening that Terry Semel got really abusive with me,” says the producer. “He said, ‘You can't do that. What do you think this is, some fucking radio station—you go bring your fans and fuck up the numbers?
They're meaningless!' I said, ‘We did nothing of the kind, I wouldn't even know how to do it . . .' Well, that's not
quite
true. ‘Well, they've got to stop this. You've wasted our time.' But when I was in the audience with that group, they went insane, and I thought, ‘This has to be a sample of something.' ”

The studio decided they needed to do a second screening as a reality check, away from LA, and to not even let Cavallo know where it would be so that they could be sure he wasn't stacking the audience. “They said, ‘You're gonna get on a plane, and we're not gonna tell you where we're gonna do the screening; we'll tell you when we're in the air.' So we go to a Denver suburb, and a guy comes running to the limousine that I'm in with Terry and Bob, and he says, ‘I don't know what we're going to do—there's so many people that there's going to be a riot. We have to give them permission to do multiple shows.' I said, ‘Oh, yeah, I did that. I got them packed in.' Anyway, those numbers were fantastic, too. Kids were fighting to get into the second showing, even though they had already seen it once.”

There was one final screening, this time in San Diego. Yet again, the numbers came back huge. “There were a bunch of Warner suits in the lobby,” says Magnoli. “They go, ‘Okay, three times in a row, reviews are through the roof. Al, we were wrong. We're gonna go from opening this in two hundred theaters to as many as we can to open this movie properly, probably more like nine hundred.' ”

Howard Bloom used the San Diego screening as his chance to start working the media on
Purple Rain
. “Cavallo called me and said, ‘We're having a screening in San Diego,
and the press is not supposed to know about this'—okay, so that means I'm going to get the press down there, because Warner still doesn't believe in its film. If I can sneak a couple of key people in, it gives them an ego stake in the film; they're in on something. We picked a few of the lead critics—Mikal Gil­more [
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
], David Ansen [
Newsweek
], Robert Hilburn [
Los Angeles Times
]—and let them know we would try to sneak them into the theater if they got down to San Diego at the right time of day. And they all became huge advocates for the movie later.”

During the screening process, Magnoli also won his fight for the controversial Dumpster scene. He agreed to try removing it for the second showing and then putting it back in for the third. Maybe it was a sign of the times, but the bit got a strong enough laugh from the audience that Mark Canton agreed it should stay in the final cut.

As the time came to start setting up the schedule for
Purple Rain
's release, there were tricky decisions to be made about coordinating all of the various parts. Mo Ostin wanted the album to come out well in advance of the movie so that it was at less risk if the film turned out to be a flop. This meant releasing a single months ahead of the movie reaching theaters. Which was, of course, not without risk of its own; if the single died or the album underperformed out of the gate or disappointed in any way, the buzz around the movie could be crushed. So there was, to put it mildly, a lot riding on the single that would give a first taste of the entire project.

According to Cavallo, while he and the team had decided
that “When Doves Cry” was the obvious first single, the urban department at Warner Bros. wanted to go with the less experimental “Let's Go Crazy.” Their selection put doubts in his mind. “I said, ‘Could I be wrong?' You never know, and sometimes Prince's stuff did sound a little weird. So I'm going out to dinner with Clive Calder [who would later become the richest man in the music business when he sold his Zomba/Jive label, home of Britney Spears and 'N Sync, to Sony for $2.7 billion in 2002]. I pick him up at a hotel and say, ‘I'm gonna play you two songs. You tell me which one you think should go.' I play ‘Let's Go Crazy' first, and he likes it, and I put the next one in. The intro goes into the first verse and the start of the chorus, and Clive goes, ‘What is this, a joke?' And I go, ‘You don't like it?' And he said, ‘No, it's fantastic.' ”

“When Doves Cry” was released on May 16. The end of my senior year of high school was approaching, and I stayed up late the night before, cassette recorder at the ready, glued to Cincinnati's R&B radio station, WBLZ, waiting for them to premiere Prince's new single at midnight. Finally it came on, and the moment was unforgettable. I'd seen Prince onstage and knew what he could do as a guitar player, but the explosive dissonance of the song's introduction was devastating.

What
was
this song? It was funky, but it sure played like a rock song. What was he talking about—“animals strike curious poses”? What? The sound was mechanical, on the verge of annoying, hypnotic. By the time it built to the keyboard coda, ascending up and up at high speed and then cutting short, I
was knocked out. I couldn't stop listening, over and over and over.

I certainly wasn't alone. “When Doves Cry” reached number one on the pop charts in six weeks—Prince's first single to hit the top spot—and then stayed there for five more. It would become the bestselling single of 1984.

“It was very rare that a first single off an album was that ridiculous,” says comedian and hardcore Prince fan Chris Rock. “Usually it was just a taste of the album, and the best single was the second or third one. On
Thriller
, the first single was ‘The Girl Is Mine.' Back when there was a real strategy to singles—no one started like that.

“And the lyric was not corny at all. It makes all the sense in the world, and it makes no sense. You can't write a song like that now—music today has no metaphors, it's all literal. Now they would make you say ‘when love dies' or something. ‘What is this about
doves
?' ”