Let's Go Crazy (15 page)

“I do think Prince has a Madonna-whore complex,” she continues. “For most guys in that vein, in that era, it's kind of what they are: he's got good girls and he's got bad girls. I was a good girl—good, crying, weak. There was no filter. So the girl in the garbage can, those were just inside jokes—they thought it would be funny, Chaplinesque or something, in really bad taste. It was just dumb.”

Lisa Coleman offers a similar, tempered response. “It's immaturity,” she says. “This was a film written by a boy, and they were bully boys. They had, like, a bad sense of humor, laughing at people falling down on the street, that kind of stuff. So throwing the girl in the trash can, that's really funny to them. I just thought that was immature and stupid. I wasn't insulted by it as a feminist, because I didn't really relate to that culturally, anyway. It was just dumb, it was ignorant. If anything, Prince hired women all the time and worked, obviously, really closely with women.”

Wendy Melvoin, though, believes that the women in
Purple Rain
are indicative of a more troubling part of Prince's person
ality. “He's mean when it comes to what he is in a relationship to a woman,” she says. “He may seem like he glorifies and exalts them and puts them on a pedestal, but it couldn't be further from the truth. He is so debilitated by the idea of true intimacy that he needs to be in complete control. And it has been consistent with every female long-term relationship he's ever had.”

Prince himself waved off the issue in 1985 when MTV asked him about accusations that the movie was misogynist. “I didn't write
Purple Rain
,” he said, conveniently handing over responsibility for words he assembled and approved. “Someone else did. And it was a story, a fictional story, and should be perceived that way. Violence is something that happens in everyday life, and we were only telling a story. I wish it was looked at that way, because I don't think anything we did was unnecessary. Sometimes, for the sake of humor, we may've gone overboard. And if that was the case, then I'm sorry, but it was not the intention.”

If the female figures in the scene were meant to be seen as (relatively) fictional, the more complicated relationship depicted on-screen was between Prince and his band. The central narrative hinge is the Kid's unwillingness to truly be part of a creative group, to be open to input from the others. Only when he allows himself to listen to Wendy and Lisa's music with a generous mind can he experience the love that culminates in the performance of “Purple Rain,” which he introduces as “a song the girls in the band wrote.”

Though publicly Wendy and Lisa were always adamant
that
Purple Rain
was not meant to be an accurate portrayal of the band's inner workings, Prince's history shows that he has been more and less eager to collaborate with the others at different times. “He didn't really like it if I presented a finished song to him,” says Fink. “Any time that he gleaned an idea off of me was during jam sessions. He didn't want to hear everything with lyrics done and melody written and produced in the studio; he preferred spontaneity during rehearsal, because he had his own vision of lyric and melody.” Though the band members all seem to look back at rehearsal during this era as a joyous time, there's no way that working with such an ambitious, brilliant, and independent leader couldn't have been difficult, and Magnoli did a good job of tapping into those tensions and amplifying them for dramatic effect.

“The scene where Lisa and I are in the dressing room alone, and he walks in and says something to us and we're all fucking quiet and weird with him?” says Wendy Melvoin. “I remember there being a bit of truth in that.”

“That part was all real, none of that was made up,” says Susannah Melvoin. “He could only do what he knew. He knew there was tension and how talented Wendy and Lisa were, how highly evolved they were as people, and that demanded that he be more evolved, too. In the movie, when Wendy stops and says, ‘This is bullshit'—in that moment, it becomes a film, an internal dialogue that you gather is highly charged. It even takes Prince off-guard in that scene. Everyone in the world who sees it knows that was real.”

Despite their crash course in acting, the band members
were also nervous about how they were doing. Though in the end, only Wendy Melvoin's role would be really substantial (and Mark Brown would be the only one without a single line of dialogue), they were all trying something new, very visibly and with little safety net.

“The band always stayed pretty close and always checked in with each other—like, ‘Are you okay? How is this working for you?' ” says Coleman. “There was a camaraderie for sure, and because we felt a little out of our element—a
lot
out of our element, I guess—we were always like, ‘Is this horrible?' ‘Do I look ridiculous?' We shored each other up.”

For the members of the Revolution, Prince's skull-cracking band rehearsals had helped prepare them for the discipline and tedium of a movie set. “It was job, job, job,” says Susannah Melvoin, “as if everybody had nine thousand films behind them. A lot of sitting in trailers waiting, nothing glamorous. Just putting one foot in front of the other, day-to-day. We all knew it was a huge moment in music history, but we didn't feel entitled. We just felt honored to be part of it.”

The band wasn't around for most of the critical dramatic moments in the shoot, but if they couldn't really see the whole thing coming together, they were still getting a sense of which elements were working. “I was never privy to the major, important scenes in the film, other than the dressing room scene where we were all in there and he's doing his shtick,” says Fink. “I thought he knocked that out of the park, so I'm thinking to myself, ‘Okay, he's probably going to pull this off.'

“In some of the acting, I could see a certain amount of
inexperience,” he continues, “but it still worked great and it was authentic because they were being themselves. There's one scene toward the end where Morris says something mean, something about, ‘How's the family?' and then they show him reacting to that, regretting it and feeling sad. He did a great job of emoting that on-camera.”

One thing that was evident was that Morris Day and Jerome Benton, separately and together, really were natural screen comedians. Certainly, their parts were written very broadly, verging on stereotype at times, but their ease and interplay injected a loose humor that pulls
Purple Rain
back from the edge of pretentiousness. Their banter and timing was so effortless, in fact, that the scene in which they try to set a password for Apollonia's arrival at First Avenue—a direct rip-off of Abbott and Costello's immortal “Who's on first?” bit—was shot live, in one master take, on the last day of filming. Ken Robinson claims that part of the reason the Morris and Jerome subplot was condensed was because their chemistry was distracting from the focus on Prince.

Off-camera, though, Day was feeling angry and creating problems. Lingering frustration over leadership of the Time was apparently being exacerbated by drug use. “The politics of the Time, those issues of control and whose band it was, never entered the filmmaking discussion,” says Magnoli. “But one day we were watching dailies, and Prince said, ‘I think Morris might be using something.' ” Day showed up late to the set, and reportedly he and Prince came to blows. (“I had to break it up,” claimed Time drummer Jellybean Johnson.)
In one scene, Benton comes to the Kid's dressing room and tosses him tickets to that night's Apollonia 6 performance; the scene was supposed to be Day's, but no one could find him that morning.

“Morris was a real pain in the ass,” says Leeds. “He was going through a lot of issues and was very difficult—chronically late to the set, uncooperative, and it was a significant enough role that it wasn't a minor irritation; it was an annoyance. There were days when they had to frantically change the shoot schedule because he didn't show up. And it was like, ‘Okay, we got how many hours left in the day? What can we shoot that we have on hand to shoot?' That's complicated, it's not like making a record, where you can just pull a guitar out and play a different song. Lighting, wardrobe—everything's different.”

In 2012, Day would still express ambivalence about the movie. “I got paid forty grand for being in
Purple Rain
,” he said. “I wrote all my own lines, so again, my creative input was overlooked, but you know, it was a great experience. It was an innocent effort, because we had no idea that it was going to go where it went, or take our careers.”

Among the other actors, Magnoli acknowledged only the challenges posed by Apollonia: “She was a new actress, and we did what we did with her.” Prince's stand-in, Byron Hechter, was actually fired from the production after he told a local weekly that Kotero “can't act to save her life.” Ultimately, up to a third of her scenes would be reshot later, in Los Angeles, to try to improve her performance. (Still, she would later be singled out by the Golden Raspberry Award Foundation, which an
nually “honors” the worst movies of the year, with a “Razzie” nomination for Worst New Star.) Another rough spot was Billy Sparks, a Detroit promoter who had been cast as the manager of First Avenue. For his speech in which he explains to the Kid that with the creation of Apollonia 6, there are now one too many acts vying for stage time, he was sufficiently nervous that it was the one time the director had to clear the set to give an actor more space and privacy. Representing his hometown with a Tigers baseball cap in the final scene, Sparks added some urban credibility to the cast, though his work on-screen feels stiff and is among the movie's least convincing performances.

There were a number of scenes that either appeared in the shooting script but never actually got filmed or which were shot but ultimately cut from
Purple Rain
. Jill Jones's character, a waitress at First Avenue, was initially much more important; she had a scene with Prince at the piano, he gave her a puppy and she had a song of her own, “Wednesday,” which made it as far as the first test pressings of the sound track. (The only evidence that survived was the shot of her in the band dressing room prior to the climactic “Purple Rain” performance, where she is seen clutching the puppy.) Magnoli mentions a scene with Morris, Jerome, and Apollonia running through a neighborhood in the dark, and another of the Time showing up at the Kid's studio and “roughing him up—putting him on the ground and stepping on his head.”

Magnoli confirms the long-running rumor that there was another sex scene between Prince and Apollonia, shot in a barn and involving a shower of almost literal “purple rain.”
Though he's been cagey about this in the past and says that it was never included in any cut of the film, shots from this scene actually appear in the
Purple Rain
trailer and in the “When Doves Cry” music video. “That scene was shot in the first week,” says Ken Robinson. “We looked at dailies, and she was playing it a little bigger than she was supposed to, and you could see the awkwardness, the uncomfortableness on his face. When we saw that, the scene was immediately gone.”

Various subplots were tried and dropped, with the idea that no one could be sure beforehand which stories and which actors would deliver. “There was one scene that I was going to do that was supposed to be sort of a funny, almost Harpo Marx comedic moment,” says Fink. “I'm waiting, I kept going up to the people and saying, ‘Oh, are they gonna get that scene in today?' I'm waiting all day at First Avenue in hair and makeup, with nothing happening. I go up to Al Magnoli: ‘Hey, Al, you think we're gonna do that fun scene that I'm in at some point?' I was being a little selfish, I will admit. My ego was a little bruised when that one ended up on the floor. It never even got shot. We experimented with it, we did try a little improv on it with Jill Jones, and then they just thought, ‘Ah, this is kind of too ­irrelevant, let's just skip it.' So that was the end of that.”

“I've always been a little perplexed with Prince with the things he's given me,” says Jones. “Like, ‘Wednesday' was about suicide, so I was a psycho girl. He loved that scene, and it was hard when he had to tell me they cut it, because I was really bitter. I don't think I had a project that was ready to go, so it wasn't really mandatory. But when I'm crying at the end of
the movie, I remember being so bitchy and going, ‘Now, what the hell am I standing out here crying for? I have no freaking idea.' The Time had some other stuff [cut], too, and that became a problem, having to tell your friends when we've all committed to this. There were expectations for everybody, because Prince talked everybody up so much about it. So when you don't have all of those things coming, it makes for a ‘the hell with this' kind of feeling, like, ‘You lied to me.' But that was the business part of it.”

Jones notes that Prince's representations of his friends and associates proved accurate in ways that even they could not see at the time. “What's so weird about the film is that his impressions of us, that he embellished, all manifested in our relationships with him,” she says. “Even if they weren't real at the beginning, by the time it ended, we were all those people. It's like he wrote what he wanted [us] to be, and then you became that.”

Howard Bloom was summoned to Minneapolis to start assembling publicity material; once he got there, however, he was never actually allowed to observe any of the action. Instead, Prince had him sit with Kotero, Jones, and the other new members of the team who had future projects in the works. “I went out to spend a week on the set, and I didn't get to see the film; he just fed me these protégés, one after another,” says Bloom. “But I wrote ninety pages on the film while I was there. I really didn't know what the nature of the film was going to be, but we all knew what he was up to—this was going to be
a personal expression of a radically different kind from what's normally found in film.”