by Alan Light
For all of the musicians, acting classes with Don Amendolia—who had appeared on Ryan’s Hope and Cheers, and would later have recurring roles on Twin Peaks and the soap opera Sunset Beach—were required three times a week. “Prince came in one day,” says Melvoin, “and he was like, ‘We’re all gonna have acting classes, we’re all gonna have dance classes,’ and that’s when it started getting really like, ‘Okay, this is going somewhere else.’ ”
“I don’t know where he got it, but Prince has a great work ethic, like a classical musician: discipline is everything,” says Coleman. “It’s not like we were even gonna be part of a big dance line or something, but we were taking classes and literally doing jazz hands.”
“It was ridiculous,” adds Melvoin. “But it was loosening and it was humbling and it was funny.”
“The acting coach was mandatory, whereas the dancing was not,” says Fink. “Prince hoped that everybody would stick around and do the dance stuff—at first he kind of required it, for about three weeks, and then people fell off. I personally stuck with it through the whole summer. I didn’t go every time, but I was much more religious about it than the rest of the band. Sometimes it would just be me, the dance instructor, and a couple gals from Apollonia 6. They phased him out toward the end of the summer because people stopped going and they didn’t want to spend the money. But I got in great shape; we were doing the Jane Fonda workout and then doing, like, Broadway dance moves and routines.”
Fink, who had studied acting in summer school and done voice-over and radio work, was probably the most experienced “actor” of the bunch, and welcomed the additional training. (He also points out that he grew up down the block from the filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, and suggests with a laugh that maybe his family inspired the title of their 1991 movie Barton Fink.) “We did a lot of exercises and played games—for the amount of acting that each member of the band was going to be doing, it was overkill, maybe, but still a good experience.”
Others among the cast were less enthusiastic about the classes. “One day, Prince was like, ‘We’re making a movie,’” Morris Day told Wax Poetics magazine. “I was like, ‘Okay, fine.’ So I started going to acting class and dancing class and all sorts of silly stuff. I got kicked out of acting class because I kept clowning around, and the guys said I was disrupting it for everybody. That’s pretty much [how I] did the best in the movie, by cutting up.”
“In acting class, they weren’t working on dialogue—they were working on, like, pimp walks,” says Susannah Melvoin. “The band was like, ‘Why are we doing this? Can we go rehearse?’ ”
As for the star of the show, he participated in the classes as his frantic schedule would allow. “Prince was very, very good,” Amendolia once said. “He’d flip right out of his persona and be whatever character he had to be. He’s very shy, as most actors are to a degree. He took direction well, probably the best. He asked a lot of questions.”
“He would come and go,” says Coleman. “He was working on his dance steps all the time, anyway. But Prince really was a good coach, like, ‘All right, let’s show some hustle out there!’—and he also wanted to see how we were doing, and also get an idea of who’s got what; where is the power coming from? They tried to make everything seem like, ‘How does Lisa usually say “Good morning” when she comes in?’ and then you’d just do that, trying to make it seem more natural for the nonactors.”
However excessive they may have seemed, the acting classes illustrated Prince’s seriousness about the movie, and were worth it if only because they revealed the natural comic timing of Morris Day and, especially, his onstage sidekick/valet Jerome Benton, which would greatly impact the direction of the Purple Rain script. Also, Melvoin and Coleman’s roles were reversed from their initial conception. Wendy was given the more outspoken, aggressive part, and Lisa made quieter and cooler. (“I was supposed to be the mean one!” Coleman asserts with a laugh.)
Jill Jones notes that one of Prince’s other girlfriends was teaching one of the dance classes, but points out that competition and rivalry for his attention was a regular aspect of the scene, and he used that to creative advantage. “Everybody knew everybody was going out with Prince at the same time,” she says, “but the men also had these relationships where everyone thought they were the one who had his ear. So the roles are always constantly on a wheel, shifting, and Prince would just take his pick from the wheel. But he was so excited, like, ‘Look what we’re doing. We’re doing something great.’ I think everybody wanted everything to be permanent, but he was definitely prepared for it all to change, in a good way. He had a very Zen thing, like, ‘It’s gonna change and it’s gonna be great.’ ”
“Prince could rally the team,” says Leeds. “He could pull them together and convince them that they were going to win no matter who they’re playing; he’s that guy. So what I walked into was a situation where he had not only convinced Fargnoli and Cavallo that they’re going to make a movie or else, but he had convinced even the skeptics in the groups. Nobody was ballsy enough to actually take him on and say, ‘Fuck you. You’re not going to do this.’ ”
In 1984, Matt Fink told People magazine that one day, Prince spoke to the band about his family life. “He mentioned something about having a tough time. Then he suddenly realized what he was doing and clammed up. That was two and a half years ago. We never heard about his personal life again.” But as things moved closer to the start of filming, there was one other relationship that Prince felt the need to confront.
“He started visiting his father a lot more, driving over to his house, because his father was a relative recluse,” says Jones. “He would go and visit, and I’d sit in the car—it wasn’t really a long visit, but I think they started mending some fences.
“He would always have very nice things to say about his eccentric father. He’d prepare you, like, ‘My dad loves you,’ or ‘He thinks you’re great,’ but John was—as a musician, I’m not saying he was superior to Prince, he just heard things that other people didn’t hear. Prince was able to find a balance between the real world and the not-so-real world of how to make money in this business, whereas his father was so extreme and so complicated, and I think he had to get clear on that.”
“He had a lot of reverence for his father,” says Wendy Melvoin, while Coleman recalls the times that John L. Nelson would show up at the warehouse. “If his dad came to a rehearsal, we’d have to not cuss, and some of the songs we weren’t even allowed to sing. We would accidentally be like, [sings] ‘Oh, motherfucker—’ and then, ‘Oops!’ ‘Remember? We’re not singing in this run-through because Dad’s here.’ ”
“He’s full of ideas,” Prince later said about his father. “It’d be wonderful to put out an album on him, but he’s a little bit crazier than I am.”
There was still no script for the film, no budget, no shooting schedule. But there were songs, the cast was learning their craft (one way or another), and the mental and emotional preparations had begun. As far as Prince was concerned, he was making a movie—and there were expenses that were raising the stakes every day.
“Somebody was posting the money for all this,” says Leeds, “because you had three bands and crews on salary, you had a professional drama coach, a professional choreographer, facilities to rent, occasional extra musicians for recordings. You had technical people to support all these activities. And, like myself, there were other people who didn’t live here, and all of them were getting apartments paid for and rental cars, getting per diems on top of salaries. There was a lot of money being spent from somewhere, and we knew Prince wasn’t rich—I mean, he had two hits. But there must have been enough optimism to justify finding the money somewhere.”
It was all being driven from the mind of one young musician. Yet one aspect of Prince’s genius was the ability to make those around him not just trust his vision but feel invested in and dedicated to the plans. “He didn’t
speak much, but he would sometimes rant on about ‘what we’re all doing is this or that’—and it was always ‘what we’re doing,’ not ‘what I’m doing,’ ” says Susannah Melvoin. “I know that’s how guys running cults like Jim Jones sound, and it was kinda like that on a musical level. It might sound creepy and eerie, but there was a little of that. And other times, he would just say nothing. He would just come in and put on his guitar, and you knew to stand at attention and get to work, or get out of the way.”
“Once his idea was put into place, even before the movie was cast, as soon as he pushed that one domino over, it was just a question of momentum,” says Wendy Melvoin. “And by the time it reached its pinnacle, it was a fucking speeding train, and there was no stopping it.”
FOUR
Sign Your Name on the Dotted Line
On August 1, Albert Magnoli arrived in Minneapolis and set up shop at a motel. He had a month before he had to return to Los Angeles and finish the postproduction on Reckless. Knowing that everyone wanted the movie, though fictional, to be firmly based in the realities of Prince’s life—“We wanted it to be the Prince story without being the Prince story,” is how Cavallo put it—he began meeting with and interviewing all of the Revolution, the Time, Vanity 6, and others in the community. He found that everyone was accessible and open, and he started to formulate the shape of the script and the extensive revisions he would be making to Blinn’s draft.
Consider the issues going on within the Prince camp in the summer of 1983. Following a period of tension with Dez Dickerson in which he was fighting to have more input in the band’s music, there’s now a new guitarist in the Revolution, whom many of the other musicians resent, and who also happens to be dating the keyboard player. There’s still anger just below the boiling point within the Time, who remain pissed that Prince fired two of their bandmates. Prince is making overtures to rebuild the relationship with his estranged, eccentric father, which presumably makes him more willing to talk about, or at least think about, his family conflicts. He is also dating, to one degree or another, Jill Jones, Susan Moonsie (one of the Vanity 6 singers), and several others, and is about to begin pursuing Susannah Melvoin, a woman who will further complicate his love life. It didn’t require much digging for Magnoli to find his basic narrative themes: “The conflicts in the movie were real,” he said, “and became the core and genesis of the relationships [people saw on-screen].”
It took eight or ten days to meet everybody and to gather his ideas. For the rest of August, when he wasn’t going to hear the bands rehearse, he was camped out in his room. “I was writing longhand,” he says. “I would write from seven to seven, with a ruler and pencil, on paper. Then a secretary would come in and take those pages and type everything up from that day in script form.”
With an actual director in their midst—even one who was just out of film school and had never made a feature before—the musicians could feel the scope of the project changing. “For the longest time,” says Coleman, “we would talk about it like, ‘We’re gonna make the best cult movie, it’s gonna be cool, we’re just gonna put it out there and see who responds to it.’ Then Al Magnoli came and actually kind of connected with Prince, and Al was the one who was like, ‘If we’re gonna make a movie, why don’t we make a hit movie? It seems like we’ve got all the parts here. Let’s not just make some artsy movie, just for fun. What do we have to lose?’ ”
“As soon as he had the serious big guns paying attention—when Al Magnoli came on, you started seeing more of Bob Cavallo and Joe Ruffalo, not just Steve Fargnoli—when those guys started making their presence known, I was like, ‘They’re gonna go deep with this,’ ” says Wendy Melvoin.
Prince had already been talking to his friends, associates, and protégés about the roles he envisioned for them in the movie. His initial idea of making a true ensemble piece, though, was shifting as he and Magnoli refined the script, which, it was becoming clear, was ultimately going to be a vehicle for Prince first and foremost. Whatever had previously been promised or implied was now leading to some resentment from the crew.
“I think he genuinely wanted to include everybody,” says Jones, “but I also think that the business side, with the managers, started to come in and influence him and say, ‘Well, what more can you do with the Time?’ I don’t think they were persuading him, but he can’t manage everybody, and that’s what created the problems. They could’ve kept it a little bit more realistic for him, and not had Prince come off like he was being really selfish and stingy. I think he really wanted everybody in this film. He was really excited. And then the jealousy started. Jesse [Johnson] would be like, ‘Who does he think he is?’ It’s just normal.
“The script was still being developed, with characters and new people coming in—how he created Wendy on celluloid had a lot to do with those new relationships with new people. He already knew how he wanted to create this thing between himself and Morris, which did exist, but maybe that rivalry existed more [in the film].”
“Al Magnoli was pushing for even more input from the band,” says Fink. “He wanted more dialogue for the group, which had been written into the original script, but later never came to fruition because Prince wanted to keep the focus more on him. You had the whole side story with Lisa and Wendy, but the rest of the group was sort of peripheral, just guys hanging out, playing, with a few lines.”
A few days after Magnoli arrived, he had a chance to see the Revolution in action when the new lineup was debuted at the First Avenue benefit. Though Prince had been working the band so hard that it was meant to feel like just another day’s work, it was still clear that this was an important show. “There was a bit of excitement, more than usual, in the backstage area,” says Coleman.
“I remember the preparation for that show, the clothes and the style, to every T,” says Jones. “This was the big night, definitely. And it was special. They really worked very, very hard.”
She also maintains that it was immediately evident the kind of impact that Melvoin’s presence would have on the group, that Prince displayed a new kind of energy that would be critical to the film. “You could see that it just worked,” she says. “His behavior onstage lightened up a lot more—the nuances, the eye contact, the interaction between those two specifically. There was something a little more human and charming and cute, because Wendy used to dote on him all the time and tell him how cute he was, and maybe it was because there was finally a girl around who didn’t want to, like, shag him. Somebody saying wonderful, feminine, nurturing things, but there’s no payoff like, ‘What can I get from this sexually?’ I think it was a nice little bit of a break for him. It was like sanctuary to be onstage, for a change.”
Susannah Melvoin came to Minneapolis to watch her twin sister’s debut with the band. “They had rehearsed for such a long time that it was kind of second nature,” she says. “There was almost no fear; they just had it down. It was a whole group of people who had studied to be in this very powerful band for this very powerful guy playing very powerful music. And it felt like a piece of the puzzle he was looking for, like matter was collecting and turning into a star or a planet.
“It went off without a hitch—and then afterward, like always, everyone just went back and watched the video of the show to see what they needed to fix or modify for the film. The audience went nuts, but then it was right back to work.”
Wendy and Lisa recall that Susannah’s visit for the First Avenue show marked the point at which Prince’s romantic interest in her became evident. Their relationship would last on and off for years; by the time Purple Rain was finished, he had cast her as the lead vocalist in the band the Family, whose 1985 album is best remembered for including the original “Nothing Compares 2 U,” which Sinéad O’Connor would make a global smash in 1990.
“We were all in love with each other anyway,” says Coleman, “and then Prince met Wendy and he was like, ‘Well, I can’t have her
because you have her, and I can’t compete with that.’ Then Susannah showed up and—twins! He thought, ‘She’s like her, only available.’ ”
Meanwhile, Alan Leeds was grinding away, hiring technical staff to oversee all of the rehearsing, recording, and logistics that would be required throughout the summer and fall. One of his finds was a young studio engineer named Susan Rogers, who had been working at Westlake Audio in Hollywood, where Prince bought a new console and various other equipment. She initially came to Minneapolis to help set up the gear and “sort of audition” for a job, and was hired full-time in August.
Rogers replaced the console and did some repairs on the tape machine and some other pieces of Prince’s home studio. “He hired me as a maintenance technician, so I wasn’t doing any recording—in fact, I didn’t expect to do any at all,” she says. “[That work] took me a week or so, and I could hear him upstairs playing ‘Purple Rain,’ playing ‘Computer Blue’ on the piano. Vanity 6 were there rehearsing, and occasionally some other members of the band would come over and they’d be talking and preparing upstairs. I finally got the studio up and running, and the first tape I put up was ‘Darling Nikki.’ I never forgot it, I never forgot that experience. I’d never heard anything like it.”