by Alan Light
Word went out that the movie was looking for a new female lead, in a hurry, and they received hundreds of responses. Reports have stated that as many as five hundred or seven hundred women auditioned; “I don’t know if we saw five hundred,” says Magnoli, “but we sure saw a bunch.” There have also been rumors that Jennifer Beals was offered the part and that she turned it down to attend Yale, but the director has no memory of the Flashdance star ever coming up in conversation.
One New York–based actress who auditioned told Rolling Stone that she fled from the tryout because what was being asked of her was excessively explicit. “It was way too pornographic for me,” she said. “I mean, they had stuff in the script I wouldn’t even let my boyfriend do to me in my own bedroom.” Magnoli remembers his mother reading that story and calling him, outraged. But he insists that there was nothing out of line in the process. “Auditions were very simple; nothing degrading,” he says.
He notes that there was a scene in the draft script in which Prince catches up with Vanity’s character under the bridge, after he has broken up Morris Day’s attempt to seduce her; it would be a key moment in the final film, as he stops himself from hitting her, suddenly aware that he is repeating his father’s destructive behavior. The scene was written utilizing more violence, verging on rape. “It was clear that this was just a note to self,” Magnoli says. “There was never any discussion of actually shooting it that way. But I think this particular actress fixated on that scene.”
Auditions were turning up no promising candidates, and shooting was coming closer. “We had no one, and then one day Apollonia walks in,” Magnoli says. “She came from the gym, in baggy sweats, no makeup. Everybody else came in leather and spandex and eighteen-inch heels. She was the polar opposite to Vanity. Vanity was danger, overt sexuality, sin; Apollonia was sweetness and light. So I called Prince and told him we had someone. I sent her over, and about an hour and a half later, he calls me and says, ‘I can work with her.’ ”
Patricia Kotero did have some acting experience; she had starred in the miniseries The Mystic Warrior. Less glamorous, she had also posed for the Elyria, Ohio–based Ridge Tool Company’s Ridgid pinup calendar. “I was a starving actor and singer,” she said. “I saw [the listing] in Drama-Logue, called my agent, and had an audition within seven days. Prince took me to First Avenue; I wore black spandex and a gold mesh thin top.” The producers also had her remove her shoes to make sure that her height lined up with the leading man’s. Elsewhere, she said, “I’d heard a little about Prince before I went to Minneapolis to audition for the movie role, but I didn’t go there to judge anything. I’m not in awe of him, so we get along just fine.”
After he signed off on giving her the part, Prince bestowed the name “Apollonia” on Kotero, taken from a minor character in The Godfather: “You’re going to be one of those one-name girls,” he told her. (Kotero has always claimed that Apollonia was her middle name; though her birth certificate just lists her as “Patricia Kotero,” it is theoretically possible that it was a confirmation name or something added later.) One thing Kotero has always been insistent about is that she and Prince were never involved romantically—“We’re the greatest friends in the world, and we never dated,” she has said—for one thing, because she was married at the time. Her husband, Greg Patschull, was identified in People magazine as “an aspiring actor and martial artist . . . who runs a karate studio” (“She wanted me to stay in the background,” he said), though media reports also linked her to Van Halen lead singer David Lee Roth.
“When Apollonia showed up, now she was the new person, and we’re like, ‘Hmm. Oh, really?’ ” says Jones. “She was sweet and cute, although we didn’t get along straightaway—which was good; Prince actually wanted that. I think he had read all these stories in those books about tension [on movie sets], so he made sure he kept up the tension between us. Now she’s like, ‘I always loved you, Jill,’ but I was such a little brat.”
The truth is, most of the inner circle found the time that Prince put into the comic-book-sexy girl group, which would now cease to be called Vanity 6 and instead become Apollonia 6, a silly distraction. Working with players like the ones in the Time was one thing—even if Prince was writing their music, they had to be good enough to really sell it, and the results were musically powerful. But in some ways, it was even more demanding for him to bring the limited talents of the lingerie-clad singers up to something credible.
“The whole band found it annoying, but you had to bite your tongue and let it go,” said Matt Fink. “If you voiced your opinion, it usually didn’t matter to Prince—and believe me, I voiced my opinion more than once. He would just say, ‘Well, somebody’s got to be the boss, and I’m him; that’s it.’ ”
“I realized he’s not in the business just strictly for the music, no matter what he tells you,” said Wendy Melvoin when asked about the Vanity/Apollonia side projects. “He’s also in it to entertain.”
FIVE
Reach Out 4 Something New
Purple Rain began filming on October 31, 1983. The script had been reconceived into what Magnoli described as an “emotional biography” of Prince. The director offered this summary of his vision for the story: “Prince is a powerful, magnetic force in the world of his peers who becomes humiliated, frightened, damaged when he sets foot in the home he shares with his parents . . . but by the end of the film, he has learned to let others into his world. He has learned to love.”
The story concentrated on the Kid (played by Prince, the only central figure whose character name differed from his real name), a young man trying to claim a dominant place in the music scene centered around First Avenue while refusing to compromise his creative independence. At home, he is contending with his father, a frustrated musician who takes his aggression out violently on his wife; at one point, the Kid refers to his family situation as a “freak show.” When a new girl (Apollonia) arrives in town, looking to break into the scene, and takes notice of the Kid, it heightens his competition with Morris, leader of the more accessibly funky rival band, the Time.
Meantime, Wendy and Lisa, members of the Kid’s band, the Revolution, are fed up with his refusal to listen to the music they are composing or to consider incorporating it into his set. Things come to a boil when Apollonia joins Morris’s girl group, leading to the Kid’s feeling of betrayal, which he expresses in some impassioned, tormented performances at the club. He returns to his home just in time to see his troubled father shoot himself. Amid the rage and confusion that follow, the Kid discovers a case full of his father’s compositions and concludes that they really share more than he thought; he just needs to avoid the darkness that swallowed his father.
At that night’s show, he debuts a new song, built from the music that Wendy and Lisa had given him, showing that he has learned to open himself up to the input of others and use his music for salvation rather than just releasing demons. With that, he wins over the First Avenue crowd, gains back Apollonia’s heart, and reconciles with his father, who survived the suicide attempt after all.
For all of Prince’s time studying European cinema and David Lynch, this narrative was no Citizen Kane—but fleshed out with a dozen songs from Prince, the Time, and Apollonia 6, and with a close focus on the unique visual style of the Minneapolis club scene (real or embellished), there was a chance that it could feel exciting on a screen. Magnoli’s main concern was to capture the personalities and spirit of the world Prince was creating, more than to worry about an airtight plot.
The Minneapolis weather was still pleasant through October. Cavallo authorized the use of a helicopter for the first day, to shoot Prince cruising around the fall foliage on his motorcycle, with and without Apollonia on the back of the bike. “We spent the day shooting the shit out of the motorcycle,” says Magnoli. “And the next day, there was eight feet of snow.” Film editor Ken Robinson remembers that the ice on the streets would get so thick that hol
es had to be cut to make them passable.
Everyone involved in the Purple Rain production, when asked about the actual shooting experience, immediately begins talking about the weather. “It was, like, five hundred degrees below zero,” says Coleman.
“We had to be at hair and makeup on the set at, like, six in the morning,” adds Melvoin, “and it’s the dead of frozen tundra winter. One of us had to go outside with our pj’s on and turn the car on so it could warm up for an hour, because otherwise you couldn’t get the ice off the windshield.”
As the shoot went deeper into the fall and the early days of winter, the weather would clearly become a major factor—serious enough that it’s easy to understand why it dominates everyone’s memory thirty years later. The weather reports from the winter of 1983, however, indicate that things didn’t actually get really bad until a few weeks after filming began: at its worst, in December, the temperature dropped to 29 degrees below zero, with up to twenty-one inches of snow on the ground. On November 1, though, when Magnoli claims there was “eight feet of snow,” the Old Farmer’s Almanac shows 54 degrees and a trace of precipitation.
Regardless, it was clearly a grueling shoot, and within a matter of days, the production team was being told that they were going too slowly. “In the first seven days of shooting, they were telling me we were already two weeks behind,” says Magnoli. “The finance company, which is called a bond company, that the studio hired sent two guys to Minneapolis, very concerned with how we were shooting this movie. The bond guys wax eloquently about how to make movies and how we’re behind schedule. They tell me a story about John Wayne directing his first motion picture, and how he was behind, so he tore ten pages out of the script and said, ‘Now we’re back on schedule!’ ”
“Lindsley Parsons is the guy who got me into the Motion Picture Academy,” says Cavallo. “We became friends. He had eighty credits or something unbelievable. After one week of shooting, he flies out to Minneapolis and says, ‘You’re a month behind.’ I still, to this day, don’t understand his logic, but he was horrified. So I said, ‘Okay, let’s sit together and work on it.’
“He takes the script and folds over a page, and then he goes two pages over and says, ‘Now you and I are gonna write a little connector, and we’re gonna lose two pages here.’ He goes through the whole script this way, and it all made sense to me. [Magnoli] wasn’t a big enough guy to have a say—I’d threaten to throw him off a balcony or something.”
“The shooting was mostly frantic,” recalls Alan Leeds. “Prince was unaccustomed to not being in complete control of things, and he was in a situation where he didn’t have the knowledge or the skill set to assume control over certain aspects of it, and you could see that frustrated him to no end. He had absolutely no patience for the time it took to set up lighting, to set up shots, even though he had done music videos—that process was simple enough and flexible enough that his impatience might sometimes compromise a shot, and everybody would go along with it. Now you’re making a movie, where continuity is an issue, and you’re not as flexible. And that drove him crazy.
“You also had drama with Magnoli, who didn’t have the complete faith of the crew, because he was not an experienced director; he didn’t have a lot of credentials. There were some people on the crew who were—for lack of a better way of putting it—journeymen, people who had been on a lot of film projects and knew their craft and realized that he didn’t have the experience to know everything, that he was questioning himself a little too publicly sometimes. All you need is one underling who’s frustrated, who thinks he should be a director, and all of a sudden he’s stirring shit up.”
Magnoli’s authority presumably wasn’t helped by Prince’s ongoing script revision. “He took everything away from Magnoli; he was writing the script himself,” says Susannah Melvoin. “He would be like, ‘Nah, that’s not what I had in mind. There are no rules here—this is my movie, so I can do it myself.’ He would read something and say, ‘It’s not popping enough, it doesn’t say what I’m saying,’ and next thing he’s sitting on the floor rewriting it. He’d give it to Steve [Fargnoli] to take to the office, and the next day it’s changed. It was always his way or the highway, and you just facilitated it.”
The biggest adjustment for everyone was marrying the cultures of music and film. Despite the recent rise of MTV, these communities were still wired for very different schedules and professional methods. “I was constantly pushing the difference between the music world and the film world,” says Magnoli. “Things as simple as, we don’t work past seven at night. I would tell Prince that he had to convert his whole team to that idea, transition their lives from night to day. And I saw the call to arms—they were excited, and they understood we were on film time. There were never any complaints; everyone showed up knowing their lines.”
“I was always of the opinion that we never had any respect from the film people,” says Leeds, whose job put him right at the flash point where the two sides connected. “That they felt we were just a bunch of lucky people—and by [the film people] I mean crew, I don’t mean the artists; I don’t mean Prince. They resented him because, basically, they didn’t believe in the movie. These were hard-nosed ADs and camera ops, and it was just another gig, in the middle of a horrible winter. They’re stuck in a Holiday Inn in Bumfuck, Minnesota, shooting some kid they haven’t heard of, taking orders from a director who’s never done anything, from a lighting director, LeRoy Bennett—who deserves ninety percent of the credit for why the performance scenes are so good—who wasn’t a film guy, he was a rock ’n’ roll guy.
“The wranglers all had to go to me, because Prince laid the rules that nobody talks to his people but me. So the ADs and so on couldn’t talk to Morris or Apollonia—they all had to come through me, which also gave me an inflated sense of importance, which was bullshit. Of course it created animosity between me and the ADs, because they resented me being in the middle. Even though I’m trying to be a team player, they don’t see it that way; they see me as interference. So there was all this undercurrent going on that a handful of us tried our best to keep away from Prince and from Cavallo and Fargnoli, because they had their hands full trying to find the money to keep us going. Prince had his hands full just being Prince, and we just felt that it was our job to try to keep all this off their plate.”
• • •
Whatever else was happening, there was obviously one primary question remaining at the center of all the activity: Was Prince going to be able to act? Even if much of the script was written around him standing still and looking cool, Purple Rain was going to live or die on his performance. “In my mind I was thinking, ‘Wow, what are these serious scenes going to be like with Prince acting?’ Because I knew that he had never really had serious acting experience,” says Fink. “He always came off to the media as being mysterious and quiet and shy, but with us in the band, we all yukked it up pretty hard; he was gregarious in that sense. But I was concerned—I know that a few times I said to Bobby, ‘Do you really think he’s got some acting ability here? Is he gonna pull it off?’ ”
Everyone involved in the production uses the same words to describe Prince during the filming process: focused, driven, absorbed, confident. “It felt as inexorable as the progress of a train,” says Susan Rogers. “It just felt steady; a slow, steady progress. There was never any doubt in those sessions, not on the movie set, not in the recording studio, not when we were doing the album or when we were doing the incidental music, not when we were doing postproduction. He would’ve been a great general in the army; he has this extraordinary self-confidence, coupled with extraordinary self-discipline and tempered by a really clear self-critical eye. I think he knew himself and what he was capable of. And I think making that movie, on some level, he knew he was dealing his trump cards . . . and this was the window of opportunity where he could reveal this enigma, and that maybe that window wouldn’t come around
again—which, indeed, I don’t think it ever did.”
In addition to acting and continuing to tweak the script, Prince was (as always) constantly writing and recording music—throughout the fall, he was running sessions with the Time, Jill Jones, and Sheena Easton, among others. “He was the Nutty Professor,” says Susannah Melvoin. “He would call you at four a.m. and say, ‘I’m cutting hits, what are you doing?’ ‘I’m sleeping.’ ‘Wrong answer’—and he’d hang up. You knew to get to the studio. It sounds a little cultish, but you did it. And, of course, I loved the music. Nobody was doing anything like that, and it moved us to believe in it. We got to do great things.”
Prince took the same approach to watching the film’s dailies that he did to studying video of his concerts every night on tour. “Every time Prince saw himself on-screen, anything he saw that he felt was less than he wanted, he would never do it again,” says editor Ken Robinson. “There was never anything that repeated itself as an issue. He would look at it, see it, and correct it for the next time. He learned as he went along, and you could see his performance improving by leaps and bounds, which is very unusual.”
He was also spending as much time as possible at Magnoli’s side, trying to soak up as much information about directing as he could. “He stood behind Magnoli all the time to learn,” says Jill Jones. “He was always curious, wanted to know what was going on with the lights; he loved the DP. I think he looked up to Apollonia a lot because she had more experience than him on that front, and I don’t think he tried to boss his way into things that he wasn’t familiar with, because he’s the kind of guy who only talks about the things he knows about.”