by Alan Light
For the part of the Kid’s father, the team cast the most experienced actor on the set. Clarence Williams III was best known as supercool Linc on the youth-oriented cop show The Mod Squad, which ran from 1968 to 1973. Since then he had gone on to work steadily onstage and in film. Though it didn’t assume the bulk of the screen time, the relationship between father and son really was the emotional core of Purple Rain, and it was a smart call to place someone in this role who would help elevate Prince’s game.
“The minute Clarence Williams came onto the set,” says Magnoli, “it created a kind of professionalism that the nonactors, the musicians, hadn’t seen before. Immediately, people were on set to watch Clarence work.”
“When Prince saw Clarence Williams’s work, he was just gobsmacked completely,” says Jones. “He said, ‘He’s amazing. He’s so powerful.’ He was just excited. And when he would see those performances, I think it made him think how great this project was going; it only affirmed his dream.”
The scene in which the Kid walks in on his father playing the piano—a melody actually written by John L. Nelson, which would be incorporated into the middle section of “Computer Blue”—and father tells son to never get married is often singled out as a dramatic highlight in the film. Magnoli says that the exchange came directly from Prince’s own life, a conversation he had with his dad that had always stayed with him.
Probably the most challenging work for Prince the actor was the scene in which he returned to the house as his father shot himself, and then reacting after the ambulance takes his parents away—trashing the basement, seeing visions of his own death, and finally realizing that the papers he is ripping apart are a lifetime’s worth of his father’s musical compositions (this after his father said that he didn’t need to write his own music down and “that’s the big difference between you and me”).
“When he did the scene where he tears up the basement at home,” says Rogers, “I had to come to the movie set to deliver some tapes. Just as I stepped in the door, the red light came on because they were going to shoot that scene, so I ducked in behind the façade so I’d be out of sight. He shot that scene, and as soon as it was done, he came around the corner and I was standing right there; I didn’t realize that this partition that I had ducked behind was actually the back wall of that basement. He came around and looked at me, and I saw his face and I was smart enough to not say a word, just share that look with him. I would guess that what Prince was experiencing was a greater vulnerability than what he ever had to show on a music album. As a person who is by nature private, this may have been a moment of real cognitive dissonance, which can be revealing. Maybe what I saw and understood was how odd it is to turn a life into art, but how a true artist is compelled to do so.”
“For the big scene where he destroys his room, Prince really did show up emotionally to that moment,” says Wendy Melvoin. “I think it freaked him out to witness Clarence and this other character fighting the way they did, screaming, and him having to not be the big rock star who would just avoid those situations at all costs. But as an actor you make yourself vulnerable, and I think it really flipped him out, because that guy would never have shed or shown a tear, and the way that moment is shot for him is beautiful; it’s a really great, true, vulnerable moment for him.”
Magnoli claims that the only time he saw Prince get rattled during the entire shoot was the shot in which he sees a shadow of himself hanging from the basement rafter. “That was just freaky to him; he took that to heart,” he says. “It was a turgid, charged moment for that basement scene—very concentrated, a lot of violence and soul-searching, all really intense.” There was actually an additional monologue for the Kid’s mother (Olga Karlatos) during this section of the movie, but it wasn’t used; the emotion they were seeking had already been found.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, there were the sex scenes. Touré writes that “there’s a pornish aesthetic to the entire film. It’s like a porno set in the world of a nightclub. . . . Few films give us two black men of such outsized sexuality and vanity, always looking like they’re about to get someone in bed.” And it’s true that sex infuses Purple Rain throughout—from Apollonia’s outfits to Morris Day’s leer, the suggestion of sex, the mood, is more memorable than the few examples of more explicit action.
The coy dialogue and gauzy camerawork in the scene of the Kid and Apollonia making love in his basement bedroom is more cringe-inducing than genuinely erotic, though to teens in 1984, it certainly offered the requisite titillation. The scene was shot three different ways, for three possible MPAA ratings; they went with the most daring, the “R-rated version.”
“Some of the kissing scenes were like, ‘That’s not real.’ You don’t kiss people like this—it’s ridiculous,” says Melvoin. “You could tell there was so much showbiz to the kissing sequence and the lovemaking sequence, it was like Harlequin romances or Red Shoe Diaries.”
To be completely fair to Kotero, though, it’s sometimes clear in the final film how much of a scramble the production really was: Look closely at the scene in which Jerome Benton and Morris Day are walking around the block, discussing the problems with the girls’ group; when Day mentions “that Apollonia babe we saw last night,” it’s apparent that the phrase was clumsily overdubbed, and that his moving lips don’t match the words coming out.
If you ask someone to name a scene in Purple Rain other than the musical numbers, chances are good that they’ll say “the Lake Minnetonka scene.” The Kid drives Apollonia out to the countryside on his motorcycle, stopping by the side of a lake. She asks if he’s going to help her with her career, and he says no, because she hasn’t passed the initiation. The first step, he says, is to “purify yourself in the waters of Lake Minnetonka.” As a demonstration of her bravery and spunk, Apollonia strips down to her panties and leaps into the water—only to have him tell her, after she wades back to the shore, “That ain’t Lake Minnetonka,” and pull away on his bike while she stands there dripping and near-naked. When he swings back around to pick her up, she giggles and rewards his prank with a peck on the cheek.
“It started to snow that night,” Kotero later recalled, “so when we did the scene, we had Al Jones, our stunt man, wearing a scuba suit. It was a sheet of ice that I ran into. One of our crew guys, an old man, said, ‘I’m going to bring you some Courvoisier tomorrow!’ I had a little bit to drink, and it gave me a little warmth.”
Trouper that she was, she plunged into the water three times for the shoot. In a 2014 interview with the Minneapolis public radio station the Current, she claimed that after a fourth jump, things got more dramatic. “They put me in a little tent,” she said, “and they said, ‘Okay, that’s it, cut, we’re wrapped . . . [A] nurse was in there, and she started to check my temperature. All I remember is that everything started to fade to black, and she said, ‘She’s going into hypothermia—we have to call the ambulance.’ And I just thought to myself, Oh no, God, I don’t want to die now! I want to finish this movie. And I could hear, just in the distance, her voice—she was panicking, and I just started to fade out.
“And I thought, Okay, I don’t know what’s going on here. I’m a fighter, I’m strong, I can do this. And then Prince came in, because I remember feeling his warmth; he held me, and he says, ‘Please don’t die. Please don’t die, Apollonia.’ And his voice kind of cracked . . . And I just remember, once I was able to talk, I just said, ‘No, I’m not going anywhere! I have to shoot more, we’ve got to get more in the can, man! I’m not going anywhere, we’ve got to shoot some more!’ And he kind of chuckled. . . . He saved me, with his warmth and his love and compassion.”
When it came time to shoot the dialogue, the decision was made not to have Kotero undress in the Minnesota wild a second time. The rest of the scene was shot, mostly in close-up, by the side of a lake in Los Angeles, and what we see in the movie is a cross-cut, with Prince speaking in Minnesota and Kotero answeri
ng from LA (complete with some inconsistencies in her makeup and hair, which goes from dry to wet and back in various shots).
The cavalier treatment of Apollonia in that scene was one of the examples that many would point to as part of Purple Rain’s atmosphere of casual misogyny, along with the depiction of the Kid’s mother as a victim of abuse and, of course, the lingerie-based female wardrobe. The most obvious representation of this issue, and the most difficult scene to watch today, comes when an angry woman pops up on the sidewalk, hollering at Morris about standing her up for a date. Morris and Jerome exchange a glance, and the sidekick grabs the woman and slam dunks her into a Dumpster. (When the movie was screened for Questlove’s NYU class in 2014, gasps and cries of “Oh my God!” were audible during this sequence.)
Magnoli, who says that the studio challenged him repeatedly on this scene, defends the script based on his interviews with all of the cast members. “I really did hear them say that they threw a girl in a garbage bin once,” he says. “If you’re going to make a film about a culture, you have to honor that culture and show what it is. For me to add any kind of enlightenment to the facts would have been absurd.” As to more general criticisms about the movie’s gender politics, he says, “I don’t believe the women are weak at all—Wendy and Lisa are empowered, Apollonia learns how to fight back. They’re tough girls.”
“I don’t have too much of a problem with the representation of the women,” says Jill Jones. “I think they’re just caricatures—I really think that Jean Harlow played a big part for the Apollonia character after Vanity left. She became lighter and more humorous and not so slithery, snaky, vampy, and I could see that from the old movies that he watched. When Prince and Al were writing, they were just looking at the lay of the land, what everyone was going through. Some of the jokes are totally male-chauvinistic jokes that the guys had. But I didn’t feel that much sexual objectification. It was kind of nice to see a young girl a little bit tougher than the Flashdance girl, a little more independent. The mother getting hit? It existed—and if I think about it, they weren’t doing many films about domestic violence back then.
“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 personality. “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.”