by Alan Light
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 annually “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.”
In 1985, legendary Detroit DJ the Electrifying Mojo asked Prince about the difference between making a movie and making an album. “There is no difference,” he said. “There have been people who have tried to tell me contrary to that, but . . . I strive for perfection, and sometimes I’m a little bullheaded in my ways. Hopefully people understand that there’s just a lot on my mind, and I try to stay focused on one particular thing. And I try not to hurt nobody in the process.”
Displaying the unified and singular vision that was such an asset for Purple Rain and would prove to be the undoing of his future film projects, he continued. “A movie is a little bit more complex, but to me it’s just a larger version of an album. There are scenes and there are songs, and they all go together to make this painting. I’m the painter. Y’all is the paintees.”
SIX
Don’t Break Up the Connection
Standing onstage at First Avenue, it sure feels like a small room. It’s a little hard to believe that this is where a myth was forged—though isn’t that how it usually works? The venue’s capacity is approximately 1,500, but because it’s wide rather than deep, and because the balcony accounts for a good chunk of that number, it practically feels like you could stage dive and bounce off the back wall.
The stage itself is pretty big proportionally, but looking around from the lead singer’s front-and-center spot and blocking out the Revolution setup, with two keyboards and drums taking up much of the footprint, it’s almost impossible to imagine Prince executing the explosive choreography displayed in Purple Rain. Also, with multiple 1980s-sized cameras occupying much of the floor space, it’s evident how claustrophobic the club must have felt for the movie’s performance shoots.
Still: this is the spot! The center of the stage, where he rolled on his back during the climax of “The Beautiful Ones” and turned somersaults and dropped into splits on “Baby I’m a Star.” Right here, where he stood for both the public appearances that earned him his stripes and for the seven songs that are the reason Purple Rain will never die. It takes every bit of self-control not to throw dignity to the wind and intone “Dearly beloved . . .” from this vantage point.
You can no longer visit the original Cavern Club, where the Beatles honed their craft (the one in Liverpool today is actually down the street from the old club). CBGB, birthplace of New York City punk, was sold and now houses a John Varvatos clothing boutique. Manch
ester, England’s Hacienda club, the Holy of Holies for UK dance music, couldn’t make it to the twenty-first century. San Francisco’s first Fillmore moved, while New York’s Fillmore East closed outright. But First Avenue has never stopped going—in fact, presumably aided by the years of tourist traffic generated by Purple Rain, it has expanded over the years, adding a restaurant and an upstairs rental party space called the Record Room. The inside of the club has been renovated occasionally and the balconies extended, but otherwise things remain more or less as they were in 1983.
On this January afternoon in 2014, the club is setting up for another benefit show, this time for the Minneapolis public radio station the Current. Outside, it’s an authentic Minnesota winter; earlier, the temperature hit a low of –17 degrees. The area around First Avenue has certainly transformed in three decades. The Target Center arena, home of the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves, opened in 1990 and now looms across the street. There’s a Hard Rock Cafe down the block. The club’s outside walls are covered with painted stars containing the names of acts that have played the room; a quick glance turns up such names as U2, Radiohead, and the Beastie Boys. A star on one of the inside balcony walls commemorates the first show in the former Greyhound station: Joe Cocker, in April 1970.
“First Avenue gave people a chance to be creative in a town that doesn’t have many venues,” Bobby Z has said, also pointing out that in the ’80s, while Prince was the main attraction in the club’s big room, the tiny second stage, known as 7th Street Entry, was ground zero for an alternative rock movement headed by the Replacements; simultaneously, there were “two major kinds of music forged in the same room.”
So there was never any question as to where the performance scenes in Purple Rain would be filmed. First Avenue was not only comfortable and familiar turf, it also exemplified the musically adventurous, multicolored, mixed-gender scene in Minneapolis that Prince wanted to celebrate. (As Kotero put it on-screen, “It was multiracial; you had the Latin woman making out with the black guy, the Jewish guys, the lesbians—it was just a beautiful mix of cultures.”) The filmmakers had decided that all of the music would be shot after the dramatic scenes were finished, so that the musicians had their characters, with their particular experiences and motivations, in mind for the performances.
As the time came to move operations to First Avenue, though, there were two big issues: first, once again, there was the weather. Maybe Magnoli was exaggerating the conditions of the first part of shooting, but by the first week of December, temperatures were down to the single digits, and there was over a foot of snow on the ground. “We put together a side team of Teamsters, and they were given equipment to melt the snow,” says the director. “After the truck that provided our electricity froze overnight and had to be thawed out, the batteries of the trucks were removed each night. There were snowplows in caravan to drive ahead of us so that we could get to the set in the morning. People had to figure out how to enable us to do our jobs.”
“When we were shooting at First Avenue,” says Lisa Coleman, “there were trucks outside with these big cables that would have to go in and out the door, so the door is cracked open. They’d block off a little area with a sheet, and we’re changing clothes and freezing, totally freezing, but then you’d go and shoot a scene, and it was hot and sweaty on the stage. Then you’d go back there and you’re covered in ice. It was insane.”
More problematic, though, was the actual shoot schedule, and the rapidly approaching deadline to finish the film. “In the production schedule, we had a month to do all of Prince’s music, all the Time music, and the girls’ music,” says Cavallo. “But by then we were three weeks behind, and the studio could take the picture away from the director. They can do that—we’ll be out, and they’ll finish it. Meantime, Albert would love to shoot the license plate on the motorcycle all day.” He remembers Magnoli spending hours on one shot of Prince coming down a fire escape, a setup inspired by something Brian De Palma did in Scarface.
Magnoli wanted as many takes of each song as he could get; Prince initially proposed that he would do one take per song. The compromise ultimately reached was three performances of each song. With four cameras set up in the club, each to be reset between every take, the director would have twelve angles to work with for each number.
“Each song needed its own visual interpretation,” says Magnoli. “There was an enormous amount of smoke, and each time the whole thing needed to be restructured.” Other than the final three songs—“Purple Rain,” “I Would Die 4 U,” and “Baby I’m a Star,” which ran in the film as a sequential part of one “show”—each song also had its own costumes and lighting; it would have felt false if they all seemed to come from the same night’s work. Magnoli’s visual approach to the concert footage, masterfully executed by lighting director LeRoy Bennett and director of photography Donald E. Thorin, was heavily influenced by director Bob Fosse, especially his work on Cabaret. “He made live performance emotional, erotic, sensual,” Magnoli said.
Not that it was easy for the band to muster the energy required for these scenes, which would obviously form the real core, and greatest appeal, of the film. “The performance stuff came toward the end of filming,” says Fink. “Those were long days. You’re on call from extremely early in the morning, getting into hair and makeup, and then you’re just there. You’re onstage when they’re ready to go, and then it’s, ‘Take a break, we’ve got to change angles, lighting, blah blah blah.’ To be in that situation where you’ve got all these people around you moving stuff, sets, making, doing, pounding, cameramen, how do you remain unself-conscious when you’ve got these people standing in front of you, watching you do the scene, and stay in character?”
But this was when Prince’s dedication to rehearsal and preparation would pay off the most. Being able to match live shots from multiple takes meant that his lip-synching skills needed to be impeccable, even while dancing, soloing, and interacting with the band and the actors in the audience. And he nailed it, every time. “It was like he was a miracle man,” says Cavallo. “When he lip-synched, it was always perfect. He hit the same spot every time.”
“He was a stickler with all of that,” says Wendy Melvoin. “ ‘Don’t fuck up your parts.’ ‘Don’t fuck up your choreography’—to the nth degree. That was not fun. Because he really kind of liked to humiliate you in order for you to do better; it was one of his tactics. Instead of encouraging, like, ‘You can do it! Come on, girl!’ he’d be like, ‘You look white and dorky, and what are you doing up here?’ And you’d be shamed into doing it right. So there was a lot of pressure.” (Prince also, consciously or unconsciously—though presumably consciously—reached back to the August benefit concert when he wandered over to Wendy during the “Purple Rain” solo and gave her a peck on the cheek, just as he had done in her first show.)
For the filming of the title song, Prince sent word that he wanted Apollonia in the audience, and she was summoned to First Avenue, though she was officially off that day. “I had my pajamas on, I didn’t have any makeup on,” she said. “I brushed my teeth and put on a big coat, and I was on top, where the light system is, and the board. So if you look at the movie, a couple of times he glances up, his eyes go up, and he’s singing to me.”
In addition to the bands onstage, the First Avenue audience was also crucial to the feel of Purple Rain’s performance sequences. The club was dressed up with additional neon and lights, and with the cameras in place, the capacity was cut down by about one-third, to a crowd of nine hundred. The call for extras went out to the Minneapolis hipsterati, and the city’s most cutting-edge fashion and makeup filled the room. Magnoli kept the color palette limited and dramatic, and made a great decision to keep the club activity present in the stage shots—you can see hands waving, cigarettes being lit, trays of drinks going by. Rather than feel like a staged shoot, these scenes retain the feel and excitement of watching a band play live in front of a real aud
ience. Many of the shots look slightly up at the stage, from the vantage point of an audience member, rather than the more traditionally “perfect” angles above the performers’ heads.
“The performance scenes in Purple Rain not only were singular for the movie’s success, but were at that time the gold standard for how film handled rock ’n’ roll,” says Alan Leeds. “How many rock ’n’ roll movies were ruined because they just couldn’t pull off the immediacy and the urgency of a concert? It just didn’t translate.”
The bands came prepared, the venue looked right, and the filmmakers had bet on a good strategy. And as a result, a shoot that had been budgeted to take four weeks—capturing seven songs by Prince and the Revolution, two performances by the Time, and Dez Dickerson’s new band’s “Modernaire”—was done in less than ten days. “We went in three weeks behind,” says Cavallo, “and came out of it on schedule.”
There would still be seven days of shooting in Los Angeles—bringing the total number of shoot days to forty-two, and the final budget to $7.2 million—to fill in and clean up certain shots that the increasingly difficult Minneapolis weather wouldn’t allow: the Kid driving his motorcycle through city traffic, Morris and Jerome walking down the sidewalk, and, of course, the rest of the “Lake Minnetonka” dialogue. (This did lead to some continuity issues, if you look closely: a palm tree, not native to Minneapolis, is visible at the end of the “When Doves Cry” montage.)
But in the larger sense, when the First Avenue scenes were completed right before Christmas, Prince had finished filming his first motion picture. Not that it slowed down his recording pace: on December 30, a few days after shooting ended, he cut two songs that his fans would later count among the most beloved of his non-album B-sides, “She’s Always in My Hair” and “Erotic City.” (The latter song had a purer dance-floor beat than anything that would end up on the album; it was inspired, he said, by attending a Parliament-Funkadelic concert in Los Angeles.)