by Alan Light
Magnoli remembers a meeting with the Warner Bros. business affairs and marketing people. “They said, ‘Our analysis tells us that this movie will play for one weekend, and the audience will consist of fourteen-year-old black girls in the inner city.’ ” Cavallo claims that—without even challenging this premise, or making any assumptions about a crossover audience—by this point he knew it was going to work. “I told them that I thought we were gonna do $40 million. Bob and Terry were laughing at me. I said, ‘I’m just gonna do the numbers: you put an ad saying “Warner Brothers presents Prince in his first motion picture, Purple Rain,” in every city that has a black community, everybody has to go see that fucking movie. When was the last time there was ‘some studio presents some black artist in his first motion picture’? I mean, it’s a big fucking deal. Plus the fact, we’re gonna have hits, and we’re gonna do a radio campaign long before. We want to give the movie to the major station in each city, to throw a screening at midnight and all that shit.’ So I added my numbers up and said, ‘We got a good $40 million.’ ”
While the Prince team tried to keep clearing the marketing hurdles, the movie’s technical challenges continued when it came time to do the final mix of the music. “The way Prince produces,” Magnoli explains, “he has a bunch of tracks, never takes any notes—like I would build a montage, step by step. But to mix the movie, the mixers needed all of the tracks that made up every song to place them properly in the Dolby system. We put up one song, and Prince just sat there saying, ‘How are you going to find the song in that?’
“It was a crucial moment, exciting but scary. After a day, we decided that we would leave the music alone, take the songs as they were, and bring in a music mixer to work side by side with the film mixer. We would take the music and harmonize—run the music on two or three tracks, add all the ingredients to those, offset out of sync to create a bigger sound. It created a wall-of-sound harmonic of the original track, so now we could add the crowd sounds, supporting and helping this idea that it happened in real time, in a real club. It wasn’t perfect, it was a little ragged, but it sells the idea, making it sound even more live and present.”
At least one positive note came from the studio screenings. “When the studio saw the final cut,” says Magnoli, “they said, ‘Are you running credits over “Baby I’m a Star?” Let that play out, and then run credits after that.’ I didn’t anticipate they would want more, but that’s what they asked for. I said, ‘That song is only three and a half minutes long, but Prince could add more music.’ So they allowed me to shoot more to elongate the song properly. They gave me one more shoot in LA.”
“We had to simulate First Avenue, and it’s not quite working,” says Rogers. “The cameras have to be in really close, we’ve got a few audience members there, but it was kind of nasty. They were shooting the fog onto the stage, but this stage was smaller than what the First Avenue stage would be, so the fog machines were closer to the dance floor, and they’re leaving this oily residue in the place where people are dancing. Prince was slipping, and he said, ‘We’ve got to fix this,’ but the movie people were just standing around. So I ran out to the parking lot and went to a planter, and I grabbed up handfuls of dirt and I came running in and, without asking, scattered dirt all over the floor and got on my hands and knees and rubbed it around, and it absorbed the oil.
“Alan Leeds told me afterward that Prince was very happy with that, so I learned that that’s what he wanted from us. He wanted us to think for ourselves. He wanted us to see his world through his eyes and do what needed to be done. Having some empathy with him went a long way. I think those of us who lasted, who stayed with him, had that mind-set.”
SEVEN
Something That You’ll Never Comprehend
Warner Bros. may have been convinced to release Purple Rain, but they still didn’t really know what it was (and they still had not determined whether they were going to put their name on it or not). The next order of business was to see how a real audience responded. The studio set up a screening in Culver City, California, an area that could produce a multiracial crowd.
They showed the movie in a big theater, with a capacity of six hundred or so. The young audience went wild watching the film. Afterward, following the usual protocol, they filled out cards that offered their scores on different aspects of the movie. What came back were, according to Cavallo, the best numbers Warners could remember ever seeing. “The numbers were so high from that first screening that Terry Semel got really abusive with me,” says the producer. “He said, ‘You can’t do that. What do you think this is, some fucking radio station—you go bring your fans and fuck up the numbers? They’re meaningless!’ I said, ‘We did nothing of the kind, I wouldn’t even know how to do it . . .’ Well, that’s not quite true. ‘Well, they’ve got to stop this. You’ve wasted our time.’ But when I was in the audience with that group, they went insane, and I thought, ‘This has to be a sample of something.’ ”
The studio decided they needed to do a second screening as a reality check, away from LA, and to not even let Cavallo know where it would be so that they could be sure he wasn’t stacking the audience. “They said, ‘You’re gonna get on a plane, and we’re not gonna tell you where we’re gonna do the screening; we’ll tell you when we’re in the air.’ So we go to a Denver suburb, and a guy comes running to the limousine that I’m in with Terry and Bob, and he says, ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do—there’s so many people that there’s going to be a riot. We have to give them permission to do multiple shows.’ I said, ‘Oh, yeah, I did that. I got them packed in.’ Anyway, those numbers were fantastic, too. Kids were fighting to get into the second showing, even though they had already seen it once.”
There was one final screening, this time in San Diego. Yet again, the numbers came back huge. “There were a bunch of Warner suits in the lobby,” says Magnoli. “They go, ‘Okay, three times in a row, reviews are through the roof. Al, we were wrong. We’re gonna go from opening this in two hundred theaters to as many as we can to open this movie properly, probably more like nine hundred.’ ”
Howard Bloom used the San Diego screening as his chance to start working the media on Purple Rain. “Cavallo called me and said, ‘We’re having a screening in San Diego, and the press is not supposed to know about this’—okay, so that means I’m going to get the press down there, because Warner still doesn’t believe in its film. If I can sneak a couple of key people in, it gives them an ego stake in the film; they’re in on something. We picked a few of the lead critics—Mikal Gilmore [Los Angeles Herald Examiner], David Ansen [Newsweek], Robert Hilburn [Los Angeles Times]—and let them know we would try to sneak them into the theater if they got down to San Diego at the right time of day. And they all became huge advocates for the movie later.”
During the screening process, Magnoli also won his fight for the controversial Dumpster scene. He agreed to try removing it for the second showing and then putting it back in for the third. Maybe it was a sign of the times, but the bit got a strong enough laugh from the audience that Mark Canton agreed it should stay in the final cut.
As the time came to start setting up the schedule for Purple Rain’s release, there were tricky decisions to be made about coordinating all of the various parts. Mo Ostin wanted the album to come out well in advance of the movie so that it was at less risk if the film turned out to be a flop. This meant releasing a single months ahead of the movie reaching theaters. Which was, of course, not without risk of its own; if the single died or the album underperformed out of the gate or disappointed in any way, the buzz around the movie could be crushed. So there was, to put it mildly, a lot riding on the single that would give a first taste of the entire project.
According to Cavallo, while he and the team had decided that “When Doves Cry” was the obvious first single, the urban department at Warner Bros. wanted to go with the less experimental “Let’s Go Crazy.” Their selectio
n put doubts in his mind. “I said, ‘Could I be wrong?’ You never know, and sometimes Prince’s stuff did sound a little weird. So I’m going out to dinner with Clive Calder [who would later become the richest man in the music business when he sold his Zomba/Jive label, home of Britney Spears and ’N Sync, to Sony for $2.7 billion in 2002]. I pick him up at a hotel and say, ‘I’m gonna play you two songs. You tell me which one you think should go.’ I play ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ first, and he likes it, and I put the next one in. The intro goes into the first verse and the start of the chorus, and Clive goes, ‘What is this, a joke?’ And I go, ‘You don’t like it?’ And he said, ‘No, it’s fantastic.’ ”
“When Doves Cry” was released on May 16. The end of my senior year of high school was approaching, and I stayed up late the night before, cassette recorder at the ready, glued to Cincinnati’s R&B radio station, WBLZ, waiting for them to premiere Prince’s new single at midnight. Finally it came on, and the moment was unforgettable. I’d seen Prince onstage and knew what he could do as a guitar player, but the explosive dissonance of the song’s introduction was devastating.
What was this song? It was funky, but it sure played like a rock song. What was he talking about—“animals strike curious poses”? What? The sound was mechanical, on the verge of annoying, hypnotic. By the time it built to the keyboard coda, ascending up and up at high speed and then cutting short, I was knocked out. I couldn’t stop listening, over and over and over.
I certainly wasn’t alone. “When Doves Cry” reached number one on the pop charts in six weeks—Prince’s first single to hit the top spot—and then stayed there for five more. It would become the bestselling single of 1984.
“It was very rare that a first single off an album was that ridiculous,” says comedian and hardcore Prince fan Chris Rock. “Usually it was just a taste of the album, and the best single was the second or third one. On Thriller, the first single was ‘The Girl Is Mine.’ Back when there was a real strategy to singles—no one started like that.
“And the lyric was not corny at all. It makes all the sense in the world, and it makes no sense. You can’t write a song like that now—music today has no metaphors, it’s all literal. Now they would make you say ‘when love dies’ or something. ‘What is this about doves?’ ”
(Sometime around the year 2000, while I was working as the editor in chief of Spin magazine, I was booked for the premiere episode of a VH1 show called The List. The premise was that four panelists would give their top three picks for a certain category, debate them, and then the audience would vote for the winner. On this day, Melissa Etheridge, French Stewart from the sitcom Third Rock from the Sun, actress Kathy Najimy, and I were to determine “The Best Song of All Time.” My nominations were Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “When Doves Cry.” I don’t recall many of the others, aside from Etheridge submitting Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” and several folks bringing up Beatles songs. When all was said and done, as far as that Los Angeles audience was concerned, “When Doves Cry” was the greatest song ever.)
The B-side of the single was a melodic non-album cut called “17 Days”; the full title, written out on the sleeve, was “17 Days (The Rain Will Come Down, Then U Will Have 2 Choose. If U Believe, Look 2 the Dawn and U Shall Never Lose),” which might imply a song with a religious theme, though the lyrics actually described another favorite scenario for Prince—being left lonely and forlorn by a woman. The track had initially been intended for the Vanity-turned-Apollonia 6 album, but it was rerecorded with Coleman and Melvoin’s backing vocals. (That album had a hard go of it—among the other songs that were taken away from the group was “Manic Monday,” which made it to number two on the charts for the Bangles in 1986.) Most significantly, while “When Doves Cry” was credited just to Prince as per usual, “17 Days” was listed as a recording by Prince and the Revolution. Other than the tease on the 1999 cover, this was the first time that a Prince release was billed as a band, rather than a solo project (as the whole album would eventually be).
The “Doves” video played constantly on MTV, though it didn’t really set up the movie; there were some unexplained shots from Purple Rain cut into the clip, but the focus was on scenes of Prince crawling out of a bathtub (not a hair from his complicated updo out of place) and of the Revolution, stylish in paisley and ruffles, posing in an empty white room. A still from the video shoot would be included as a poster in the Purple Rain LP, the first thing to be hung on my dorm room wall a few months later. In small print on the back of the “Doves” 45 it said, “From the forthcoming Warner Bros. album and motion picture Purple Rain,” but there was still very little information circulating about the movie.
In late June 1984, Rolling Stone ran another Random Note (not yet even a full news story) with the headline “Prince Film Due Out in July.” The item noted that the movie was planned for release “right when the Olympics are in full swing,” and that “those who’ve seen the newly completed movie are primarily raving about its concert sequences.”
Albert Magnoli got another boost in confidence when he went to the movie theater one day and the first Purple Rain trailer popped up on the screen. “I hadn’t seen it before,” he says, “and I saw that they duplicated the style of our editing in the trailer. This completely white crowd just went nuts, and I thought, ‘Whoa.’ It was so electrifying. The trailer was doing its job, and there wasn’t any hype besides that—the audience was able to say, ‘This is ours, not theirs.’ There was no actor on TV telling you to go to the movie, no interviews, no baloney.”
Indeed, what had also become evident was that there was still at least one more way in which Prince was going to violate the rules of opening a movie, especially a major studio production: he really was not going to do any interviews. Meaning, not one. He did not speak to the press at all following the release of 1999 in 1983 right up until the release of the Around the World in a Day album in the spring of 1985, sitting out the entire cycle of the Purple Rain album, movie, and tour.
“We did not need to have Prince do interviews anymore,” says publicist Bloom. “We humans have very little memory, and it’s not until you repeat something fifteen times that it rises to level of consciousness. So I worked on a Pavlovian philosophy almost, getting Prince’s name repeated as frequently as possible. Doing publicity of this kind, you’re like Sisyphus, rolling that big round stone up the mountain. Except when you’re building a Prince, if you’re moving that stone by repeating his name over and over again in every context possible, when you get to the peak, gravity takes over and the thing keeps moving with a momentum of its own. We had passed that peak. Prince had his own momentum by the time that movie came out.
“Liz Smith [a syndicated gossip columnist] had always been kind of an adversary of mine, but I managed to put together item after item that was perfect for her, and she became my greatest ally. With a gossip column, you can get somebody’s name out every single week. So by the time you went to see the movie, his name had been trickling around you for a long time.”
On the record company side, Bob Merlis claims that there was no great pressure to force Prince in front of the media. Radio promotion was more important to his marketing than press, and his previous interviews had been odd and unpredictable enough that maybe it was better to retain his mystery than risk messing it up.
Still, today it’s almost impossible to imagine a movie studio, reluctant to put out a film in the first place, agreeing to terms in which their star would do zero promotion. “Those were simpler times,” says Alan Leeds. “It was easier to manage a cohesive campaign without him than it would be today with social media and everything. But he was good at something that you could only get away with once. If anybody else tried what he did, it would be like, ‘You’re trying to be like Prince.’ But he really did sell not just the industry but the world on the concept of his mystique, and the value of it and the legitima
cy of it was based around this reclusiveness. He worked it brilliantly, for an awfully long time, to his advantage.”
“I don’t know if it was preplanning or if it was just coincidence,” says Susan Rogers, “but this is where being an enigma paid off, because he became more and more of an enigma from Dirty Mind onward, and if you’re an enigma who’s selling a lot of records and making millions, and you say, ‘I want to make a movie about my life,’ someone is going to say, ‘Now this I’ve got to see!’
“There was Prince and there was Michael Jackson and Madonna and Bruce Springsteen, and Prince was the only one who was so extremely enigmatic. Michael Jackson we thought we knew, Madonna we could sort of figure out, Bruce Springsteen had no artifice, so I can see how being an enigma would play to your advantage. But you only get one shot at that; there’s only so much you can reveal, and then after it’s revealed, there’s your story.”
• • •
The Purple Rain album, credited on the cover to Prince and the Revolution, was released on June 25, 1984, just as “When Doves Cry” reached number one. Until the last minute, the members of the Revolution didn’t even know how or if they would be acknowledged; Bobby Z said that it was only when he saw the test pressing of the album cover that he realized how prominently the band was going to be billed. “That’s when I really had the chills about it,” he said.