Let's Go Crazy (14 page)

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.”

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 answering 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.