Let's Go Crazy (7 page)

“I know he had this idea pretty early on about a film. When
I was touring with Teena Marie and we were opening for him, he said he was going to do a movie, but he didn't really elaborate. He had a pretty clear vision on his road map.”

“We were always videotaping rehearsals and shows,” Bobby Z said. “We were also doing skits. He was always talking about doing a movie.” Lisa Coleman confirms that Prince expressed his ambition to make movies when she first joined the band, during the
Dirty Mind
period. Prince had even ­attempted a film project titled
The Second Coming
during the 1982 Controversy tour. The March 7 homecoming show at Bloomington, Minnesota's Met Center was shot in full, but Prince drove director Chuck Statler (who had helmed pre-MTV promotional videos for Devo, the Cars, and Elvis Costello, in addition to the Time's clip for “Cool”) past the breaking point attempting to film interstitial narrative segments; Statler later described the experience as a “gruesome drill,” with Prince demanding take after take of every shot.
The Second Coming
was abandoned before it was ever edited, though stills have turned up on the Internet.

Throughout the Triple Threat tour, though, Prince could often be seen scribbling in a purple notebook that he carried everywhere. Eventually he started letting the band know what his plans were for their next step. “I think it was at a rehearsal where he said, ‘Here's what I'm thinking, here's what we're gonna do,' ” says Coleman. “Actually, he wouldn't ever say ‘Here's what I'm thinking'; that would be way too intimate. He'd just be like, ‘We're gonna make a movie.' I remember on a plane ride during the tour, he called me to come sit next to
him and told me a lot of the ideas. He would ask me things like, ‘Would you kiss Matt if I wrote this scene?' He would describe how he saw the character, who I was. I think he was always aiming at big, ‘I'm gonna be a big star,' but to him, a band was much more interesting than just a singer. So he wanted to ­really feature that, and he wanted to have his philosophy and his politics and his message all be incorporated—on
Dirty Mind
, ‘Uptown' was a big thing in his mind. The song wasn't that big, but there was always this utopian thing.

“I remember him saying, ‘We're gonna have a director come and meet us, and we're just gonna see what he's about and if he's up to it.' We were little smart-asses, too, so it was like, ‘Ha, ha, the director will come, and we'll give him a hard time and scare him away.' ”

“I think we were in Cincinnati, maybe a week before the end of the 1999 tour,” says Matt Fink, “and he called me and said he wanted to have breakfast with me, just the two of us. He took me to the hotel restaurant and told me about his plans to do the movie, asked what I thought about that and if I was excited about it. I said yes to all of it—I thought it was a great idea to go for; why not? So I said ‘Perfect, I'm on board.'

“After the conversation, I did think, ‘Now, wait a minute. Do we really have the following to create a movie that's going to generate enough people to come out and see it, create the revenue needed to support something like that?' ”

Objectively, the idea of Prince starring in a feature film made very little sense. As of 1983, he had just one album that could truly be considered a major hit. He was still largely un
familiar to a general pop audience, and, especially since he had stopped doing press of any kind, he certainly did not register as a mainstream celebrity. And other than the Beatles with
A Hard Day's Night
and
Help!
, very few musicians had been able to make a convincing or successful jump to the big screen; most recently, Prince's fellow Warner Bros. artist Paul Simon had just flopped with his 1980 film
One Trick Pony
.

“When I got there, he already had a notebook, and people were saying, ‘He's writing a movie,' ” recalls Alan Leeds. “The people closest to him were probably in the know about what he was doing; I just knew that he's got this notebook, and he sits on the bus and he writes and he wants to make a movie—you know, like, ‘Yeah, so do I.' I didn't take it seriously. I thought he was nuts. I've got to figure that most people around him thought it was nuts, too—even the people who knew how ambitious he was and knew these traits that we now celebrate as being a necessity for success for somebody like him. He was a kid with a very vivid imagination, who was stubborn and angry enough with the world to refuse anybody's no. And you could argue that without all that, he wouldn't have gotten where he got; if he'd have been civil, he wouldn't have ever gotten the movie made.

“Somewhere there's a book to be written about the DNA of guys like Prince or James Brown or Miles Davis, all of whom had mother issues, all of whom had abandonment issues in various ways, and all of whom could be extremely judgmental and difficult to get along with. There's a pattern there; it's not a coincidence. The normal person, if somebody tells you no, you
get tired of it or you're needy enough that you want friends or whatever, so eventually you just say, ‘Well, yeah, okay, I'll do something else.' Not these guys.”

At Prince's label, Bob Merlis remembers that the initial reaction to the idea of a movie was a certain bewilderment. “My own response was, ‘Really?!?' I thought it was very bold—it certainly wasn't conventional in terms of the usual sequence for these things. But the success of
1999
was substantial, so he did have momentum, instead of doing it on the downside of a career, which is often when these things are attempted.”

To others in the camp, the concept of a movie was less of a shock and more of a tribute to Prince's artistic vision and trajectory. “It made absolute sense to me, because before anybody had heard who Prince was, I read the black charts and other people didn't,” says Howard Bloom. “That phenomenon of going platinum when you were buried on the black charts, that says something.

“There are two keys to superstardom—one is an intense work ethic, and it doesn't just come from a work ethic, it comes from the fact that you want to make music more than you want to breathe, eat, sleep, or do anything else in life. When you find a person like that, it's someone worth hanging on to. Prince had that; his entire life was music. And then he had this astonishing executive capacity, this prefrontal-cortex discipline. If you're a soul searcher, which is what I was, you have really found it when you found him. So the idea that he should make a movie was no more outrageous than the idea that the Beatles would write their own songs in 1961—ninety percent of the
time when an artist of this caliber makes a decision out of pure passion, he is right, and you have to defend him for all you're worth.”

“When he said it was going to be bigger than
Saturday Night Fever
—he had that burning desire—I was like, ‘Sure, why not?' ” says Jill Jones. “It didn't seem crazy because I had the background, growing up with the Gordys, where anything can happen. But I also really admired the fact that he didn't have any real help, that his mind put all these people together.”

“Prince
had
to make it happen, he had no choice,” says Susannah Melvoin. “He was compelled, and he knew how to make everyone else feel that compulsion, too—and that was the weird part. How did he make us all fall under his spell? You got sucked in, and sometimes that was great and sometimes it was really crappy. On the periphery, it didn't make sense, but inside this world of his, there were a lot of people who wanted to make it happen.”

Whether Cavallo and the rest of the management team ­really believed in the idea, the ultimatum Prince laid down left them with no choice but to deliver. “It was right out of the blue, but it didn't surprise me,” says Cavallo. “It was worth so much money to me, because if he didn't re-sign with us, it would've been a tragedy. We had such a big fucking hit with this guy, and I knew how big he would be. I knew that in person he was unstoppable; he was so good, he works so hard, his shows are so precise. It was something to see.”

The marching orders were spelled out very clearly by Prince to Cavallo. “He said, ‘It's gotta be a major movie; it can't
be with one of [your] gangster friends' or something. I don't have any of those—I went to Georgetown University, I'm not a mob guy! But anyway, whatever his fantasy was, he says, ‘It has to be with a major studio, my name above the title'—basically, ‘Warner Brothers presents Prince in his first motion picture.' Think how carefully he thought about this.”

Dez Dickerson remembers Prince saying, “If it's just me and Chick [bodyguard “Big Chick” Huntsberry] in the snow with a camcorder, I'm going to make this movie.”

Meanwhile, at the conclusion of the 1999 tour, Prince decided to make one more personnel change in the band, which would prove to have a major impact on the direction of the movie. His relationship with lead guitarist/primary onstage foil Dickerson was fraying, for a number of reasons: Dickerson didn't want to take as much direction from Prince; he wanted to work more on his own music; he was a Christian and was increasingly uncomfortable with Prince's lyrics. (He was also probably still annoyed that Prince used his home phone number as the title and hook of the Time hit “777-9311.”) Prince sat him down and told him about the plans for the movie, and that it would require a multiyear commitment to ride out the project—a commitment he didn't feel he could make. “That was the bottom line,” Dickerson says. “I just couldn't see myself doing that for three more years.”

“By the time I came on that tour, Dez was on the outs,” says Leeds. “The band that I was introduced to when I came aboard was, ‘There's the band, and then there's Dez—Dez is a pain in the ass. He's got his wife with him, she stirs him up;
she doesn't like Prince, Prince doesn't like her. He demands his own dressing room; sometimes there's venues where there's not enough rooms to accommodate him and that becomes an issue. He doesn't have to come to sound check, you've got to kiss his ass to get him to do that; it's just bad.' So everybody was fed up with Dez.”

“Dez just walked himself out of the job,” says Jones. “Dez was the only one who was married at the time—now, after we've all been married, I think we kind of know that those things happen, but it's really no joke how a wife can come in and just wreck your shit. ‘You can't be here, you need your own dressing room'—those kinds of things started to really wear on Prince. But I don't think Prince wanted to continue the new wave-y stuff like what he'd done prior, anyway, like ‘Head' and those kind of songs; I think he was trying to make it commercial and make a lot of money, because with money, he could do anything, and he knew that.”

“I felt bad about the way that Dez was feeling . . . he was super-angry,” says Coleman. “His kamikaze headband, white-guy rocker look was kind of cool. But I think he felt what was coming and didn't like what it looked like. I think that he and Prince were mutually done with each other.”

Even Dickerson himself ultimately seemed to understand that times had changed. “Prince doesn't need the same kind of band he had when he started out,” he said soon after his departure. “Back then, he needed a power band, people who could get him to another level. Now that he's there, he can relax a little.” In the end, the blow was softened when Prince helped
set up Dickerson and his band, the Modernaires, within his management team. (Later, he even gave them a brief appearance in
Purple Rain
.)

Conveniently, another guitarist was close at hand. Wendy Melvoin, the teenage daughter of an A-list Los Angeles session musician, had grown up with Lisa Coleman, and the two had become romantically involved. Prince had actually gotten close to the couple and to Melvoin's twin sister, Susannah, staying in the apartment in Los Angeles shared by the three women when he came into town to record.

“Wendy and Lisa would pick him up at the airport, and then they'd all just come home and hang out,” says Susannah Melvoin. “He would sleep on the living room couch; we had some cats that bothered him in the middle of the night. I had the room in the middle of the apartment with no door on the bathroom. We had no privacy, but we were all having a great time.”

Wendy was traveling on the bus with the band for much of the 1999 tour. Prince had overheard her playing guitar—the first time, through a hotel-room door—so when Dickerson wasn't at sound check before a New York City show, he asked if she could fill in and run through “Controversy.”

“He was walking around the venue listening,” says Coleman, “and he almost ran back up onto the stage and sat at the piano, which was at the middle of the stage at that time, and started jamming. He's like, ‘Damn, girl, is your daddy black?' That started this romance; it was like little stars and flowers came out of his eyes.”

“I had been a huge Prince fan, so by the time I was on that
stage, I had done my own finishing school,” says Melvoin. “I was playing and practicing and knew myself that something would happen. I just kind of knew it.”

Coleman and Melvoin, forever joined in the minds of Prince fans as one unit (“Wendy-and-Lisa”), ended their romance years ago, and are both happily settled into long-term relationships—Coleman is married to the duo's manager, ­Renata Kanclerz, and Melvoin's partner is Lisa Cholodenko, who wrote and directed
The Kids Are All Right
, a 2011 Oscar nominee for Best Picture. But watching them together in the studio they share in Hollywood's Jim Henson Company lot over the course of a rainy Los Angeles afternoon, one can't help but notice that they interact like an old married couple. They finish each other's sentences, trigger memories, laugh easily, bicker over details. Coleman is still and drily witty; Melvoin stays in motion, smoking an e-cigarette, picking up a guitar to illustrate a point. Clearly, one reason they continue to thrive in their work collaborating on scores and sound tracks for movies (
Soul Food
,
Something New
) and television shows (
Crossing Jordan
,
Nurse Jackie
,
Heroes
) after all these years is the strength of their personal bond.