Prince was the only person who thought ‘Purple Rain’ would be a box-office hit
Turns out he was more than right
Many of us will watch Purple Rain on the first anniversary of Prince’s death. It’s a classic. But back in the spring of 1983, only one man thought it was a good idea.
Fresh from touring behind the platinum album 1999 with his band The Revolution, Prince gave an ultimatum to manager Bob Cavallo, whose contract was expiring.
“He’ll only sign with us if he gets a major motion picture,” Cavallo told Spin. “It has to be with a studio — not with some drug dealer or jeweler financing. And his name has to be above the title. He wasn’t a giant star yet. I mean, that demand was a little over the top.”
For months, Prince had jotted down ideas about a musical rivalry and love triangle between the Revolution and rival band the Time, with himself at the center, bedeviled by an abusive father.
Musicians didn’t make movies in the mid-80s. But Prince knew it would be a hit.
“I don’t know how you describe his obsession,” tour manager Alan Leeds told Spin. “It was beyond confidence. It wasn’t even arrogant. It was destiny, and either you’re on board or you’re going to miss out.” So Cavallo pitched it to directors and producers.
“Everybody turned us down,” recalls Cavallo, who eventually decided to produce it himself. “Nobody wanted to give me the money. We were gonna make a movie…with unknown black people in front of the camera and me as a first-time producer.”
Cavallo commissioned a screenplay and hired Albert Magnoli — a recent film-school grad whose only credit was a docudrama about jazz — to direct. Magnoli immediately disliked the screenplay.
“It just didn’t have any truth,” he tells Spin. “If a film like this works, it works because it’s speaking to the kids and it’s coming from the heart.”
Upon meeting Prince, “I was able to discern a tremendous amount of vulnerability in him, which the material I’d studied hadn’t given me,” Magnoli says. “When Prince is performing, he’s extremely assured. But what I saw walking across the lobby was a very vulnerable kid.”
Over lunch (Prince ordered spaghetti and orange juice), Magnoli pitched his vision: “A kid from the other side of the tracks, someone that’s not appreciated, he’s in this wonderful musical world, and he’s got parent problems.”
“How is it that you can tell me my whole life in seven minutes?” Prince asked, impressed.
When Magnoli heard the band rehearse the melancholy ballad “Purple Rain,” he knew it would be the film’s centerpiece. Prince replied, “If that’s the song, can Purple Rain also be the title of the movie?”
Cavallo’s nickname for Prince — “The Kid” — became his character’s name.
As the cast of musicians began shooting, Leeds says it it was clear “no one was going to win any awards for acting.” Their musical performances were a different story: When shooting fell behind, “Prince, who’s unbelievable, always hit his mark,” says Magnoli. “If he did three takes, there was no change. Within a week, we had done the four weeks’ work.”
When studio Warner Brothers screened the completed film, execs didn’t want to release it. But Howard Bloom, a music PR man and Prince fan, was also in the screening room. The film left him in tears, and he delivered an impassioned speech.
“I got pissed off,” Bloom tells Brooklyn Paper. “Everyone was saying it wasn’t a movie.” Bloom warned that killing such a “cultural milestone” would be a “sin against art.”
Warner agreed to release it — on just 200 screens. They considered it a “black film,” and Prince had mysteriously refused to promote it in interviews. When the filmmakers insisted Purple Rain had crossover potential, Warner told them to “go to Texas now and screen this in front of an all-white, redneck audience.”
“A week later,” Magnoli says, “we fly down to Texas and put it up in front of 300 white kids. Within three minutes, they’re all up on their feet. Bob was able to get the studio to understand that they needed to get this into the heartland.” Warner added 700 screens.
Purple Rain was released on July 27, 1984, blowing past its $7 million budget the first weekend. Warner added 1,000 more screens.
Critics chided the acting, but teens went to see it seven and eight times. The performances, especially the four-song closing set, showed small-town American kids what it was like to see Prince live.
The film grossed $68 million. Prince had the top film, album, and single in the country. The soundtrack was number one for 24 weeks and even a year later, album sales seemed unstoppable. Prince was “the biggest rock star in the universe.”
But during the nearly 100-show tour, he snapped.
“I was doing the seventy-fifth Purple Rain show, doing the same thing over and over,” Prince later told journalist Touré. “And I just lost it…I knew I had to get away from all that. I couldn’t play the game.”
“He had found the thing that was going to throw him into the stratosphere of stardom, but also that he couldn’t stop,” singer Susannah Melvoin told Alan Light, author of Let’s Go Crazy: Prince and the Making of Purple Rain.
In reality, he was the only one who could stop it.
Prince shocked his band by ending the tour, axing the international dates — and playing a new album he’d produced in secret. Cavallo warned that two Prince records on store shelves would confuse consumers and end the once-in-a-lifetime sales momentum of Purple Rain: “If you want to be a pop strategist, you can’t put out this fucking record now.” Prince released it anyway.
“Around the World in a Day” quickly went to number one, but the soundtrack’s sales began to slow. The reign of purple was over.
