Prince's 'Purple Rain' (Part 2 - The Movie): Everything You Didn't Know - Too Much Information

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating
facts and figures behind your favorite TV shows, music, movies,
and more. We are your two genius Jehovah's Witness, genre
bending guitar slinging Paisley Parked progenitors of Minneapolis Minutia all out,
I'm Alex.

Speaker 1 (00:28):
Title and I'm short and run talk. That was very good.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
And this week we are continuing our two part exploration
of the phenomenon that is Prince's Purple Rain.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
We have moved from the world of the strictly oral
into the visual.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
We're now looking at the hallucinatory vision of Prince's Minneapolis.

Speaker 1 (00:49):
That's part biopic and part.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
Hagiography, without a doubt, one of the strangest and most
successful cinematic ventures ever mounted by musician at their own behest.

Speaker 1 (01:02):
That's a really crucial point too. Nobody asked for this.
This wasn't like a post studio that was like, hey,
we gotta we gotta use Prince, or we have this
great idea, who can we get for this, oh Prince. No,
Prince was just like Hey, I really want to do
this thing. I don't really have an idea for it. Yeah,
and in the pantheons of you know, musician starring things

(01:24):
like It's Got, I mean that aren't explicitly I mean,
I guess we have to slot in a bunch of biopics, right,
like Ray and dream Girls and stuff. But yeah, none
of those people are playing themselves, you know. So, I
mean I gotta say, this is another bad Prince take
for me in a long line of bad Prince takes
from me. I always kind of ignored that there was

(01:47):
a movie that accompanied the album, you know, I kind
of just assumed for many many years that it was
just this embarrassing vanity project that happened. It kind of
is bro Yes, yes, I mean, bearing mind every he
just said.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
Yeah, you know, the quiet part I allowed is that
it's not a good movie.

Speaker 1 (02:04):
It's like, but it's better than it has any right
to be. I think that was where that was how
I approached it. I mean I literally thought that it
was just like a long music video for a very
long time, and then when I did watch it quite late,
I want to say, it was like out of college.
He was good.

Speaker 2 (02:22):
Actually, Yeah, I mean it's really carried off on Prince
doing the Kubrick stare all like just his powerful gaze
and like I think the secret MVP this movie is
more as Day, not Apollonia, not like anyone else. It's
just like it's more as Day because the rest of
them are all like perfectly serviceable actors in a sense,

(02:46):
but in another truth when she's all bad, Yeah, oh
they're all bad. But like Morris day Man, that guy
should have had a bigger career if you weren't so
addicted to coke. Like he just holds the camera and
just like struts around. He's he's got it. He's got
that thing that draws you to him, and he's just
so and that laugh that laughs still so annoying and

(03:08):
hilarious that it's like, how's a family? You know, he's
so funny. Yeah, and you know, we know obviously all
the music stuff looks amazing.

Speaker 1 (03:19):
I didn't realize until rewatching scenes from this how all
the years that I was a wedding DJ, I was
subconsciously trying to recreate the opening scene whenever I would
open the dance floor with Let's go crazy. Yeah, Like
that was what I was trying to make happen. Yeah,
that editing in that sequence is really cool. You see
how it quickly became an influence on music video editing.

Speaker 2 (03:39):
Really like the rapid fire cuts and just sort of
the you know, I think there's like a girl on
girl kiss in there that's so fast you barely see it.
But otherwise it's just a bunch of like cool detail
shots of people wearing ridiculous fashions and so forth. But
that opening scene crackles pretty well, it just slows to
a halt whenever anyone's actually forced to add.

Speaker 1 (04:02):
You know, all right, here here's a fun little thought experiment.
Game hit me. Movies that are nowhere near as good
as their soundtrack. I would like to offer up Saturday
Night Fever, Bodyguard, Reality Bites, maybe Garden State, maybe Famously, Yeah, Glitter.
I'm actually not even sure if the album is all

(04:23):
that good, but I know the movie is worse.

Speaker 2 (04:26):
Soundtrack better than album. Godzilla.

Speaker 1 (04:31):
Oh yeah, oh you're totally not the.

Speaker 2 (04:35):
P Diddy Yeah, but not the p Diddy song. But
there's a there's a bang in Regi against the Machine
song on there. There's jamiir Kwi Mortal Kombat, the original
for me.

Speaker 1 (04:44):
Also good, Yeah, it.

Speaker 2 (04:45):
Has like Nate palm death up against orbital, Like it's
just a very strange.

Speaker 1 (04:51):
For you, right, that was a yeah? Well, I mean.

Speaker 2 (04:56):
It's just so funny hearing orbit will pop up in
like Mean Girls and I'll stuff halleon Hallion on and on,
like pop up is like the end of Mean Girls
when I'm like, that's the Mortal Kombat song. But what
else is in this category? What else is in this category? Uh,
it's a great thought experiment Flash Chance. H what's on
the soundtrack other than maniac?

Speaker 1 (05:18):
Yeah? Other than that, that's it. I'm not counting like
a bad movie that had a good song. I mean,
like the full album was like, oh.

Speaker 2 (05:25):
That's oh bang, Yeah, okay, maybe not maybe not a
Flash Chance, although yeah that's flash Dance has h what
a feeling and maniacally in that too. Do you want
to know what the streaming ones are?

Speaker 1 (05:38):
Yeah? What Furious seven? It's been alone? Oh that makes
total sense? So that was number one for like tifteen weeks?
Is it? When I see? Yeah? Can I break the
record for the longest longest number one? I don't care?

Speaker 2 (05:56):
Star is Born, Greatest show Man, Frozen, the twenty sixteen
Suicide Squad soundtrack has two point five billion streams. Uh huh,
thought experiment over. Oh man, I forgot My favorite shot
in this movie that I wanted to talk about is
when Prince meets Apollonia for the first time, he is

(06:18):
not wearing sunglasses, and then he crosses around behind her
and dawns sunglasses so that when he looks over her
shoulder necks, he seems to have emerged out of nowhere
wearing sunglasses.

Speaker 1 (06:29):
Wait? Is that also the scene where he basically seduces
her by staring at the back of her head and
she just like feels his smirk. Oh?

Speaker 2 (06:35):
Got so many pinched smirks in this movie. It's an
old timer for smirking. I'm not sure that's when he
first meets her. He gets her card. Yeah, with the
other chick who's later in Apollonia six, tweeted us. So
tweeted us said, Apollonia six well from the decidedly downer

(06:57):
of an early draft that pulled from Prince's tortured up
bringing to the breathtakingly disgusting meal combo he was seen
eating at early development meetings, to the real life feud
between him and Morris day. That kind of has a
nice ending to the mystical origins of his epic cloud
guitar and the lightning speed with which this whole thing
came together. Here's everything you didn't know about Prince's Purple

(07:20):
Rain the movie. So, as we mentioned last week, Prince
had his mind on the silver screen from his early
as the late seventies. I found a long thread on
Prince dot org that was collecting references to films Prince
made in his lyrics cross his entire career, including The

(07:40):
Shining and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He also
seemed to have an affinity for Roger Vadiem. He referenced
Vediem's films and God Created Woman and Barbarella in song.
Barbarella has a few references, and he christened one keyboard
player at one point Tommy Barbarella.

Speaker 1 (07:57):
Of course he loves Barbarella. It's all the horniest movies
made with Jane Fonda. That poster is iconic, and you'll
recall that me, you and your then girlfriend now wife
had a lovely afternoon watching it at my apartment on
a Sunday Afterion Will a number of years ago. That's soundtrack.
Speaking of movies, where the I guess it's as good
as the movie the soundtrack goes. It's by Bob Crue,

(08:21):
who did a lot like adult contemporary pop stuff in
the sixties and worked with like The Four Seasons. So
I mean, of course Prince loved it. It's weird, SpaceX
and slick songs, good summation, check out Barbarella, everybody it rules.
We should do that. Actually, oh yeah, that'd be fun.

Speaker 2 (08:38):
Lisa Coleman remembers Prince having a poster for the Chris
Christofferson Barber streisand version of a Star Is Born on
the Wall in his pre Paisley Park House too. We
mentioned that last week, after the success of nineteen ninety nine,
Prince came to his management team and said if they
wanted to re sign him, they had to get him
a movie deal from a legitimate studio with his name
across the top.

Speaker 1 (08:58):
I want it from a major. I don't want it
from some drug dealer or diamond jewelu that you.

Speaker 2 (09:04):
Find yeah, pacific and hilarious, because like that would have
been a source of funding in the eighties. Prince's managers,
Bob Cravallo, Joe Ruffalo and Steve Farnoli understandably blanched at this,
but nevertheless started to put out feelers for financing. This
was tricky because Prince was, at this point the only
draw to the project. There was no screenplay to shop it.

Speaker 1 (09:25):
Just go to meetings. Just toss an eight by ten
glossy on the table. Just see the reaction it gets.

Speaker 2 (09:32):
Just like draw a money sign over it. Prince had
a rough story for the film that he'd cobbled together
by himself for years. His treatment was subsequently reprinted in
the posthumously published memoir The Beautiful Ones and Old Boy
Is It Dark? The main protagonist named for some reason, Prince,
witnessed the murder of his father at the hands of

(09:54):
his mother, who then kills herself. In the last scene
of Prince's version, rather than the triumphant musical performance that
we know from the ultimate version of the film, Prince
was to use that same gun in a scene of
him seriously contemplating suicide.

Speaker 1 (10:09):
Very hamlet. Oh, I know we'll touch on this later,
but let's take a second to play armchair psychologists. Well,
we're here, Prince. In real life, his parents split up,
his dad very famously threw him out, and Prince would
later say, begging to come home was the last time
he cried. And Prince would also make barely veiled insinuations

(10:30):
of childhood abuse. So there's a lot here.

Speaker 2 (10:34):
Yeah, I mean, the whole film is it's basically just
like a therapy session, you know, the whole thing about
him not letting other people in and thinking everyone is
out to get him, and that was something that Albert
Magnoli did in his version of the screenplay, was very
keen to highlight. But yeah, and then the part where

(10:54):
his dad's like, you got a girlfriend, Princes like yeah,
he's like, you want to marry her? And he like
does a non committal shrug and he just goes, don't
ever get married, or like don't get married something, and
it's just, yeah, there's a lot, there's a lot going
on under the hood of this not especially veiled.

Speaker 1 (11:11):
I can't remember. Did Prince get married in real life?
Oh yeah, I cut a whole thing about him and
his wife Maria. Oh and yes, they lost their first kid, babe, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (11:29):
And he immediately went back to work. May tay Garcia
is her name, and like within days he was performing
a concert and shooting a music video and forcing her
to co star in it, where they laid in a
hospital bed in the same hospital their son had just
died in.

Speaker 1 (11:45):
I cut that because it was too dark. How did
he die again?

Speaker 2 (11:48):
He was born with some kind of a syndrome that
basically made it so he would never be able to
breathe on his own, and they took him off a ventilator.

Speaker 1 (11:55):
Oh, it's RDS or something like that. I don't remember
the specific name.

Speaker 2 (11:58):
Again, I took it out because it was so dark.

Speaker 1 (12:01):
Sorry, sorry, but.

Speaker 2 (12:03):
Certainly it goes into the rich stew of Prince's dad stuff.

Speaker 1 (12:07):
Astandingly, the movie at this point was.

Speaker 2 (12:09):
Called Dreams, and it was under this title that Prince's
management convinced William Blinn, executive producer of the TV show Fame,
to help out with a proper screenplay.

Speaker 1 (12:20):
I can't believe that makes so much sense that they
got the fame guy. They got the fame guy. Oh
my god, Blint told Spin for the two thousand and
nine Oral History of Purple Rain the movie. I went
to Hollywood where Prince was putting together final touches on
a video, met him at an Italian restaurant in Hollywood.
What I remember more than anything was that he was
the only person I had ever seen in my life

(12:40):
who had pasta an orange drink. I was gonna say,
does that imply tang Oh? I was gonna say, like
orange crush. Yeah, that's either. I mean, none of this
makes it better, whether it's tang an orange soda or
just raw orange juice. It's all pretty orange juices. Were
tang is in the middle, orange soda, I would allow

(13:03):
because that seems like like soda and spaghetti. I mean,
that's like something you would have at like a kid's
birthday party at a roller rink when you were like eight.
And it's like, all right, we got this.

Speaker 2 (13:12):
I guess it's not that far from orange soda and pizza.
But yeah, gross, Yeah, it's still weird. I thought it
was orange.

Speaker 1 (13:18):
Juice and that that's unforgivable. No. Blinn continued, I didn't
get it then, the choice of food and drink pairing.
I don't get it now. But what the hell? He
had definite ideas of what he wanted to do. Generalized
storyline broad strokes. It wasn't his life, but it was
about his life. Oh that's an interesting distinction. Not that

(13:39):
it was wall the wall Docky drama, but he knew
where he'd come from, and he wanted the movie to
reflect that. Insightful that's a great quote. In May nineteen
eighty three, Blind went to Minneapolis to hold long conversations
with Prince. Soak up the Minneapolis ambiance. Sorry, shouldn't laugh,
I've never beann. I'm sure it's wonderful. And work on
the screenplay. Oh have you been?

Speaker 2 (14:01):
No, But just the way everyone talks about the weather
and the making of this movie, I'm like, no, I'm
not going there. I don't care that there were several
Minneapolis punk bands and Prince that I liked, It's not
enough reason to go subject myself to that.

Speaker 1 (14:14):
Soak up the Minneapolis on Beyonce, and work on the
screenplay with his notes and music. It was Blin's idea
to add a rivalry between the two bands based on
the fraternal rivalry between Prince and Morris Day, and he
ultimately finished his draft in about a month. I took
the Orange Juice anecdote myself to leave you ample time
to take the more.

Speaker 2 (14:34):
Decidebar Morris Day, Man, what do you that guy mentioned
at the intro, man who just bends this film around?
Him by sheer charisma. He was born the same year
as Prince, and he was actually just a complete He
was drummer, first great drummer, everyone says, you know, the
two of them went to high school together, and Morris

(14:54):
played drums in one of Prince's high school bands, Grand Central,
which Day's mom managed, which is hilarious. This didn't mean, though,
that they were immediately best of friends. Dave recalled in
a Forbes interview that it was weeks before Prince even
spoke to him directly. He would just hang out in
the doorway of the rehearsal room and watch him drum

(15:14):
and kind of like probably gave him a nice pinched
smirk and then like turned around and walked out.

Speaker 1 (15:21):
I mean, is this a thing where he just like
is trying to cultivate mystique or do we think he's
genuinely shy? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (15:28):
No, I think everyone described him as actually quite shy
and introverted, and that you know, he basically by creating
this character, this larger than life Prince character, that he
could inhabit, it let him duck outside of his innate shyness.
But that's one of the log lines that everyone says
about him is like, yeah, he was the asslest chaps.

(15:50):
James Brown moved guitar virtuoso, dolphin shrieking guy, but he
was painfully shy. Make of that what you will. Day's
family moved the family to Ireland and then California, and
when they returned to Minneapolis in nineteen eighty, as they
told Ultimate prints dot Com, Prince had already signed with
Warner Brothers. By then, he already had his situation up

(16:11):
and running. He said, he knew I was back in town.
We started hanging out again. I started playing drums in
a lot of tracks. We were jamming a lot, writing
stuff together. He told me, you can use my studio
to put your thing together. Well, the first thing that
I started to cut was Party Up, which is a
track that would later end up on Dirty Mind.

Speaker 1 (16:28):
It was a lot slower and funkier, but he liked
it and he wanted it. It was just a basin
drum track at that point, but he wanted it. So
he said, I'll offer you money, or I'll help you
get your record deal. I said, I'll take the record deal. Prince,
as was his wont, immediately got to work helping Day
form the time in nineteen eighty one. The pair largely

(16:48):
crafted the group's first three albums alone in the studio
before putting a live band together that featured future producing
superstars Jimmy jam and Terry Lewis Jordan. What do they
work on a lot of Janet jacks and stuff? I
interviewed them. I should know more, but yeah, the Janet
Jackson I think, like Rhythm Nation stuff was the big one.

Speaker 2 (17:08):
So Day has a memoir out called on Time, A
Princely Life in Funk good stuff that does very little
to help Prince's reputation as a deeply competitive control freak. Essentially,
according today, Prince stifled the band's record distribution in Europe
via warners and blocked them from performing in many of
the major A markets that Prince would hit on tour,

(17:29):
relegating them to smaller cities and smaller venues. Dick move Prince. Yeah, Yeah,
it does seem that he felt like the second he
helped anyone out, he was immediately allowed to be.

Speaker 1 (17:41):
Addicted to them forever more in perpetuity.

Speaker 2 (17:43):
Yeah, like control them and do things that he and
they were like under his thumb.

Speaker 1 (17:48):
Basically, this dynamic is probably best exemplified by a situation
Day recalls when The Time and the Revolution were still
touring together, during which Prince apparently got some members of
his band to pelt the Time with eggs during their performance.
He told Forbes we get off and he's thinking it's
real funny, and he said, don't try and do that

(18:10):
to me. This warning did not work. Day continued, saying,
we retaliated. Prince gets on stage and we're slinging eggs
at him and messing up his performance. Then he gets
off stage and it turned into a big ordeal. It
ended up with he and I in a room with
a security guard. He's cussing and yelling at me. I
ended up footing the cost of the damages of that

(18:30):
whole fight because he was in control. We were signed
to his production company. He was dangling the carrot like
I'll pull the deal. At warners, you won't be this,
you won't be that. That's just the way it went.
And Day also talks about Prince bringing both himself and
the rest of the Time to Paisley Park for an
hour's long lecture on the virtue of his newfound Jehovah's

(18:51):
witness faith. Day later went by himself at Princess Behest,
only to have Prince again ask him to convert because
he was unsuccessful first time, and then when Day said no,
he refused to work with him for a number of years.
Messed up.

Speaker 2 (19:06):
Yeah, Day rewrote or improvised a lot of his lines
in Purple Rain, including my favorite how's the family. When
he passes Prince Prince's suggesting room, he said, we had
recorded cool and had added it to the show. It
was on the radio, roasting on the charts.

Speaker 1 (19:23):
Not a phrase I'm used to, but sure.

Speaker 2 (19:25):
And we were a rehearsal and I get to the
part somebody bring me a mirror, and all of a sudden,
Jerome appears. He snatched a mirror off the wall somewhere
and he appears in front of my face holding up
a mirror, and it was just one of the moments,
one of them aha moments. Despite all this and co
starring in Purple Rain, Day said that he was paid
fifty grand for the film all told, which he then

(19:46):
had to split with a time. He later said he
ended up making about twenty five thousand from Purple Rain,
and at least as of his interview with Forbes, he said,
I see some royalties, but they're not great and to
be fair, Day was very coked up during the shoot.
He showed up hours later at one point and Prince
blew up with him. Prince shoved him and things nearly
turned into a brawl before it was broken up by

(20:07):
time drummer jelly Bean Johnson.

Speaker 1 (20:12):
It's so hard.

Speaker 2 (20:13):
Naming these band members in the straight face. Jelly Bean Johnson,
Matt Doctor Fink. God dude, it's so damn funny to
see them all in these like frilly horsed albums and
then just oh the outfits and yeah, and Matt Fink
in this in the scrubs, like.

Speaker 1 (20:28):
Oh, got like a lost member of the village people. Yeah. Wait,
So Morris Day got fifty grand for this that he
then had to split with the rest of the band.
How much did Prince make? Do you know?

Speaker 2 (20:40):
I mean, I'm sure that's just unquantifiable because he I
mean millions, certainly. I'm sure he got a cut of
the back end. Oh, she probably negotiated for that in
Yeah Yeah. Morris d and Prince reconciled before Prince's death
in twenty sixteen, though years later there was one sad
grace note to their relationship. In twenty twenty two, Prince's
Estate forbade Day from using the trademark name Morris Day

(21:01):
in the time, insisting he needed to license it from
them for use. And you'll see this has become this
becomes a trend with the Princess State.

Speaker 1 (21:09):
Yeah, unrelated, but still kind of related because I had
to deal with the Princess State a lot because Prince
died the day that I first interviewed with people, and
it just kind of like set the tone on my
first like six months there, Like there was always like
people coming out of the woodwork that we had to interview,
and then the Princess Estate would get mad that we had. Yeah,
but one of my first big exclusives that people was

(21:31):
interviewing the folks at the crematorium who designed the Prince's
custom made Paisley Park shaped urn. Have you seen this course, Yeah,
it looks like a Polly Pocket model of Paisley Park.
Like it doesn't look good, Like there's no gravitas there.
You know. He asked for something and he got it.
It's like a mini purple Baby grand in there. I

(21:52):
mean it's like a dollhouse. He asked for what he
wanted and he got it all right. As you meditate
on that, We'll be right back with more too much information.

Speaker 3 (22:06):
After these messages, Prince's management team were rejected by basically
every director they approached, which.

Speaker 1 (22:22):
Makes sense because it's basically them pointing out an eight
x ten glossy of Prince and going, eh, this guy, yeah, eh, no.
I guess they had to have a script at this point.
At one point, when the script was still known as Dreams,
it was shopped to James Foley, who was then screening
his upcoming film Reckless around La. One of Prince's managers,
Bob Carvallo, was at one of these screenings scoping out

(22:44):
Foley for the Dreams Purple Rang job, and after Foley
also passed, Carvallo vented to Reckless's editor Albert Margoli. He
said something to the effect of, I don't understand. I
got a lawyer in Los Angeles who gave me a
talent agent who gave me a series of clients. Know
why we're getting stonewalled? Margnoley, basically just feeling bad for
the poor guy, offered to take a look at the

(23:05):
script and said that the bleak family stuff had to
go and that the banded rivalry in Minneapolis. Local flavor
needed to be at the center of the story, so
carvol Op pressed him further, asking what he would do
for a story, and basically off the top of his head,
Albert Margnoli rattled off the eventual plot of Purple Rain. Carvolo,
very impressed, asked Margnoli if he would consider the job.

(23:26):
As Marknoley recalled to the Huffington Post, I said, put
me on a plane to Minneapolis tomorrow night. I'll meet
with Prince and I'll tell him this new story. If
he likes it, we'll make a film. If he doesn't,
you're out nothing more than the cost of a plane ticket.
And this was in June nineteen eighty three, shortly before
William Blynn had finished his first draft of the script
and returned to La to go back to making fame.

(23:48):
Only when Magnola got to Minneapolis, he was confronted by
another member of Princess Management, the similarly named Steve Bargnoli.
That's why I said his name wrong. It's very con Yeah, yeah,
Magnoli said. Steve immediately zeroed in on me and said,
we're not doing your story. The film we're doing is

(24:08):
the script that's being written, and that's all there is
to it. I'm going to take you to the hotel
where Princess stang, and he's going to come down the
elevator at exactly midnight, and you're going to meet him.
When Prince came down to meet Magnoli, presumably exactly at midnight,
he was struck by the stars seeming self consciousness, something
that he would come to identify as an important part
of the movie's tone. When Prince asked him about the

(24:30):
Dream screenplay, Magnoli brashly told him something to the effect of,
I'm not here to talk about that. I'm here to
talk about a story I told Bob yesterday in Los Angeles,
before launching into another mini pitch for what he told Covolo,
adding on the fly elements of characterization from what he'd
just seen right then, and there is Prince's own vulnerability
and isolation. Prince dismissed everyone else and took Magnoli out

(24:53):
for a late night drive in his blue BMW. Leaving
the city and cruising through pitch black Minnesota farmland, he
asked Magnoley, do you know me? Magnoldy answered truthfully that
he'd only heard cuts from nineteen ninety nine on the radio.
Prince responded, well, how is it then that you came
here and in ten minutes you told me my life story.

(25:16):
Imagine Prince telling you that, presumably at dawn, driving through
farmland in his blue BMW, I would be a little frightened. Actually, yeah, maybe.

Speaker 2 (25:27):
Originally they were set to use five hundred thousand from
Prince and another five hundred thousand from his management, which
would have been a terrifyingly shoestring budget for a feature film.

Speaker 1 (25:36):
That's like three million dollars today. But then they started
shopping at around to studios. Both Richard Pryor's and Jim
Brown's Indigo Productions and the Geffen Film Company were interested,
but they wanted too much creative control, and the project
was rejected by essentially every other major studio as well,
until Moe Austen, who is one of Prince's biggest boosters
at Warner Brothers, decided to help out and agreed to

(25:57):
throw in some financing for the film. I met with
the head of production at Warner at that time, Mark Canton,
and convinced him. Austin told Billboard in twenty sixteen, the
top executive in the company had some misgivings about it,
and in order to get them to commit, the management
and probably Princes himself agreed to put in some money
to front the film, and we told the film company
that we the record company, would guarantee everything that went

(26:20):
over budget, so that really sealed the business part of
the deal. Warner Brothers agreed to throw in seven million
to the Purple Rain budget. A large part of that
was supposedly something like two to four million of Moe
Austin's own salary. That's crazy, like he took an advance
against his future salary to help fund Purple Rain. Get

(26:41):
yourself a friend like Moe Austin, Yeah, seriously.

Speaker 2 (26:43):
One of the studio notes was early on if John
Travolta could be considered for the role of the kid God, jeez,
that would be just the fucking piece of shit.

Speaker 1 (26:54):
Actually, you know.

Speaker 2 (26:55):
What, he can probably have made it work. I was dancing, certainly.

Speaker 1 (26:58):
Oh yeah, I would allow it. If he wore the
frilly new romantic outfits and the Chelsea Oh he for
sure would have.

Speaker 2 (27:05):
I mean, like yes, his yeah, well, I mean he
wears worse in.

Speaker 1 (27:10):
Uh everything else, all live staying alive. Oh, the sequel,
the Misbegotten Saturday Night Fever sequel. Yeah, I forgot about that.

Speaker 2 (27:21):
See some of the costumes he wears, Well, it's sort
of the I mean he's torqued, but he's sort of
wearing the Prince speedo from Dune.

Speaker 1 (27:29):
Why is he so oily? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (27:32):
Well, Magnoli Brashley shut the John Travolta aspect of things
down before also shutting down the studio's requests for PG
thirteen rating, intent on keeping the darker.

Speaker 1 (27:42):
Aspects of the film in place.

Speaker 2 (27:43):
It would have probably still been PG.

Speaker 1 (27:46):
At this point.

Speaker 2 (27:46):
Actually, I think that's a mist remembered bit because the
PG rating had been created like a year or.

Speaker 1 (27:54):
Two before this was in production.

Speaker 2 (27:56):
Warners eventually folded, and Magnoli was soon on his way
to a minut Napolis to interview local musicians and other
people in Princess Circle to gather material for the film.

Speaker 1 (28:06):
Yeah. So about those darker elements we touched on earlier.
Prince's character in the film, named simply the Kid no
longer Prince, is not a great guy. There's the famous
scene in which he tells Apollonia to purify herself in
the cleansing waters of Lake Minnetaka you haven't completed the purification,
and then after she does so, tells her that the

(28:27):
body of water she was just in was not, in
fact like Minietonka, before taking off on his motorcycle, leaving
her freezing, naked and stranded for a time. Not cool,
A rare moment of actually no, there's a lot of
moments of him not being great to women, as we'll
touch on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's also a scene in
which Morris Day and Jerome Benton literally toss a woman
into a dumpster, something that Manoli said that, as well

(28:51):
as the other misogyny, was intended as commentary on the
actual sexism in the club scene and music industry at
the time, and not an endorsement of it. Yeah, yeah,
was it though It's played for comedy, which is odd
and dumb comedy. Yeah, but something that you write is
resolutely not funny, and i'll co sign that is the

(29:13):
scene in which the kid hits Apollonia in the film,
which you may remember from last week, was the scene
that caused Stevie Nicks to flee the premiere and hide
in the bathroom. I wonder if she had PTSD from
Beam with Lindsay Buckingham all those year. Yah Jesus. Yeah.
It was also a point of contention this scene with
Prince's rival Michael Jackson, who told a friend that he
also left the Purple Rain movie in bad spirits, saying, quote,

(29:37):
can you read this in the voice? Prince looks mean
and I don't like the way he treats women. Salient points, MJJ,
is it true? True? Yeah. Prince later defended the slapping
scene in his very first TV interview, That's not quite true.
He was interviewed as an eleven year old on a
picket line for Okay Alright, saying it was a story,

(30:00):
a fictional story, and should be perceived that way. Violence
is something that happens in everyday life, and we are
only telling a story. A Polonia echoed that on the
tour for the film, saying the movie had to do
with alcoholism and a dysfunctional family. There was an abusive
relationship and a paralleled the relationship the Prince had with
his parents.

Speaker 2 (30:18):
But but yeah, as I was writing this man, the
New York Times magazine published an article that I think
it was like it might have been just like five
days ago. It's all about this lost Prince documentary that'll
probably never will definitely never see the light of day
because of his state issues and this, that and the other.

(30:39):
But Netflix is tied up in it somehow. It's this
guy Ezra Edelman, and it is nine hours long, and
it has one scene in particular that challenges Prince's whole
fictional story. Jill Jones, who you may remember from last

(30:59):
week's episode, was one of Prince's backup singers who was
with him when he supposedly made the decision to yank
the base out of the mix of When Dove's Cry,
and she recalls on screen. She recalls one night in
nineteen eighty four when she and a friend visited Prince
at a hotel. Prince naturally overlooked Jones and started kissing

(31:19):
her friend. Jones understandably slapped him before Prince looked at
her and said, bitch, this ain't no movie. The pair
then got into a fight, which ended with Prince repeatedly
punching Jones in the face. She wanted to press charges
against him, but eventually declined out of what still remained
her love for him, and when his team told her

(31:39):
that pursuing the issue would.

Speaker 1 (31:41):
Ruin his career. Now.

Speaker 2 (31:42):
That scene is preceded by Tyken Nelson, Prince's sister, recalling
how their father used to hit their mother when they
were growing up. Obviously, as in Purple Rain, it's intended
to depict the cycle of violence that physical abuse often
locks multiple generations into, but it so casts a pall
over the film and Prince's views on women as a whole.

(32:03):
I was looking at this and they were actually, like
historically contemporaneously, there were many people pressing this on him,
So are bringing this up when the movie came out,
So at least for the time, it was not overlooked.

Speaker 1 (32:17):
Yeah, that's more that can be said for a lot
of this kind of stuff in media. So on a
lighter note, back to the movie, we mentioned that it
was originally supposed to start Vanity as the female lead,
but people have said that it wasn't necessarily the breakup
of Prince in Vanity, but the fact that she supposedly
was in the running for the role of Mary Magdalene

(32:38):
in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. Barbara Hershey
ultimately played that role and was nominated for a Golden Globe,
but supposedly that's the reason that Vanity left. Director Albert
Magnoli told Spin I felt bad for her because I
knew she was in a terrible bind. In the end,
she and her representative made the determination that they would
do this Scorsese project, which then got delayed because of financing.

(33:02):
Oh jeanter Grishawn auditioned for the role and god as
far as meeting Prince, but she wasn't down with the
explicit sexual nature of the role. Let's say, what movie
we gone. We talked about her and something She's come
up multiple times.

Speaker 2 (33:17):
I think I don't know if it was most recently,
but it was for the lesbian thriller Bound that she
made with Jennifer Tilly. That was the Wachowski's first film.

Speaker 1 (33:27):
Oh right, that's.

Speaker 2 (33:28):
What got like one guy at Warners to be like,
these guys have some thing. Sorry these people, he would
have said, guys at that point, I'm just being historically accurate.
Please don't cancel us.

Speaker 1 (33:37):
It's not what Kanye based his song Bound Too on.
I don't even know.

Speaker 2 (33:43):
Yeah, they were, just the name is not going to
be referenced in this podcast ever.

Speaker 1 (33:47):
If I have my brothers, do you feel like do
you feel like Kanye your jumny click voice. Do do
you feel like you clubbed Prince? Do you feel like
you clocked Kanye West from the beginning? Yeah, I mean
I loved my beautiful, dark, twisted fantasy, sure, but the

(34:10):
ego that would have to make something that astonishingly uh
manic and astonishingly delusional in a way. Yeah, I mean
I think that that would. Uh that was a sign
after that, I mean the Taylor Swift thing also a sign. Yeah.
I just always thought he was not good. That's like

(34:33):
a rare well and I actually like love See, I
actually never drilled into that. I kind of wrote him
off after like college dropout stuff because I was like
you yeah, I mean like I kind of pretty quickly
clocked that.

Speaker 2 (34:46):
It was like, oh you just the sped up soul
sample is like your thing, because right around that time
he'd done h h to the i Iszzo, which is
like one of my favorite jay Z songs. But I
was like, after like hearing three to four songs in
a row where Conny was just doing the sped up
soul sample, I was like, Okay, I get this guy's thing,
and then uh, you know, I was in my jazz

(35:07):
era in college.

Speaker 1 (35:08):
So I mean, anyway, he did have some a great
run on Twitter, didn't he say? Like, I hate when
I'm like sleep on a plane, I wake up and
somebody put like a water bottle on my tread. Now
he's like, great, Now I got a responsible for the
fall of water.

Speaker 2 (35:22):
He did also call what's the Elder Chris Chris Kardashian
Chris Jong Eel at one point.

Speaker 1 (35:29):
Oh yeah, that was also good. Also medium funny Chris Jenner,
Chris Jenna. Jeez, Chris Jenner. Oh, I'm so sorry.

Speaker 2 (35:36):
Yes, right, anyway, Uh, production saw I've also heard, We've
I've also heard the Jennifer Biles turned it down to
go to Yale, which was probably a smart decision. Production
saw hundreds of girls for the role, ultimately landing on
actress slash model, slash singer slash dancer Apollonia Kotero.

Speaker 1 (35:57):
When she showed up for casting. She later told The
Current there was a girl walking out of the casting office.
It was Nina Peebles, and I remember she had this
terrified look in her face and she said, it's you.
You're the one. You're gonna kill me. Aberbagnolli liked a
Polonia because she showed up in sweats. Apparently. Apolonia later

(36:18):
told Spin I was in South America and Mexico singing
in nightclubs, doing commercials, TV series films. I had to
submit my tape with songs in the acting reel, meet
the producers in LA and meet Prince in Minnesota. He
was shy, and he smelled real good, like purple. We
sat there and stared at each other for the longest time.

(36:38):
Prince took her to dinner. She remembers he had spaghetti
and tea, so clearly he must have been in a
spaghetti phase. Tea is what kind of tea, green herbal?
If it's like English breakfast tea, that's gross, awful black tea. No, no, no.
And after this Italian meal, he took her to the
First Avenue club to dance. I felt like i'd met

(36:59):
him before, she continued to the current. There was something
that's still to this day. I don't understand. I don't
really believe in past lives or anything, but I felt
really comfortable with them. Supposedly, when it came time to
film the couple's sex scene, they shot it three ways
with a g PG an R rating. In mind a
G rated sex scene with Prince Jesus Christ. There's also

(37:23):
a long standing rumor that there's a much more explicit
version of this sex scene out there, since the MPAA
allegedly gave Purple Rain an X rating when it was
first submitted. I want to do a quick sidebar, although
I think you know more about it than me. On
Prince's recording session for the Batman soundtrack with Kim Bassenger,
oh all I remember because he was like trying to

(37:44):
date her, and all I remember is that he was
trying to make a singer out of her, and he
sent everyone away from the studio to work with just her,
and then they came in the next day, the technicians did,
and they found the mixing board all covered with honey?
Am I remembering that? Right?

Speaker 2 (37:59):
I actually don't know. I'm so sorry. I wish I
could verify that.

Speaker 1 (38:05):
That seems like a pure Alex Heigel's story. I can't believe. Yeah,
it sounds about right. I feel like someone one of
my coworkers, one of my first coworkers in New York,
told me some kind of story where someone came to
a Hollywood party once and they thought what they thought
they saw Kim Bassenger running around a pool being pursued
by a naked twelve year old and it was Prince. Uh.

(38:29):
An engineer said to a magazine that Prince arrived in
the studio with Kim and a pot of honey. Everyone
was ordered out. Later on, when everybody came in the
next day, there's honey all over the mixing desk.

Speaker 2 (38:41):
That's real bad for the console. Man, that's real bad
for it. I just I think that's like rule number one, like,
don't get honey in.

Speaker 1 (38:47):
There, don't have honeysex on.

Speaker 2 (38:49):
The I just don't understand honeysecks man, it's parting me
such a series of delicate fluid balances, and they're gonna
introduce bees to it.

Speaker 1 (39:03):
Yeah, that's a that's a moment of vulnerability. I feel
like Macnoley coming to see Prince and seeing that glimmer
of vulnerability that others may miss. I don't know, man,
that came out of a bee. Why would you put
it on that's the line for you. Why would you
put it on your parts? I mean, I guess I

(39:28):
get it. It's it's tastes good.

Speaker 2 (39:30):
Certainly, But I feel like if I was the one
being having it applied to the second it starts getting
anywhere near the bathing suit area or any significant holes.

Speaker 1 (39:38):
I'm just like, keep the bee stuff away from there.
You know, babies aren't even allowed to eat honey because there,
Oh yeah, because they haven't developed the relationship with the
allergens yet. We can literally kill them. Oh yeah, here
we are.

Speaker 2 (39:53):
And here Prince is slathering around on Kim Besinger's You know,
you know, you've heard of it well.

Speaker 1 (40:03):
This time of year, though, it's important as the seasons
change and Elogi's kind of kick in if you're feeling
a little under the weather because of that, it's really
good to have very local honey. And there's actually, for
any New Yorker listeners out there, there's actually a dealer
in the Union Square farmers market that has honey that

(40:23):
actually comes from beekeepers located on roofs in different neighborhoods.
You can have honey that's so so local that it
can be in your own neighborhood in New York. Is
that nice? How much are they paying you? That was
a nice memory. That was a nice thing, And actually
I find it very helpful.

Speaker 2 (40:41):
Okay, right in the pocket of Big Honey, the.

Speaker 1 (40:47):
Only Big Honey Higel's you ah, oh oh, this is great.
So Prince hired an acting coach named Don Emmn Dooley
and a dance choreographer named I can't believe this is
his dances name, John command Wait. I can't think, I

(41:09):
cannot believe that is the man.

Speaker 2 (41:10):
He was the creative director of the Minneapolis Dance Theater,
where they raised the Purple Range.

Speaker 1 (41:17):
Taping show raised money for tremendous name. Dance instructions were
held at the Minnesota Dance Theater and Lisa Coleman, Princess
keyboard player Lisa Coleman, remember being in a proper jazz
ballet class and being forced to do jazz hands, while
Bobby doctor Fink remembers every morning starting out with one
of Jane Fonda's workout tapes, our second Jane fond of

(41:39):
reference this episode. Eventually, Prince released the cast from dance
lessons after much protest on their end. Wennie Melvoye, another
member of Princess band, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune, You'd
go into the next room in the warehouse and there
was Don Ammondolia doing acting classes. Act like ice cream
and melt. Then we go downtown to these dance classes,

(42:00):
and there would be time drummer jelly Bean Johnson, the
six foot four guy trying to do purouettes across the
room with a trench coat on searing image, I know,
really haunting a man named Jellybean. So, speaking of trench coats,
let's talk wardrobe. The film's stylists were Lewis Wells, who
spent decades working with Earth, Wind and Fire, and Marie France,

(42:23):
and they took cues from everything from the then fashionable
new Romantic stylings of bands like Adam and the Ants,
with the kind of military jacket and eye patch situation
Human League, and they also played up a lot of
seventeenth and eighteenth century what they call byronic influences in
the cravat. Some influences were more specific. Prince's cropped leather

(42:44):
motorcycle jacket was inspired by James Brown. Lewis Wells told
Billboard he wanted this because it showed off his butt
so well.

Speaker 2 (42:52):
He loved his butt. That's good every man should. Prince's
look in the film varies from his trench coat, which
was a holdover from the Dirty Mind era, where he
dressed the entire band in trench coats, and Wells said
it was fun because you never knew what it was
going to be under it when it opened. But the
freely pirate shirts amid other centuries old touches, came right

(43:14):
from Prince's name. Wells said, when I first met Prince
in nineteen eighty one, he had this idea to make
an autobiographical movie about his life. He told me he
would call it Purple Rain because purple was the color
of royalty and he thought of himself as musical majesty.
By the way, no one is ever going to know
why this film was called Purple Rain or when it
was named Purple Rain, because seventeen different people have given

(43:36):
seventeen different accounts of it. I assume the most likely
explanation is that the song came first and everything else followed.
But like then you got this guy who's like no.
In nineteen eighty one, he told me it was going
to be named Purple Rain, which I have to call
bull on because at that time it would have been
called Dreams. Lewis Wells died, so I can't say anything
bad about him.

Speaker 1 (43:55):
Senator Northson, Yeah, much.

Speaker 2 (43:59):
Of Prince in the Revolutions wardrobe was otherwise the wheelhouse
of Prince's former bassist Andre Simon's seamstress, sister Sylvia.

Speaker 1 (44:08):
I just want to applaud that you got that out.

Speaker 2 (44:12):
She added a lot of the studs and the other
accouterments to whatever the band wore off the rack, as
well as tailoring their outfits for them. Von Terry, who
also worked in the wardrobe department of Prince, said, I
would say we influenced the world of fashion with Prince.
This is in an interview with Women's Wear Daily in
tribute to as Wells. He continued, you would characterize Prince's

(44:35):
influence with the ruffel shirt, the purple trench coat, the
fitted pants with sheering up the side, the diagonal fly
with the big twenty millimeters buttons. Certainly the leather jacket
with the scarf with the tassels. Even now we're still
using it. I do storyboard references at Coach pulling out
Prince pictures. It's still influencing fashion tremendously. Also, did you
know that there was an officially licensed line of Prince

(44:58):
clothing called Purple Wear. It was exclusively sold through the
now defunct Merry Go Round chain of retailers.

Speaker 1 (45:05):
I've never even heard of the chain of retailers. No,
I could kind of see it being awesome. I mean
it's out there.

Speaker 2 (45:12):
I think it's just like kind of mass market versions
of a lot of the wardrobe um. Purple Rain began
shooting on Halloween of nineteen eighty three. I forget if
I mentioned this last episode or not, but Magnoli was
so captivated by the Revolution's August performance of Purple Rain
at First Avenue that he told Prince it had to
be in the movie, which subsequently gave the film its name.

(45:35):
But Magnoli also told the Hoffington Post that the weather
in Minneapolis had something to do with it. The weather
can be quite extreme, and they have very dramatic torrential downpours.
He said, just before a fierce storm, clouds would begin
to churn, and Royal Prince would grab me and take
me outside. We would stand together in a field just
looking up at the sky. It would change color from
dark gray to blue and finally to purple, and then

(45:56):
the sky would open up and down came the rain.
That sounds so romantic of them. Also, did you know
that Prince has his own pantone color?

Speaker 1 (46:03):
I did not know. Eighteen Dash three eight three eight.
Nice love that for him. Yeah. Speaking of production, paid
one hundred grand to close down first avenue of the
club from November twenty sixth through December twentieth, nineteen eighty
three to shoot the film's musical performances. Bob Carvolo told Spin,
we were a few weeks behind. We had four weeks

(46:24):
set to shoot the music. So I said the Prince.
You know, Albert's gonna want to do twenty takes. He's
going to want to get different angles and Prince he
almost changed color. I'll give him one take for each song.
He said, No, that's extreme. What if we just did
a couple takes with a bunch of cameras and that
sounds like the compromise that they all agreed to. We

(46:45):
got a bunch of cameramen and Prince, who's unbelievable, always
hit his mark. If he did three takes, there was
no change between Prince's abilities and the revolutions unerring tightness.
After months of full day rehearsals, what they budgeted four
weeks to shoot took only one. Director Aberbagnoli told Variety,
I'm a massive Bob Fosse fan, and he called after

(47:07):
he saw the movie and said, I just can't believe
that you shot all that music in one week. Do
you know how long it took me to shoot the
opening musical sequence in Lenny a month. I just want
to say I'm a huge Bob Fosse fan, and I
was on a big Fossy kick earlier this year after
I saw Cabaret on Broadway with Eddie Redman, and I
watched the FX documentary and the book All That Jazz,

(47:28):
which is like six hundred pages long. I believe he
means All That Jazz the movie from nineteen seventy nine
with Roy Scheider, which is one of my favorite movies
ever that has a big opening musical number sequence that
I think he spent a month working on. Lenny is
a biopic of the famed comedian and free speech activist.
You could say, Lenny Bruce, there are no musical numbers

(47:50):
in that movie, thank you.

Speaker 2 (47:52):
I wonder if they got the refund back from First
Avenue for only taking a week out of a projector.

Speaker 1 (47:57):
Oh yeah, oh good good. Point. Didn't that place used
to be like a bus station or something.

Speaker 2 (48:03):
All of these Prince locations used to be something industrial
and sad. I think his warehouse was a dog.

Speaker 1 (48:09):
Yeah, yeah, Well, fortunately for the Purple Rain. Production doctor
Albert MacNulty told Salon Warner Brothers left us alone. I
must give them a lot of credit for that. They
left us alone to make the film throughout the shoot
and the entire process. However, he said this might have
had to do with practical concerns and the goodness of
their hearts, adding the winter in Minneapolis was harsh twenty

(48:30):
degrees below zero with eight feet of snow they were
trying to visit us. Prince Band member Wendy Melvoye added
to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Lisa and I had a
condo in aDNA, a town nearby. I remember that our
call on the set was at like four thirty or
five o'clock in the morning, and the two of us
had to get up an hour earlier to go out
and turn the damn car on to get it warm

(48:50):
enough to get into town. We'd be done filming by
ten o'clock at night. Well grown up in the suburbs
of Boston. That, oh, just give me bad flash. Abber
Bagnoli told Rolling Stone that the weather's impact on the
shoot was made immediately clear to them on Halloween nineteen
eighty three. We were scheduled to begin shooting on November first,

(49:12):
but it was a beautiful fall day. Bob said, is
there anything we can shoot that quickly to take advantage
of this, meaning the beautiful weather. I said, we could
do all the aerial motorcycle shots within forty eight hours.
The temperature went from the mid sixties to twenty degrees
and then below zero. The first snowstorm was five days later,
and by the time we finished shooting there were eight
foot snow drifts. The generator truck froze into ice just

(49:36):
getting to the sets. Meant we had three trucks paving
the way for us. He also added in a different
interview that they had quote a blowtorch brigade of crew
members who had come out in clear paths on exterior
sets for specific shots, not a place where Misser, we're
supposed to live or film movies. Good Lord, these conditions

(49:56):
would prove harshest on Apollonia. Kotero, who was a right
from La I, wasn't accustomed to that type of weather.
She told the current. We had mini heaters on our
hands and feet. One late afternoon, I went for a walk.
It was my day off, I don't wanted to go
walk in the snow away from the hotel. I got
caught in a mini blizzard. It started as snow and
it was nighttime already, and I didn't know where I

(50:17):
was because I couldn't see where I was anymore. I
thought I could be on the street, get hit by
a car or something, you know. So I finally saw
the green letters of the Holiday Inn and I made
it back, and I was terrified. By the time I
got back. I remember my hair was wet from the snow,
and I guess I was crying, so I had icicles
on my eyelashes. The people in the lobby were like,

(50:37):
are you okay? And I was like, no, I got lost.
It was scary. I mean, that's a stupid thing someone
from LA would do. I don't think I've ever been there.
I don't thought in a blizzard.

Speaker 2 (50:51):
I mean, I don't know, dude, Like, I would never
want to be in one of those white outs where
you just like cannot see, especially in downtown Minneapolis.

Speaker 1 (51:00):
Holy why do people live there?

Speaker 2 (51:04):
Things got worse for her while filming the famous Purify
Yourself in the cleansing waters of Lake Minnetonka scene, and obviously,
as Prince says in the film, first she tries to
stop her from jumping in, and then afterwards he says,
that isn't Lake Minnetonka.

Speaker 1 (51:18):
Rather, it's a portion of the Minnesota River.

Speaker 2 (51:19):
Near Henderson, Minnesota, which is like a population of eight
hundred people or something. So they must have just driven
down like one of the interstates that were like, eh,
this is fine.

Speaker 1 (51:31):
Apollonia told The Current that.

Speaker 2 (51:33):
The first attempt of the scene is the one that
ultimately ended up in the film, but that she did
three more afterwards, and after the fourth production shoved her
into a tent where a nurse took her temperature, ascertained
that she was going into shock from hypothermia, and.

Speaker 1 (51:47):
Rushed her to the hospital. Oh God.

Speaker 2 (51:50):
And I just thought to myself, Oh no God, Oh
no God, I don't want to die. How many different
line readings can I do that? And I just thought
to myself, Oh no God, I don't want to die now.

Speaker 1 (52:04):
I don't want to die. I just thought to myself. Yeah,
And I just thought to myself, Oh no God, I
don't want to die. Now. Let's go with that one.
And I thought to myself I thought.

Speaker 2 (52:16):
I thought to myself, Oh God, I don't want to
die now.

Speaker 1 (52:22):
This is like this, I says to God. I say so,
I says to God, I don't want to die now.
She said, I want to finish this movie. And I
could hear, just in the distance, the nurse's voice. She
was panicking, and I just started to fade out. And
then Prince came in because I remember feeling his warmth.
He held me and he said, please don't die, Please, don't die, Apollonia,

(52:45):
and his voice kind of cracked, and I don't know
it took a while, but I remember, just like in
the movies, you kind of fast forward, and then I
started to see images and it was him, and I
just remember, once I was able to talk, I just said, no,
I'm not going anywhere.

Speaker 2 (52:58):
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
probably favored her with a very emotional pinched smirk. Anyway,
after all this, they wound up finishing a lot of
that stuff in La despite all of the weather that
was trying to kill them. Every chance they could get

(53:21):
Margoli told Rolling Stone that the most difficult day was
when Prince trash's a basement. There was some apprehension when
we had to terror part the basement. It was emotionally rough.
It takes a lot to teror part a basement. We
didn't have the budget for a second take. He added
that Prince had a really hard time with this. With
a different shot, it's the scene in the film where

(53:43):
the kid deals with his father's attempted suicide and his
own briefly imagined one which is quickly flashed as him
hanging from the basement ceiling. Magnolia said, it's a shot
that lasts less than eight frames, but that was a
highly emotional scene. Prince was very agitated during the entire thing,
especially when I had to him up. His body had
to be roped into this harness to be hung on

(54:03):
a stud in the basement. We put him on the
hook and he was hanging there. Then I said to
one of the grips, touch his body so he's swinging,
and he just went berserk. He just lost total control.
The fear was coming from a real place. That's mean
that they put a little short guy up and started
pushing him around and making him swing.

Speaker 1 (54:20):
Come on, guys, he was probably just scared. He'd never
been that far off the ground before. We're gonna take
a quick break, but we'll be right back with more
too much information in just a moment. Hello, folks, it's me,

(54:43):
the mean one, Alex from too much information. I'm here too.
Jordan's here too, for a variety of reasons that they're
not interesting. Jordan and I have, in our quest to
make this thing as efficient as possible and justify the
enormous amount of time we spend on it weekly, have
been trying a variety of things, and we are now

(55:03):
at the begging stage. We were not going to do
a paywall, We're not going to do a Patreon, but
what we are going to do is drop the I'm
told it is pronounced co fee, which is sort of
a digital tip jar into this episode's description. I know
people complain about the ads, but trust us, we're not
seeing ad revenue and this is a way to make

(55:24):
it a little more sustainable and let us keep doing it. Essentially,
if the average monthly listenership of this podcast just gave
us fifty cents, it would be a truly affecting amount
of money, and if everyone gave a dollar, it would
be like life changing for a few months. So that's

(55:44):
all there is. We're not doing a payroll, we're not
doing a Patreon. We're going to drop a koffee link
in there, and if you feel so compelled, you may
donate to it, and we will be ever so grateful
and not let it go to our heads or affect
our work in any way. Probably that is all onto
our regular schedule.

Speaker 2 (56:04):
Programming up Alex's Gear, Alex's Gear corner.

Speaker 1 (56:17):
Well, it's Alex's Gear corner. No one cares about this.
I put it in. Oh I'm very excited about this.

Speaker 2 (56:26):
So I promised last week that we're going to talk
about the guitar in the movie, and here we go.
Baby Prince is so called Cloud Guitar. And I think
it got its nickname because on around the world in
the day Princes wearing the cloud suit and this is
the guitar that he's holding, So it just started calling
the Cloud Guitar. It was made by a local Minneapolist
luthier named Dave Russon, who is then working at the

(56:48):
astonishingly named newt Coupe Music, which is an uptown Minneapolis
store co founded by a local guitarist named Jeff Hill,
and Prince had been going there since high Schooler Dave
Rus told Premier Guitar that he'd actually been working in
London for like nine months at a different guitar shop,
and one day after returning to Minneapolis, he saw Prince
come into the shop and asked for the owner, Jeff Hill.

(57:10):
He and Jeff went into the back office and they
talked a long time, and then Jeff came down and
told me Prince is going to make a movie. He
needs a guitar, and you're going to make it. Brusanne
and Prince actually went back further than this. The luthier
auditioned for Prince's backing band in the early days, but
in his own words, Prince was looking for a black
female guitarist, so I didn't get it. There's a writer

(57:32):
named Andrea Swenson who really went above and beyond trying
to track down the exact inspiration for the Cloud guitar. Supposedly, well,
it's generally agreed upon. The guitar's distinctive design was inspired
by a bass that Prince had bought Andre Simon, his
childhood friend in the original bassis in his live band,

(57:52):
but Simon remembered that this happened in San Rafael, California,
when Prince was working at a record plant in Sasolito.
The bass was made by Jeff Levin, who built instruments
under the name Sardonic's Guitars, which is hilarious, but he
worked out of the East Village. So after a ton
of research, and I do mean a ton, Swinson was

(58:14):
contacting Princess Roady's calling all of those original shops. She
got a call from one of the shops and sent
Raphael that she'd already checked out, who told her that
the original owner had been contacted and had indeed confirmed
that that was where Prince bought the bass in late
nineteen seventy seven. Wildly unnecessary deep dive, but good for her.

(58:35):
The actual bass looks kind of cool.

Speaker 1 (58:37):
He said.

Speaker 2 (58:37):
It was inspired by Gibson mandolins, so kind of the
curving parts of it are reminiscent of the mandolin design, which.

Speaker 1 (58:46):
Is what Gibson originally made. Actually, my grandfather, I think
it was my grandfather had one that my dad now has.
That's from the Geez. I want to say it's in
nineteen teens, maybe nineteen twenties. It's pretty cool looking cool.

Speaker 2 (59:00):
Brusen remembered Prince had this bass with him in the
store that day. I'd actually worked on it before, and
his main requirements was just that the guitar should be
in that shape, and it had to be white, and
it had to have gold hardware. I think he specified
he wanted EMG pickups. But compared to all the conversation
you would usually have.

Speaker 1 (59:16):
With someone about a customed guitar, there wasn't anything else
you wanted to talk about, the size and the neck,
the frets, the playability features or anything. And this is funny.

Speaker 2 (59:26):
There was a guitar company in the nineteen eighties called
O'Hagan that had put out a model called the Shark,
and they send a bunch of these to this music
store newte Coupe, and that's what he carved the Prince
guitar out of the body of this defunct Shark guitar model.
So you can say that Princess Cloud guitar is in
a way a Shark.

Speaker 1 (59:48):
I'm not over New Cupe.

Speaker 2 (59:51):
Yeah, Well, it was a pain in the ass doing this. Apparently,
he said they had to strip down their first paint
job and do it over again because of trying to
get it into all those little scrolls and the little
scrolls and detailing. And then he told Fretbord Journal on
the different interview that his only memory of this all
important influence bass, the Sardonyx, was that it was basically

(01:00:12):
a weird piece of it had no trust rod and
it had bar Fretz. That's all I remember, with only
this to go on and a few other scant details
that owner Jeff Hill was able to ring out of Prince.

Speaker 1 (01:00:22):
On subsequent shop.

Speaker 2 (01:00:23):
Visits, Russan turned in an instrument that Prince loved so
much he ordered two more of. There was a fourth
made for Warner Brothers, a promotional giveaway that they had
in nineteen eighty five, like win a Prince guitar, but
no one seems to know where that one is. Later
in the nineteen nineties, Washington based luthier Andy Beach made
twenty seven additional copies of the Cloud guitar for Prince.

(01:00:45):
Russan had since been making custom copies of the Prince
guitar by hand in Minneapolis for years. When after Prince's death,
his estate partnered with guitar maker Scheckter to release their
own line of Prince guitars that are seld in the
Paisley Park gift shop, and demanded that Dave Russan stop
using the design and name. One of Princess Cloud's guitar

(01:01:06):
hangs in the Smithsonian after he donated in nineteen ninety three.
Here you want this, Well, it's funny because so it
hung up in the museum and it was credited to
the wrong luthier. And that's part of what this woman
went on her. She was just like, I want him
to get credited. So that was what spurred her whole
insane research thing. And you know the luthier when she

(01:01:29):
finally got to him the New York I was just like, yeah,
I mean, I wish it hadn't gone up without my
name on it, but I guess it's fine. I believe
they have since corrected the air. One of the ones
that Russan did make sold at auction in twenty twenty
for five hundred and sixty three and five hundred dollars.

(01:01:50):
So I guess congrats to whichever rich piece of owns that.

Speaker 1 (01:01:54):
Now it's gotta be Jimmy or say it owns the Colts,
and you know, it's like Hendricks is white woodstock guitar,
and I think he owns I think he owns Tiger
or one of Jerry Garcon. Did I ever tell you? So?
A friend of my girlfriend's family, real character and just

(01:02:17):
has a lot of great stories. And he used to
he knew I liked the Beatles, and he used to
definite tell you this. And one day he would come
up to me. It's happened a few times. He said, oh,
you know, I got Joe Lennon's piano, right, And I
was like, yeah, you don't, but you know, and then
he would like punch me on the shoulder and be like, yeah,
now I also got Hitler's Mercedes in the garage. And
then he'd laugh and walk away, and I just thought
he was messing with me. And then I was going

(01:02:39):
to interview Yoko Ono for for work, and word got
back to him and I got a text from him said, hey,
show these pictures to Yoko and see if she wants
to buy it. And it was this very very distinct
Baroke piano. It was like a black and red with
like these candelabras that were ult in these brass candle

(01:03:01):
oberas that were built into it. It looked like this,
like mystical piano, and I've seen it in pictures at
John Lennon's house. Is the piano that he wrote all
of Sergeant Peppern and All You Need Is Love and
like very famous piano, and he ended up selling it
against My Tearful Wishes, and Junior say about it. I

(01:03:24):
got to hit a key on it, though nice, I
got to play it. Yeah. Well, with all the guitar
minutia settled, we have to move on to another character
in Purple Rain, Prince's motorcycle, which also of course appears
on the album cover. It's a heavily customized nineteen eighty
one Honda CM four hundred Honda Maatic and with Prince
at five foot two and you assume ninety nine pounds,

(01:03:48):
the motorcycle there was comparatively lightweight at four hundred pounds,
with a low seat height of thirty inches. It dubbed
a Hondomatic because it only had two gears high and
low like me, and twenty seven horsepower, and it was
the first of these to appear on screen. There had
never been a Hondomatic on screen before. Let somebody prove

(01:04:09):
me wrong. Prince was the first one of the many
barriers he broke. I think it was because they were
considered like children's toys. Yeah. Man, I was a little kid.
I always wanted one of those like electric cars that
you would sit in, And then I went to a
kid's birthday party and the accidentally ran me over in one,
and I don't want one anymore. That tracks. Yeah, Yeah,

(01:04:31):
there were three of these movie bikes made. There was
Princes and two for stunt ridings. That's kind of I
sort of am sad that he didn't do his own stunts.

Speaker 2 (01:04:40):
I've heard that he did a good amount some of
the riding, certainly mean this is an opening seed where
he just pulls up to yeah first first avenue on
the motorcycle with a guitar, just simply on plane air
strapped across his back, which was like, come on, man.
But yeah, he supposedly did a good bit of driving.
There's a really funny when I was researching last episode, Uh,

(01:05:02):
Steve Luke Luke.

Speaker 1 (01:05:04):
Lutherger No, he's the guy from Toto. Yeah, so that's
that's why. That's what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 (01:05:08):
So in the in some of the research I was
doing last episode there was Steve Luthericker was being guitarist,
total guitarist and session whiz. Steve Lutherger was being interviewed
at Sunset Sound and he said he is one of
his memories of Prince where Steve Lutherger was rolling in
at like ten am for a you know, for a
job in right around the Purple Area era, and he

(01:05:31):
turns like the corner from the parking lot and there's
Prince astride the motorcycle in like full purple regalia, like
at ten in the morning.

Speaker 1 (01:05:42):
Being photographed. I should also I wish, I wish it
was just him just for just waiting out there.

Speaker 2 (01:05:49):
It's really funny because he talked this is definitely gonna
get lost in the translation of of podcast of visual
but he talks about like I think the first time
Prince like was in the studio and Steve Lutherger was playing,
or there was some kind of situation where they were
in the studio together. But he talked about how shy
Prince was and he was like, yeah, and you know
we were just playing tracking, like messing around, and then
you know, every so often we just see like Prince's

(01:06:12):
tiny head come up from like below the mixing from
below the console desk, like like the you know Kilroy
was here viewing?

Speaker 1 (01:06:20):
Yeah, oh wow, I actually I event Steve Lucather he was.
It was backstage. He's in Ringo Stars All Star band,
and before going on stage that night, he apparently always,
or at least then, was in the habit of warming
up by playing an acoustic twelve string because then it's

(01:06:41):
like baseball players when they like carry a bunch of
bats and then they go up with just the one.
It feels a lot easier. Having like the big, chunky,
thick neck double strings for the twelve string made it
a lot easier to do like single string bends and
stuff on electric guitar later that night. That was a
good tip. I liked that man. His his sessionography's crazy.

(01:07:01):
His sessionography is crazy.

Speaker 2 (01:07:03):
But I was just I'm thinking specifically of Rosanna sim
singing on that and playing guitar.

Speaker 1 (01:07:12):
I wonder if you does he play that batch guitar
solo that rules so much. I think he does. He
has a bunch of motorcycle details that neither one of
us understand, but maybe you do. Nope. The purple rain
bike had Calmstar wheels six ben handlebars and a King
Queen seat not a Prince seat, stitch with recess purple

(01:07:32):
diamonds and supported by a Tridath style sissy bar. I
not a sissy bar is.

Speaker 2 (01:07:37):
Yeah, so the King Queen is just like a two
seater with like the Queen ostensibly being behind you supported
by the sissy bar.

Speaker 1 (01:07:46):
The bike was also embellished with an early version of
Prince's love symbol, which he'd later changed his name to.
Prince kept the motorcycle and used it again in the
film Graffiti Bridge, his nineteen ninety sequel to Purple Rain,
in which he again played the kid, but it was
repainted black, which I'm horrified by, and some of its
chrome pieces were gold plated. Okay, that's kind of cool. Yeah.

(01:08:08):
These movies are actually some of the most lasting tributes
to this bike. It wasn't around for very long. Honda
produce the four hundred cc version from nineteen seventy eight
to nineteen eighty one, and while most other engine sizes
were offered in different years, overall sales were poor for
the Hondomatic and they were discontinued after nineteen eighty three.
Blue Too Close to the Sun Baby Princess bike was

(01:08:31):
retired to Paisley Park after filming for Graffiti Bridge wrapped.
But you saw one source that suggested that Princess Honda
Maatic went up for auction in twenty eighteen.

Speaker 2 (01:08:41):
I did never found a sell price for it, so.

Speaker 1 (01:08:43):
Do you know who bought it? It sounds like a
hard rock or a rock and Roll Hall of Fame
type of thing. That's like a pretty I thought I
saw it. Now that I'm thinking about it, maybe it
was one of the stunt ones at the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame. I just like to imagine driving
it around the interiors of Paisley Park, except for in
the elevator. Ooh, you'll get that one on your way home.

(01:09:08):
How could you? How could you? Wow? Wow? One of
the happiest moments of my life. It wasn't, but all
for the purposes of this anecdote. My friend, who was
a lot cooler than me, had a I don't know
why he had it, but he had what was basically

(01:09:30):
like a cheap electric Vespa scooter. It wasn't Vespa, but
it was like an electric scooter that you just plugged
into the wall. Wasn't like anything crazy, and I somehow
wound up with it, and a bunch of us were
hanging out after school and nobody was around, and so
we went around and opened all the doors and turned

(01:09:50):
the school because it was built in like a big
O shape, and just rode the thing around down the
school hallways and down like the ramps and stuff after hours,
and it was really fun. It was real fun. It's
probably the most like stereotypically bad thing I ever got
up to. All told.

Speaker 2 (01:10:08):
From Magnoli's Fateful Prince meeting in July to the end
of shooting in mid December, Purple Rain was conceived, written, financed, organized,
and shot in about five months, which is crazy.

Speaker 1 (01:10:20):
It shows well, it doesn't show visually, but it shows
in every other way or well not musically either. Just
it's really just the acting. It looks real good. Yeah,
Like I almost wonder if this could have been saved
if it had like gel actors. Jennifer Biale, Yeah, yeah, boy,
you have it in for Apollonia. Huh Oh, she's cool,

(01:10:45):
she's pretty, she's pretty brunette. It's kind of my thing,
isn't the name of Michael corleon AND's Sicilian bride that
gets blown up? I don't have that one deep on. Yeah,
Apolonia of itele Coleone, m hm, cool man. Yeah, what's
her real name? Patricia who Apollonia? Ah, Oh that's not her. Wow.

(01:11:11):
I feel really, I feel like one of those kids
had just found out Sanda is not real. It's like, oh,
of course, Tricia, that's not her real name.

Speaker 2 (01:11:18):
From San Pedro, California.

Speaker 1 (01:11:20):
Who named her that? Parents? No, Apollonia did like Prince.
I assume prince. Oh well, okay, it's her middle name,
all right. Anyway, Warner Brothers was very confused when presented
with Purple Rain, somewhat understandably, but they were supposedly afraid
of competing with the Rick Springfield starring Hard to Hold,
a movie that I am just now hearing about. Yeah,

(01:11:43):
they gave him a they just like handing out. I
guess he's kind of handsome.

Speaker 2 (01:11:47):
I mean, it makes sense. He he wound up on
the soap, right, so.

Speaker 1 (01:11:50):
He like he did. Oh yeah, he was on General Hospital.

Speaker 2 (01:11:54):
For two years in the eighties and then four years
in the ADTs. Anyway, Albert MAGNOLDI assured them wouldn't be
a problem competing with it.

Speaker 1 (01:12:05):
He was correct. There were three.

Speaker 2 (01:12:07):
Test screenings held for the film, Warners were concerned about
the dumpster tossing scene and had magnoldly take it out
for the second, after which he decided it was going
back in. The first screening was done in Culver City,
and the reaction to it was so insane that warners
thought they were being taken for a ride. They were like,
there's no way this can be a real thing, Like
you juice these stats. You seated the audience or something.

(01:12:30):
So Magnoli told Spin the studio said, we need to
go to Texas now and screen this in front of
an all white, redneck audience. A week later, we fly
down to textit and put it on in front of
three hundred white kids. Within three minutes, they were all
up on their feet. So by he told Rolling Stone,
by the third screening they said, okay, we have something here.

(01:12:50):
They originally thought to put it in two hundred theaters,
but that jumped to nine hundred, and within a week
that number jumped to a thousand. This was helped by
the fact that by the time Purple Rain was released
on July twenty seventh to nineteen eighty four, When Does
Cry and Let's Go Crazy had both been enormous singles. Consequently,
the film.

Speaker 1 (01:13:08):
Knocked Ghostbusters out of the top spot on the weekend
box office, and while Beverly Hills Cop and Ghostbusters headlined
that year's most successful list in terms of box office.

Speaker 2 (01:13:19):
Purple Rain narrowly missed out on the making the top ten.
It came in at the eleventh spot. It gross to
very respectable sixty eight point four million on again a
seven million dollar budget. And then Prince became the youngest
ever winner of the Academy Award for Best Original Song Score.
That is a weird oscar category that has not been

(01:13:39):
given out since him, because then I think they started
treating it best Original sore and Best Original Song. But
do you know who Prince beat out for that record?

Speaker 1 (01:13:47):
Uh? Huh?

Speaker 2 (01:13:47):
George Harrison for Let It Be. He was twenty seven
when he won that. Whoa Prince beat him by the ear?

Speaker 1 (01:13:54):
Wait? Song score? Was that just a consolidated No, I
don't understand what that category.

Speaker 2 (01:14:00):
I don't know either, yeah, because everyone just does original score.
I think it was like a weird category that was
intended to differentiate between scores that would have been popular
music versus traditional scores. That's the only reason I can
think of the other winner, one of the other winners
being George Harrison. Anyway, after they picked up the Oscar,

(01:14:21):
Lisa Coleman told Spin that Prince immediately equipped to the
band we better run. They're going to think we stole it.
That said reviews were mixed. There's a long standing anecdote
that Prince had a very specific nightmare before the film
premiered about Ciskel and Ebert ripping it to shreds. But
both of them actually loved Purple Ran, and they put
it on their top ten lists for nineteen eighty four.

(01:14:43):
Roger Ebert later called it one of the greatest rock
movies of all time, which sure Vincent canby at The
New York Times had some of my favorite reactions. His
most famous one is from his review is probably the
flashiest album cover ever to be released as a movie.
And then later he drops this stonishingly caddy line. With
his mass of carefully tended black curly locks and his large,

(01:15:05):
dark dough eyes, Prince looks in repose like a poster
of Liza Minelli on which someone has lightly smudged a mustache.
When astride his large motorcycle as he is from time
to time. The image suggests one of Jim Henson's.

Speaker 1 (01:15:18):
Special effects from uppet movie Kermit the Frog on a
Harley Davidson So Mean. Unfortunately, as we mentioned in the
last episode, Prince didn't have particularly long to enjoy the film,
with the Purple Rain tour starting in November nineteen eighty four.
This screwed up much of Albert mcnolay's attempts to get
a sequel off the ground. As he told Rolling Stone,

(01:15:39):
if you look at the credits of Purple Rain, it said,
may you live to see the Dawn. That's what I
wanted to do next with him The Dawn. We discussed
doing a true musical, singing and dancing a Broadway show
on film, but Prince had to go do the Purple
Rain tour and that took him away for the next
two years. Bob Carvallo, princess manager, said that he wanted
to start working on The Dawn, but they need did

(01:16:00):
a concert film, so I said I would work on
The Sign of the Times movie uncredited. Sadly, while Warners
signed Prince for two more movies off the success of
Purple Rain, he failed to launch an on screen career
with it. He was in the director's chair with an
uncredited assist from cinematographer Michael Bauhaus for nineteen eighty six
decidedly misguided Under the Cherry Moon, which is intentional mudge

(01:16:23):
to old school screwball romantic comedies. Prince plays a jigglow
swindling a French woman on the riviera until he falls
in love with one of them. Have you ever seen
Under the Cherry Moon?

Speaker 2 (01:16:34):
No?

Speaker 1 (01:16:35):
Am I missing it.

Speaker 2 (01:16:37):
It's something. It's a punishing watch, I would say.

Speaker 1 (01:16:40):
Under the Cherry Moon grossed just ten point one million
dollars domestic box office, so not great. The third film
in Princess Warner's deal, Graffiti Bridge, started out promising enough.
Prince's new manager, Arnold's Steifel, was eyeing major players like
Kim Bassenger, the aforementioned Kim Passenger, the aforementioned Honeypot Yeah

(01:17:03):
with whom Prince was you right? Friendly Patti LaBelle was
also considered, and Paula Abdul as both an actress and
choreographer that would have been cool, and director Jonathan Kaplan,
who just directed Juddie Foster's Oscar winning turn in The Accused.
With all those things in place, I went to Mo
Austin at Warner Brothers, and they put up the money,

(01:17:24):
Arnold Stiffel told the Hollywood Reporter. But when they said Rollam,
instead of Jonathan Caplan directing, it was Prince, and instead
of Combassador, it was someone named Ingrid Chavez all rude.
Although I don't know who she is either. No, you
don't know she is either?

Speaker 2 (01:17:39):
No.

Speaker 1 (01:17:39):
Yeah. Prince's first cut of the film clocked in it
over five hours and even cut down to a spry
what two hours? Yeah, failed to make an impact when
it premiered in nineteen ninety I've never seen graffiti bridge, No, no, no.
It pulled in only ten million dollars at the box office.
By nineteen ninety three, Prince was embroiled in his famous

(01:18:01):
feud with Warner Brothers over his music, during which he
scrolled slave on his face, and that was it for
his career on the silver screen, unfortunately, which is sad.
I feel like he could have made a serious go
of it. You really, I don't know. He's fun to watch, Yeah,
that's true. Prince's one time manager, Bob Carvola, told Spin
that he had his own idea for a sequel that

(01:18:25):
sounds like something that we would riff on. It does,
doesn't it? Purple Rain two the Further Adventures of the Time,
which would have transplanted the rivalry between Prince and Morris
Day to Las Vegas, which kind of would rule I
would like that very funny. I gotta say.

Speaker 2 (01:18:45):
There have been sporadic updates to the Purple Rain legacy, though.
In twenty fifteen, the film was remade in Niger with
appropriately altered settings, featuring members of the nomadic group of
people known as the Tareg. They are probably most famous
state side into music circles because the band Tenari when
are members of this tribe having at one point been

(01:19:06):
like legitimate freedom fighters in the Sub Saharan region. This
is just gonna be a funny thing hearing me pronounce this.
It was titled.

Speaker 1 (01:19:13):
Akunak tadala taha has Oguhai, which translates to rain the
color of blue with a little red in it, because
the tar Egg have no word for purple. Wow. Oh
that's awesome.

Speaker 2 (01:19:27):
Well here's what's crazy. This starred Madu mac Tar who
is currently like having a big moment as like, you know,
once every couple of years the US decides like, oh,
we're gonna get really into like an African guitarist. It
happened to Ali Farcatore, it happened to Tanaru when currently
it's Midu mak Tar's turn on that semi patronizing you know,
Merry Go Round.

Speaker 1 (01:19:48):
But he shreds.

Speaker 2 (01:19:49):
He's been influenced by his own emission, not only by
Ali Farka Torre and Tenari Win, but like Eddie van Halen.
His most recent album maybe not recent, but the one
that I saw get munch of reviews and the one
that I have is called Afrika Victim and it is
so shredtastic.

Speaker 1 (01:20:05):
The man rips and Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:20:07):
In twenty fifteen they made a Purple Rain movie, A
Nice Year with him.

Speaker 1 (01:20:11):
It was funny.

Speaker 2 (01:20:12):
Director Christopher Kirkley said that because it was made under
restrictive and four conservative Muslim audiences couldn't feature a kiss
or any particularly heavy romance, and when he pitched a
movie ending hug between the male and female.

Speaker 1 (01:20:27):
Leads, that was also turned down.

Speaker 2 (01:20:33):
Lastly, it was announced in January of this year that
Albert mcnolay's long standing dream of Purple Random musical is
coming true. It has a book from music and lyrics,
of course, by Prince, with a book from Pultzerprise finalist
Brandon Jacobs Jenkins, directed by Tony Award nominee Lilliana Blaine Cruz.

(01:20:53):
Back in twenty eighteen, Universal actually acquired the rights to
a selection of print songs. I believe they were eyeing
a rocket Man esque big screen musical, but as of
January twenty four there had been no update on that.
And actually, I'm just going to off the dome this.
I believe there was an article about this recently January. Yes,
Premirie in Minnesota in spring of twenty twenty five, so

(01:21:17):
that feels appropriate.

Speaker 1 (01:21:18):
It can't be good, right, Oh pishaw. Look at all
the awards that are attached to it. Yeah, Tony nominee,
a Polizer nominee. Granted they lost, but you know, it
seems like the kind of like the kind of project
that you get after you get all the critical bona fides,
and it's like, all right, here's the big pay check.

(01:21:39):
It's gonna suck no matter what you do. But here
I'm trying to think of it. There was a rolling
star arcle beut. Let me just quickly see if there's
anything interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:21:47):
So I guess this proposal went back many years ago.
Bobby Z said that Prince became very animated after he'd
seen Rent and later Hamilton, both of where which he loved.
Bobby Z said, it was one of those days in
the studio and he said, Wow, we should really take
this as stage like Broadway. He didn't think he could

(01:22:08):
personally do it because it's a different animal, but he
lit up on that, which gives me a feeling that
Purple Rain going Forward is in the spirit of something
creatively in his orbit. It will feature songs not just
from Purple Rain, because the album is, of course only
nine songs in length. I think they're going to address
some of the misogyny like.

Speaker 1 (01:22:24):
A big bugsy Berkeley musical number of like people jump
cleansing themselves in the waters of like.

Speaker 2 (01:22:30):
Lata exactly, they have a big tank on the stage.
I'm going to leave the last word on Purple Rain
to Questlove. Questlove is a huge avowed fan. He wrote
about Prince's legacy when he died twenty sixteen. He's brought
him up constantly as a big musical obsession of his.
He said that after getting his copy of nineteen ninety

(01:22:51):
nine in nineteen eighty two, I think he said he
bought it twice because his parents took the first copy.
He wrote, Prince was in my ears, and he was
in my head starting then I patterned everything in my
life after Prince, and then came Purple Rain, and the
world changed. Before that, I kept my Prince obsession close
to my vest. But the day after the video for

(01:23:13):
Wendove's Cry premiered, I was shocked to see that my
secret was out. Everyone suddenly knew what I knew, which
is that Prince was like nothing else and that he
was everything. Folks, thank you for listening. This has been
too much information. I'm Alex Heigel.

Speaker 1 (01:23:27):
And I'm Jordan Runtogg. We'll catch you next time. Too
Much Information was a production of iHeart Radio. The show's
executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtogg. The show's
supervising producer is Michael Alder June.

Speaker 2 (01:23:45):
The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtogg
and Alex Heigel.

Speaker 1 (01:23:49):
With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
us a review. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast US, or wherever you listen to
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Prince's 'Purple Rain' (Part 2 - The Movie): Everything You Didn't Know

Episode Transcript

Host

Jordan Runtagh

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Prince's 'Purple Rain' (Part 2 - The Movie): Everything You Didn't Know