conversation, I did think, âNow, wait a minute. Do we really have the following to create a movie thatâs going to generate enough people to come out and see it, create the revenue needed to support something like that?â â
Objectively, the idea of Prince starring in a feature film made very little sense. As of 1983, he had just one album that could truly be considered a major hit. He was still largely unfamiliar to a general pop audience, and, especially since he had stopped doing press of any kind, he certainly did not register as a mainstream celebrity. And other than the Beatles with A Hard Dayâs Night and Help! , very few musicians had been able to make a convincing or successful jump to the big screen; most recently, Princeâs fellow Warner Bros. artist Paul Simon had just flopped with his 1980 film One Trick Pony .
âWhen I got there, he already had a notebook, and people were saying, âHeâs writing a movie,â â recalls Alan Leeds. âThe people closest to him were probably in the know about what he was doing; I just knew that heâs got this notebook, and he sits on the bus and he writes and he wants to make a movieâyou know, like, âYeah, so do I.â I didnât take it seriously. I thought he was nuts. Iâve got to figure that most people around him thought it was nuts, tooâeven the people who knew how ambitious he was and knew these traits that we now celebrate as being a necessity for success for somebody like him. He was a kid with a very vivid imagination, who was stubborn and angry enough with the world to refuse anybodyâs no. And you could argue that without all that, he wouldnât have gotten where he got; if heâd have been civil, he wouldnât have ever gotten the movie made.
âSomewhere thereâs a book to be written about the DNA of guys like Prince or James Brown or Miles Davis, all of whom had mother issues, all of whom had abandonment issues in various ways, and all of whom could be extremely judgmental and difficult to get along with. Thereâs a pattern there; itâs not a coincidence. The normal person, if somebody tells you no, youget tired of it or youâre needy enough that you want friends or whatever, so eventually you just say, âWell, yeah, okay, Iâll do something else.â Not these guys.â
At Princeâs label, Bob Merlis remembers that the initial reaction to the idea of a movie was a certain bewilderment. âMy own response was, âReally?!?â I thought it was very boldâit certainly wasnât conventional in terms of the usual sequence for these things. But the success of 1999 was substantial, so he did have momentum, instead of doing it on the downside of a career, which is often when these things are attempted.â
To others in the camp, the concept of a movie was less of a shock and more of a tribute to Princeâs artistic vision and trajectory. âIt made absolute sense to me, because before anybody had heard who Prince was, I read the black charts and other people didnât,â says Howard Bloom. âThat phenomenon of going platinum when you were buried on the black charts, that says something.
âThere are two keys to superstardomâone is an intense work ethic, and it doesnât just come from a work ethic, it comes from the fact that you want to make music more than you want to breathe, eat, sleep, or do anything else in life. When you find a person like that, itâs someone worth hanging on to. Prince had that; his entire life was music. And then he had this astonishing executive capacity, this prefrontal-cortex discipline. If youâre a soul searcher, which is what I was, you have really found it when you found him. So the idea that he should make a movie was no more outrageous than the idea that the Beatles would write their own songs in 1961âninety percent of thetime when an artist of this caliber
Objectively, the idea of Prince starring in a feature film made very little sense. As of 1983, he had just one album that could truly be considered a major hit. He was still largely unfamiliar to a general pop audience, and, especially since he had stopped doing press of any kind, he certainly did not register as a mainstream celebrity. And other than the Beatles with A Hard Dayâs Night and Help! , very few musicians had been able to make a convincing or successful jump to the big screen; most recently, Princeâs fellow Warner Bros. artist Paul Simon had just flopped with his 1980 film One Trick Pony .
âWhen I got there, he already had a notebook, and people were saying, âHeâs writing a movie,â â recalls Alan Leeds. âThe people closest to him were probably in the know about what he was doing; I just knew that heâs got this notebook, and he sits on the bus and he writes and he wants to make a movieâyou know, like, âYeah, so do I.â I didnât take it seriously. I thought he was nuts. Iâve got to figure that most people around him thought it was nuts, tooâeven the people who knew how ambitious he was and knew these traits that we now celebrate as being a necessity for success for somebody like him. He was a kid with a very vivid imagination, who was stubborn and angry enough with the world to refuse anybodyâs no. And you could argue that without all that, he wouldnât have gotten where he got; if heâd have been civil, he wouldnât have ever gotten the movie made.
âSomewhere thereâs a book to be written about the DNA of guys like Prince or James Brown or Miles Davis, all of whom had mother issues, all of whom had abandonment issues in various ways, and all of whom could be extremely judgmental and difficult to get along with. Thereâs a pattern there; itâs not a coincidence. The normal person, if somebody tells you no, youget tired of it or youâre needy enough that you want friends or whatever, so eventually you just say, âWell, yeah, okay, Iâll do something else.â Not these guys.â
At Princeâs label, Bob Merlis remembers that the initial reaction to the idea of a movie was a certain bewilderment. âMy own response was, âReally?!?â I thought it was very boldâit certainly wasnât conventional in terms of the usual sequence for these things. But the success of 1999 was substantial, so he did have momentum, instead of doing it on the downside of a career, which is often when these things are attempted.â
To others in the camp, the concept of a movie was less of a shock and more of a tribute to Princeâs artistic vision and trajectory. âIt made absolute sense to me, because before anybody had heard who Prince was, I read the black charts and other people didnât,â says Howard Bloom. âThat phenomenon of going platinum when you were buried on the black charts, that says something.
âThere are two keys to superstardomâone is an intense work ethic, and it doesnât just come from a work ethic, it comes from the fact that you want to make music more than you want to breathe, eat, sleep, or do anything else in life. When you find a person like that, itâs someone worth hanging on to. Prince had that; his entire life was music. And then he had this astonishing executive capacity, this prefrontal-cortex discipline. If youâre a soul searcher, which is what I was, you have really found it when you found him. So the idea that he should make a movie was no more outrageous than the idea that the Beatles would write their own songs in 1961âninety percent of thetime when an artist of this caliber
Similar Books
