It's easy to look back at Prince's overnight pop stardom after his perfectly bad landmark film Purple Rain and assume that The Purple One was a sure shot for stardom. Not so, says journalist Alan Light, whose new book, Let's Go Crazy, details the ins and outs of Prince's megastardom.
"If you look at the moment that it happened, when Prince went to his managers and said, 'You have to get me a feature-film deal or you're fired," Light told NPR. "And what came out was a movie with a first-time director, first-time producer, you know, Prince as the star who'd never acted, his band as most of the cast — and they said, 'We're gonna shoot in Minneapolis in the winter.' Now, which piece of that sounds like it was going to be a big success?
The new book doesn't include any new interviews from Prince about the '80s. Light didn't even try to ask.
"I didn't even approach him to talk for this book because his thing is really that he will not talk about his past," Light said. "Any time he surfaces, it's to talk about what he's doing now, what he's doing moving forward. But I was with him the 20th-anniversary year of Purple Rain, and he said, 'I know what that was. I know what it took for us to do that. We don't need to revisit that stuff. We just keep moving forward.'"
Apparently, Prince's vision for the Purple Rain film was much darker than the final product.
"If you remember the movie, there's the scene where his father shoots himself and in the movie he pulls through," Light said. "And in the last scene is the scene of Prince at his side in the hospital bed, and this is after he played 'Purple Rain,' and you see there's a happy ending here. For a long time, Prince was fighting for the father to actually kill himself in that scene and be done with it."
The book is available through most online retailers, as well as Light's website.
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