Prince...it's a great name, isn't it? It's a great name for a dog. It's a great name for spaghetti on Wednesday night. It's a great name if you want to throw a party in 15 years. And now, it's a great name for a movie star.

We speak of Purple Rain, the independently-financed flick starring Prince and his dozens of musical cronies. The film is coming momentarily to a theater near you—and we're here to tell you about it. (We feel obligated to mention that we have yet to see Purple Rain...the press has been shut out until the week before its premiere. This doesn't particularly bother us, since it gives us a chance to catch up on stuff like finishing off our Michael Jackson interview sessions. And, in any case, we've learned plenty about the movie already. Maybe even too much.)

As the Chambers Brothers once noted, there are things to realize. The main thing to realize as we delve into Purple Rain is that musicians have generally made the transition to honest-to-God acting every bit as well as the average garage attendant has. Perhaps better. What we mean to say is that no one blessed with eyesight would trade Mick Jagger's entire film career for five minutes of Humphrey Bogart as Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest. And that we don't exactly adore Neil Diamond's music, but—compared to his lack-ofcommand performance in The Jazz Singer—the man practically invented rock 'n' roll. And that while David Bowie might be the best of the lot, we have yet to confuse him with Robert Redford. Not that we blame them—when a musician aspires to be an actor it's probably because he's been listening to his last album. But if you bear in mind that these people were comfortably wealthy beyond belief before they tried their hand at acting, you realize that Prince is taking a bit of a chance here.

Which is not to say that Purple Rain may not be the exception to the rule. A few bold moves have been made. The producers—Bob Cavallo, Joe Ruffalo and Steve Fargnoli (gentlemen who have, by some coincidence, served as Prince's managers for the last five years)—went out and got 30-year-old Albert Magnoli to serve as director. Magnoli had never directed a feature film prior to Rain. He had, however, won tremendous critical acclaim for his short film Jazz and is regarded as something of a wunderkinde in Hollywood. Plus, he's not been keeping up with music, which is definitely a bonus. "All I knew of Prince were two songs-'1999' and 'Little Red Corvette," Magnoli said. (We're willing to bet that he's followed Paul McCartney's career intensely ever since "Say Say Say," too.) Magnoli, who ought to know, describes Purple Rain as a "film that takes chances, that defies rules, that has deeply personal emotional content." In other words, it's a Clint Eastwood flick.

Just kidding. If Magnoli's the man who's brought Purple Rain to life, Prince is being widely touted as the main motivator. Jill Jones, who appears in the movie and is a long-time personage on the Minneapolis scene, said this: "Purple Rain started with Prince's concept. He had been keeping notes longer than any of us really knew. He had a purple notebook he walked around with everywhere. When we were out on tour, he'd sit on the bus writing." Although this leads us to suspect that if Prince had access to Dow Chemical stationery we'd be waiting for Acid Rain, it does lend substance to the image of Prince as an intense and highly motivated artist. That's an image most of us critics adore, with the possible exception of the one who shaves my face.

"Purple Rain is a film that takes chances, that defies rules..." -Albert Magnoli

But enough of personal opinion. What we want to know is: what in the world is Purple Rain about? Well, it's chock full of music, for one thing. (Nine songs by Prince, including "When Doves Cry," two from the Time and one apiece from Apollonia 6 and the Dez Dickerson Band.) Morris Day, the Time’s lead singer, plays himself and is billed as the co-star. The female lead is played by Apollonia Kotero, the lead vocalist of Apollonia 6 (formerly Vanity 6). Fellow Apollonians Susan and Brenda also get to play themselves. Jill Jones plays a lovestruck singer who has a crush on Prince. And Prince plays the Kid. We’re starting to understand what Mr. Magnoli meant about defying the rules...names like “The Kid” break ’em faster than fifth-graders on a jaywalking spree.

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Director Magnoli describes a bit of the action for us: “There’s music. That means there’s night, there’s bars, there are alleys.” Not to mention flowers, lazy days in June and AA meetings, right? But I interrupt. “All of a sudden a story begins to emerge,” said Magnoli. That seems like a reasonable ploy, this being a movie and all...please continue, Albert. “A girl comes into town to a club. She sweeps out of a cab in black. There’s Prince-he’s a dark figure. There’s Morris (Day)—he’s a light figure. There’s the girl— she’s a mystery.”

Hey, what’d they do, let her read the script? We’re certainly mystified as to where all that chance-taking and rule-defying went off and hid. Let’s give Mr. Magnoli a little more of the lasso to see if he can clear this up.

“Prince is a powerful, magnetic force in the world of his peers who becomes humiliated, frightened and damaged when he sets foot in the home he shares with his parents. His father and mother have a violent relationship that sends him inward, allowing him to express himself only in his music. But, by the end of the film, he has learned to let others into his world.. .he has learned to love.” We have to admit it pretty much sums up all the powerful, magnetic people we’ve come to know. They’re a peck o’ trouble until they learn how to love, that’s for sure.

Perhaps you’re wondering how this film came into existence. We certainly are, even taking the purple notebook into account. Co-producer (i.e., co-manager) Joe Ruffalo said: “Prince wanted to make a movie. And we (the management team) had wanted to get into the film business for years. But we had to do it in a way consistent with the manner in which we’ve always done business. We’d been offered films in the past, but we didn’t feel they were outstanding. And Prince had been offered major parts and had turned them down.” Hey, the man might’ve been Indiana Jones for all we know.

Once the directorial reins were handed to Magnoli, though, the thing became an apparent cakewalk. By all accounts, the director—after hanging out with the Minneapolis music mafia— was tuned in to Prince’s vision of Purple Rain. We return to Mr. M’s reminiscences: “When I first met Prince, Prince said, ‘What should I have as a vehicle? I was thinking of a motorcycle.’ That sounded pretty good.” Hmmm...let’s see...a rock star makes a movie and tools around on a motorcycle in lieu of the more traditional John Deere Riding Mower. You know, it sounds pretty good to us too.

All of this is not to make fun of Purple Rain, however. Seriously. It’s more-or-less obvious that everybody’s suppposed to play themselves in the flick, right on down to Morris Day et. al. wearing their 1940ish threads. (“The characters in the film are extensions of the personalities of Morris, Prince, Susan and the others,” Magnoli explained. “They’re exaggerations or minimizations developed to fit a story that never happened, yet in a strange way is their reality.”) Well, it’s probably not Citizen Kane, but it doesn’t sound like it’s as bad as the much-hated Quadrophenia.

Speaking of Quadrophenia, of course, brings up the whole ugly idea of soundtracks, which Quadrophenia turned into an art-form...the distillation of the despicable. Wary observers must express concern that Warner Brothers will be hedging their bets by cashing in on a Purple Rain soundtrack. It has been done, we understand. The Footloose LP has probably sold a few less copies than the Bible, but that’s the risks you take in this biz.

Report is that we can rest easy, though. Well, almost. “We didn’t want to get to be producers by simply packaging a soundtrack album,” Cavallo was quoted in a recent issue of Billboard. Not that there won’t be one...Warner Brothers has released a soundtrack, but it only has Prince’s songs on it. The tunes performed by the Time, Apollonia 6 and Dez Dickerson will appear on their own albums. “We were trying not to have a double record,” Cavallo said. “It seemed obvious that we could reach more people if the price were lower.” To which we’ll add that, in our nation, only Bob Dylan (Blonde On Blonde) and the Beatles (The Beatles) have ever put out double albums worth owning.

There does loom one very major problem with Purple Rain; Cavallo was candid enough to address it in the Billboard interview. The problem? Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Robert Redford... these are names that draw people into theatres. Prince is—to most Americans—what you call Di’s husband in the receiving line. “We believe Prince has much greater name value than the number of records he’s sold,” the manager said. “In the beginning, Warner Brothers Pictures discounted his name value. If Prince has two million record fans, you can swallow them up in a Saturday (of film-viewirtg). But there’s something about Prince that piques people’s interest a little more than some other artists. People don’t know a lot about him; he’s a little mysterioso and he has a controversial image.”

Uh huh. It remains to be seen if the movie-going public can get all that worked up over a flick “about a musician who lives in Minneapolis who’s trying to make it.” These are days of escapism, obviously. We’ll not be surprised if Purple Rain is a rousing artistic success and a box-office flop while the sci-fi biggie Dune (featuring Sting) is just the converse.

To take purple out of context, and to paraphrase a bit, acting’s funny and I don’t know why.