Read Online Let's Go Crazy by Alan Light - Free Book Online

David Lynch at one point, so he really started looking at, like, Eraserhead ; I remember screaming at that little worm-baby or whatever it was. He was looking at European directors, trying to pull all of that in. He was really into the old studio system, too, Louis B. Mayer, he had books on those, looking at how that was structured. Also Elizabeth Taylor films, Marilyn Monroe—he’d look at a person long enough and try to figure out who they related to. Like the concept of giving me the blond hair: he said, ‘You’re very plain just with your normal hair,’ because I looked like I’d come out of some Ralph Lauren catalogue. He cut off all my hair with, like, fingernail scissors and started to Svengali.
    â€œI know he had this idea pretty early on about a film. WhenI was touring with Teena Marie and we were opening for him, he said he was going to do a movie, but he didn’t really elaborate. He had a pretty clear vision on his road map.”
    â€œWe were always videotaping rehearsals and shows,” Bobby Z said. “We were also doing skits. He was always talking about doing a movie.” Lisa Coleman confirms that Prince expressed his ambition to make movies when she first joined the band, during the Dirty Mind period. Prince had even ­attempted a film project titled The Second Coming during the 1982 Controversy tour. The March 7 homecoming show at Bloomington, Minnesota’s Met Center was shot in full, but Prince drove director Chuck Statler (who had helmed pre-MTV promotional videos for Devo, the Cars, and Elvis Costello, in addition to the Time’s clip for “Cool”) past the breaking point attempting to film interstitial narrative segments; Statler later described the experience as a “gruesome drill,” with Prince demanding take after take of every shot. The Second Coming was abandoned before it was ever edited, though stills have turned up on the Internet.
    Throughout the Triple Threat tour, though, Prince could often be seen scribbling in a purple notebook that he carried everywhere. Eventually he started letting the band know what his plans were for their next step. “I think it was at a rehearsal where he said, ‘Here’s what I’m thinking, here’s what we’re gonna do,’ ” says Coleman. “Actually, he wouldn’t ever say ‘Here’s what I’m thinking’; that would be way too intimate. He’d just be like, ‘We’re gonna make a movie.’ I remember on a plane ride during the tour, he called me to come sit next tohim and told me a lot of the ideas. He would ask me things like, ‘Would you kiss Matt if I wrote this scene?’ He would describe how he saw the character, who I was. I think he was always aiming at big, ‘I’m gonna be a big star,’ but to him, a band was much more interesting than just a singer. So he wanted to ­really feature that, and he wanted to have his philosophy and his politics and his message all be incorporated—on Dirty Mind , ‘Uptown’ was a big thing in his mind. The song wasn’t that big, but there was always this utopian thing.
    â€œI remember him saying, ‘We’re gonna have a director come and meet us, and we’re just gonna see what he’s about and if he’s up to it.’ We were little smart-asses, too, so it was like, ‘Ha, ha, the director will come, and we’ll give him a hard time and scare him away.’ ”
    â€œI think we were in Cincinnati, maybe a week before the end of the 1999 tour,” says Matt Fink, “and he called me and said he wanted to have breakfast with me, just the two of us. He took me to the hotel restaurant and told me about his plans to do the movie, asked what I thought about that and if I was excited about it. I said yes to all of it—I thought it was a great idea to go for; why not? So I said ‘Perfect, I’m on board.’
    â€œAfter the