Monday, July 27, 2009

This Day in Film History (Prince’s “Purple Rain” in Boffo Box Office)


July 27, 1984—He might have stood only five feet tall, but the Minneapolis rocker Prince made a giant impact on the American cultural scene with Purple Rain, a film with strong resemblances to his own life and career.

The movie—which a timorous Warner Brothers, viewing as merely a musician’s vanity project, budgeted at only $7 million—went on to gross $68 million in the U.S. ($140 million in 2009) and to net the lecherous singer-songwriter a Best Original Song Score Oscar.

The accompanying soundtrack did even better, with four Top 40 hits and 24 weeks in the No. 1 spot on the Billboard chart.

Did you catch Brian Raftery’s oral history of the making of the film and soundtrack in the July issue of Spin Magazine? Unfortunately, the magazine has not put the contents up on the Web.

However, I urge you to go out and get a copy of the issue. Using the article in that issue and this link, you’ll be able to download a link to a CD filled with cover versions of the soundtrack.

I was never a Prince fan. The tales of his lasciviousness and eccentricities (only the late Michael Jackson made him look normal by comparison) turned me off. Yet I confess to having had something of a change of heart after seeing his extremely skillful set at the 2007 Super Bowl.

My curiosity and (at least somewhat) newfound appreciation for his musicianship, I suspect, will eventually lead me to rent the film from Blockbuster to see what all the fuss was about a quarter-century ago, when America obeyed his exhortation, "Let's Go Crazy."

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