Let's Go Crazy by Alan Light

about. It was as if he was sorting out his own mystery—[on] an honest quest to figure himself out.” Elsewhere, the writer said that Prince’s “initial concept, unlike in the finished motion picture, was that his parents were dead. They were the victims of a murder-suicide: his father had killed his mother, and then himself. . . . It was a constant back-and-forth as to whether he was going to embrace life—in the form of the character of the girl, and the substance and form of his music—or, in essence, he was going to be swallowed up by the death that surrounded him.” The writer concluded that “this picture was either going to be really big or fall on its ass.”
    As Blinn was working, he tried to set up a follow-up meeting in Minneapolis, but Prince canceled on him several times. Finally they connected and went to the movies together, but Prince got up and left after twenty minutes. At this point, Blinn announced that he wanted off the project. (“I know he’s very gifted, but frankly, life’s too short.”) He went back to Los Angeles, but Prince called him and asked him to return to Minnesota.
    In May, Blinn submitted a first draft of the script, at the time titled Dreams . “It’s a little TV, it’s a little square,” Cavallo thought, “but it’s a good idea, and I figured the director will rewrite it ­anyway. But I can’t get a director. There was nobody interested.”
    Sending out the script was getting him nowhere. Awareness of Prince in Hollywood was close to zero. Someone recommended that Cavallo see an early cut of a new movie called Reckless , a Rebel Without a Cause –style love story starring Aidan Quinn and Daryl Hannah, made by a young director named James Foley. “I go to screen this movie and I’m the only one in the theater,” says Cavallo. “I see it, I walk out, and a young man comes up to me and says, ‘What did you think?’ I said, ‘Well, I thought it was pretty good, and that’s really all I thought. I thought the editing was good.’ He’s like, ‘Really? Good. I did that.’ ”
    The editor was a recent University of Southern California film school graduate named Albert Magnoli. His final film school project, a twenty-three minute study of musicians titled Jazz , won multiple awards, including a student Academy Award. Magnoli remembers that Cavallo approached him after the screening and asked if he thought Foley might be interested in getting involved in Prince’s first motion picture. “I was excited to continue editing alongside Jamie, so I told Cavallo that Jamie was a massive fan,” says Magnoli, who may not have made a movie in a while but remains a master storyteller, even over the phone during a series of marathon calls. “I ran across the parking lot and called Jamie in New York and said it was great, I had found us our next film. And he said to me, ‘Who is Prince?’ ”
    Magnoli got the script from Cavallo and sent it to Foley, who called him the next day and said, “Have you read this? It’s terrible, and I will not do it.” When he passed that news on toCavallo, Magnoli recalls, the aspiring producer “went into a fit of sorts—he said, ‘I don’t understand, I’ve sent this script out and they’re all passing on it. I thought I was doing everything correctly. Why isn’t this working?’ He asked if I had read the script, and said ‘I really need to understand what I did wrong, and what I’m going to do, and fast.’ ”
    Magnoli read the Dreams script and, he says, “Jamie was actually being very nice—it had no relevance to the audience the film was intended for; it was not musical, too cerebral.” He called Cavallo and suggested that they meet, telling him, “At this moment, I know way more about the film business than you, and I don’t