Let's Go Crazy by Alan Light Page A

know anything.”
    The two men met for breakfast at Du-par’s restaurant in the San Fernando Valley. Thirty years later, the chronology of this conversation differs a bit, depending on which of them you talk to (“Magnoli completely makes up shit,” says Cavallo. “Sometimes he’s very flattering to himself, and sometimes he’s just wrong”). According to Cavallo, they sat down and he offered Magnoli the chance to direct the movie for $75,000. “Now, he doesn’t have a glass to piss in,” says Cavallo. “He says, ‘I pass.’ I fucking went crazy. I lost my cool. I say, ‘How the fuck do you pass? Why?’ He said, ‘Oh, it’s so square.’ I said, ‘I know it’s square—can you do something about it? Do you have any ideas?’ He says, ‘Give me a week.’
    â€œWe meet again a week later, and basically, he does the movie standing up, jumping up and down—he’s a very athletic kid. [And] we make a deal.”
    Magnoli’s account of his own performance is quite similar,but he claims there was just one meeting, and that his conjuring of the movie’s narrative was much more spontaneous. When he asserted that what the movie needed was a writer/director who would spend time with the musicians and write something more authentic, Cavallo asked him what the story would be.
    â€œIt was one of those moments when all the bells go off,” Magnoli says. “I looked at him and I just started talking, and in five to seven minutes, I pitched him Purple Rain . In elementary and high school, I was a drummer, so that was enough to give me some insight into the troubles and tribulations of a performer. The Blinn script gave me the characters. I had enough information that I could just pitch. And I’m an excitable guy; I was jumping up in the air, getting down on the ground.
    â€œ[Cavallo] looked at me and said, ‘That’s a hell of a story. So now what are you going to do?’ I said that the next day I would go to Minneapolis. It was a Friday. I would go and meet Prince and pitch that story. Then Sunday I would come home, and I’ll come back with a motion picture or I won’t.”
    They both agree that it was Magnoli’s vision of the movie’s first scene that helped close the deal. “He got me excited by describing the opening,” says Cavallo. “He said, ‘Take the ending of The Godfather and make it the opening of our picture.’ Prince is doing a song, the elevator comes up, the girl is coming from the airport, hustling her way in—all the characters are introduced, and you keep cutting back to the stage. Prince is putting makeup on, getting on his bike, he rides up to the place, the bar scene with the Time, Apollonia pulls a scam andgets in, you see everybody. So he described that scene, and I went nuts.”
    â€œI instinctively conceived an opening musical number in which we could introduce other characters and minimize the need for dialogue,” says Magnoli. “I mentioned the ending of The Godfather , all those cuts to the other characters—moving from Michael Corleone at the church, with those words going all over the other scenes and characters, and that gave him a visual.”
    (It isn’t actually the final scene in The Godfather that Magnoli was referencing—that’s the famous moment when Michael Corleone denies his involvement in the mob to his wife—but the penultimate scene, often called the “baptism sequence.” For five minutes, Francis Ford Coppola cuts back and forth between Michael’s godson’s baptism and a series of murders of the Corleone family’s enemies. It’s interesting to note that the director was unhappy with the montage, which used sixty-seven shots, until one of the film’s editors suggested he lay an organ track over the entire sequence: in an inversion of the Purple Rain concept, in