Let's Go Crazy by Alan Light Page B

The Godfather it took adding the music to unify the scene, rather than the weaving of narrative moments to intensify a song.)
    Agreeing that they would move forward, Cavallo sent over Prince’s music videos and some concert footage. Magnoli spent the night watching them and felt they were low-quality and didn’t reveal much that would translate to a mass audience on a movie screen. He felt uninspired and considered calling the whole thing off—he had an offer from Henry Winkler’sproduction company to write a script, so there was a more secure choice in front of him. But on Friday, he got into the car that would take him to the airport.
    â€œThe driver is a black guy in his mid-twenties, and I think, ‘This guy is potentially part of my audience,’ ” he says. “Just before we get to the airport, I ask him, ‘Do you know Prince?’ And he says yes. I said, ‘Do you listen to him?’ And he said ‘No, the guy’s a fag.’ I was pretty sure that was not true, but it was another thing that had not gotten over; that was the perception.”
    In Minneapolis, he was met by Steve Fargnoli and Prince’s hulking bodyguard, “Big Chick” Huntsberry. “I hadn’t even been told there was another manager,” Magnoli says. “And Fargnoli said, ‘Understand this—we don’t care what you pitched to Cavallo. It’s garbage. We’re doing the script as written. If you don’t understand this, I will buy you a ticket and send you home right now.’ ”
    The plan was to meet Prince in a hotel at midnight and then go to dinner. As the clock struck twelve, Prince walked out of the elevator wearing black pants with buttons up the sides, heels, a trench coat, and a scarf. He walked past Magnoli over to Cavallo and Big Chick, which gave the director a momentary chance to observe him with his guard down. “What I saw was an extremely vulnerable guy who was essentially alone,” says Magnoli. “And in that time, I filled in the rest of the pitch—I saw the father, the fragmentation of the family.”
    They drove to the restaurant and sat in a booth in the back in silence. Prince, once again, ordered spaghetti and orangejuice. “He looks at me and says, ‘Why do you like my screenplay?’ ” Magnoli recalls. “This was news to me, suddenly, that it was his script. And I said, ‘It sucks. Now let me talk about what I want to talk about.’” Prince reacted—he looked at Fargnoli, looked at Chick. They’d told him Magnoli was coming out to talk about shooting the script as it was, not wanting to make large and dramatic changes. He had been lied to.
    Magnoli continues: “I said, ‘I want to talk about the story I told to Cavallo; I want to tell you that story.’ I gave him my entire rant. He said, ‘You guys go home; Magnoli, you come with me.’ ” Like a true director, Magnoli describes a dramatic scene, in which Prince drives his black BMW to the freeway, then takes an exit that plunges them into complete darkness: “It was like we were in a spaceship. Prince stopped the car and said, ‘Okay, what do you know about me?’ I said, ‘Really nothing.’ He said, ‘Then how is it that in ten minutes, you told me my life story?’ ”
    The next morning, Fargnoli picked Magnoli up at the hotel and drove him over to Prince’s purple house in the Chanhassen suburb. He didn’t mention anything about the night before. Prince was going to spend the day playing some new music for Magnoli to consider for the film. The board in the home studio was on the fritz, so they went upstairs and sat on the floor. “We must have listened to about a hundred songs,” says Magnoli. “I said, ‘I need twelve songs,’ and he said, ‘You pick them.’ I told him that I would come back in August, I’d research and write a script,