My Year of Flops (20 page)

As usual, this insane inner voice urging self-destruction made valid points. But how could Prince best go about sabotaging his thriving career? Should he change his already ridiculous prance-about stage name to something so ludicrous it couldn't even be pronounced? Maybe something so bizarre it was subverbal, something that would make him a constant target in talk-show monologues and stand-up routines? Or should he scrawl “Slave” on his face and launch a long, public, widely mocked campaign to get out of his major-label contract by comparing it to unpaid servitude? How about an album of jazz-fusion instrumentals? What if he formed his own independent label and flooded the market with three-disc monstrosities and increasingly irrelevant solo albums? What if he passive-aggressively fulfilled Warner Bros.' desperate cry for a
Purple Rain
sequel with a flaky spiritual romance about an angel named Aura? Or he could very publicly become a Jehovah's Witness, that most respected and least ridiculed of all religious sects.

Oh, but there were
so
many different ways for Prince to fuck up his career! Over the course of his long, glorious, exquisitely checkered life, Prince would have an opportunity to try out all the aforementioned career wreckers. But in 1985, he happened upon an altogether more ingenious self-sabotage scheme. If those Hollywood phonies wanted another Prince movie so damned badly, he'd give them the craziest, least-commercial Prince movie imaginable, a black-and-white period romance heavy on dialogue and perversely light on
musical performances. Maybe he wouldn't even sing at all! That'd show them.

I can imagine Prince's pitch. He'd look a studio suit firmly in the eye and say, “Look, I know this whole black-and-white thing sounds risky, but if it's any consolation, I'll be performing at most two or three songs. It'll be less about the music and more about dialogue and comedy. Oh, and the soundtrack will be vastly different from anything I've ever done, and my character will be an asshole. But that won't matter, because the woman I'm romancing—who'll be played by a white, British unknown, incidentally—will be a raging bitch. Also, I die at the end. And I plan to direct it myself after the original director is fired over ‘creative differences.' And I'll film it almost entirely in France. In case you're worried that a hit soundtrack might accidentally fuel interest in the film, you should know I plan to give the soundtrack a different name from the movie. I'll call it
Parade,
and the film
Under The Cherry Moon
. Now may I please have $12 million for this can't-miss proposition?”

I suspect that after the ashen-faced executive picked his jaw up off the ground, he assumed that Prince was playing an elaborate practical joke and actually planned to make another
Purple Rain
–style conventional musical melodrama. You know, for the kids. Warner Bros.' doom was sealed.

Released in the summer of 1986,
Under The Cherry Moon
opens with glittery narration promising an escapist fairy tale about a bad boy redeemed by the love of a good woman. From the get-go, the film promises more than it can deliver. But for its first scene, at least, the prospect of a screwball Prince romance seems not only palatable but delectable.

As the film opens, freewheeling gigolo Christopher Tracy (Prince) is tickling the ivories while making goo-goo eyes at a potential meal ticket. He doesn't just make love to her with his eyes; he makes love to her, marries her, grows bored and disenchanted, cheats on her, proposes a trial separation, becomes lonely, and reluctantly reconciles with her exclusively via glances, winks, and lascivious stares. In this first scene,
Prince comes off like an impossibly glamorous silent screen star, a caramel-colored Valentino with big, wonderfully expressive eyes, oozing sex and glamour. It's a full-on seduction from a legendary lothario, pitched as much to the audience as his ostensible conquest. Michael Ballhaus' black-and-white photography is silky, decadent, and lush, an impossible dream of retro glamour.

Here, Prince's vision of a screwball comedy directed by Fellini comes gorgeously to life. Prince gives us not just a setting but an entire seductive fantasy world created by consummate old pros: regular Scorsese cinematographer Ballhaus and production designer Richard Sylbert, a two-time Oscar winner with credits such as
Chinatown, Dick Tracy,
and
The Graduate
to his name.

Then people start talking, and everything goes to shit. Christopher is a pianist whose affections can be rented by the hour but who pines for true love. He lives with effeminate sidekick/professional manservant Tricky (Jerome Benton), his half brother and endlessly game partner in crime, mischief, and androgyny. Perhaps the only heterosexual alive who can pull off wearing a puffy pirate shirt, Christopher keeps his customers satisfied with lascivious compliments like, “To not hear your voice each day is to die seven times by God's wrath / if I was anything other than human, I'd be the water in your bath.” But when he happens upon society girl Mary Sharon (Kristin Scott Thomas, in her first role) on her 21st birthday, he's instantly smitten.

Thomas' character is written as an elitist snob who treats Christopher with aristocratic disdain and lets her sinister father control her. Yet she's introduced brazenly flashing high society, causing a wealthy dowager to faint in horror. After gleefully crowing, “How do you like my birthday suit? I designed it myself,” Thomas settles down behind a drum set and leads the crowd in a funk-rock chant of “Let it rock. You just can't stop.” Have I mentioned yet that the film takes place either in the '30s, the '40s, or some strange alternate universe that looks uncannily like the distant pre-rock past yet includes boomboxes, computers, cable, answering machines, and references to Liberace and Sam Cooke?

Initially repulsed by Christopher's leering advances, Mary repeatedly derides him as a “peasant.” “It may seem strange to a hustler like you, but I go out with people my own age, special people. And they don't wear wedding rings, either,” Thomas hisses self-righteously at Prince. He retorts, “Then they must be wearing diapers!” This, alas, is the film's conception of sophisticated screwball banter. There are elementary-school playgrounds with higher levels of intellectual discourse.

Withering insults like, “Maybe if you took off your chastity belt, you could breathe a little more better!” vex Mary to the point that she practices a series of equally devastating snaps to hurl Christopher's way the next she sees him, settling on, “You know, I could breathe a lot easier if the air weren't so polluted by your presence.”

After treating this obnoxious playboy with withering contempt, Mary inexplicably falls in love with him and showers her exotic new lover and Tricky with gifts and money. But trouble lurks around the corner in the form of Mary's disapproving father. Will Mary end up with the mystery man who incites her wildest fantasies, or settle down with her stable, predictable, (unseen) boyfriend, Stuffy Q. Borington III? More important, will Christopher ever stop behaving like a petulant middle schooler and sing some fucking songs? Or will the audience simply be forced to choke down dialogue like the following:

If vintage screwball banter suggests a furious volley between two world-class tennis players,
Cherry Moon
's version feels more like a lazy game of badminton between morbidly obese amateurs. In classic screwball comedies, the leads' rapid-fire surface bickering masks lust,
attraction, and ultimately something nobler. Here, however, the leads' contempt for each other feels both deeply warranted and authentic; it's their growing attraction that rings false.

Prince and overqualified collaborators Ballhaus and Sylbert create a sinful, seductive world, then populate it with grating stick figures. Screwball comedies are all about pacing, speed, momentum, chemistry, wit, and the heedless, exhilarating forward rush of witty banter breathlessly executed. A woefully misbegotten would-be concoction,
Cherry Moon
is more like cotton candy with the weight and consistency of a brick.

Shortly after being shot by one of Mary's husband's goons, a death-bound Christopher (don't worry, in a too-little, too-late bid to give the audience what they want, Prince gets to sing in heaven alongside the Revolution, over the end credits) asks his true love, “We had fun, didn't we?” To tardily answer his question, no, we most assuredly did not.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Fiasco

All-Singing, All-Dancing Book-Exclusive Case File: The Musical Version Of I'll Do Anything

I'll Do Anything
puts the words that begin this Case File into Albert Brooks' mouth to establish his Joel Silver–like superproducer as the
gauche embodiment of everything that's crass and mercenary about show business. As delivered with lip-smacking zeal at a machine-gun clip by Brooks' excitable schlock merchant, the monologue becomes a proud vulgarian's warped code of honor, a cultural barbarian's moolah-mad manifesto.

So it's ironic that James L. Brooks ended up living the mercenary creed of a character he created to epitomize everything that's monstrous (and secretly wonderful) about Hollywood.

Brooks filmed
I'll Do Anything
as a 140-minute musical with songs by Prince and choreography by Twyla Tharp. When the dailies were bad and the previews weren't encouraging, he castrated his musical by gutting the songs. Every last one of them. Yes, even the one where Rosie O'Donnell and Woody Harrelson rap. Brooks likes Tharp's choreography and Prince's light funk, but audiences wouldn't know it from watching the theatrical version of
I'll Do Anything
. They didn't even learn what kind of lamps its writer-director likes.

The musical
I'll Do Anything
has never been seen by the general public, but I was lucky enough to have a My Year Of Flops operative send me a bootleg DVD of the aborted version for use in this book. I watched the film as test audiences saw it, as a rough assemblage of scenes instead of a polished, finished movie.

In a desperate attempt to save his baby from being shown only in theaters serving cappuccino, James L. Brooks ended up killing it. A strange, overreaching musical was radically re-edited to become an intimate comedy-drama about the tricky intersection of art and commerce. A film that once sang its ambitions from the mountaintops became a meek, tuneless, albeit intriguingly personal and bravely sincere mediocrity.

It was to no avail. The Film Formerly Known As A Prince Musical flopped anyway. Audiences were understandably skeptical of an ex-musical with production numbers so terrible they were all excised before hitting theaters.
Anything
hobbled into theaters enshrouded in a thick cloud of failure and desperation. Brooks fatally lacked the
courage of his convictions. He let disastrous test screenings destroy his labor of love.

The first of many, many ironies is that both cuts of
I'll Do Anything
are obsessed with test screenings, focus groups, and Hollywood's pathological need for approval. In the musical version, this theme is established in its very first scene, a brassy production number where a contingent of shaggy young singer-dancer-actor types share an orgasmic sense of post-show exhilaration following the première of a new play with Nick Nolte's Matt Hobbs as Jesus. Then a snake arrives in their show-biz Eden in the form of a tweedy critic panning the show on television.