Let's Go Crazy by Alan Light

Author:Alan Light
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

SEVEN

Something That You’ll Never Comprehend

Warner Bros. may have been convinced to release Purple Rain, but they still didn’t really know what it was (and they still had not determined whether they were going to put their name on it or not). The next order of business was to see how a real audience responded. The studio set up a screening in Culver City, California, an area that could produce a multiracial crowd.

They showed the movie in a big theater, with a capacity of six hundred or so. The young audience went wild watching the film. Afterward, following the usual protocol, they filled out cards that offered their scores on different aspects of the movie. What came back were, according to Cavallo, the best numbers Warners could remember ever seeing. “The numbers were so high from that first screening that Terry Semel got really abusive with me,” says the producer. “He said, ‘You can’t do that. What do you think this is, some fucking radio station—you go bring your fans and fuck up the numbers? They’re meaningless!’ I said, ‘We did nothing of the kind, I wouldn’t even know how to do it . . .’ Well, that’s not quite true. ‘Well, they’ve got to stop this. You’ve wasted our time.’ But when I was in the audience with that group, they went insane, and I thought, ‘This has to be a sample of something.’ ”

The studio decided they needed to do a second screening as a reality check, away from LA, and to not even let Cavallo know where it would be so that they could be sure he wasn’t stacking the audience. “They said, ‘You’re gonna get on a plane, and we’re not gonna tell you where we’re gonna do the screening; we’ll tell you when we’re in the air.’ So we go to a Denver suburb, and a guy comes running to the limousine that I’m in with Terry and Bob, and he says, ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do—there’s so many people that there’s going to be a riot. We have to give them permission to do multiple shows.’ I said, ‘Oh, yeah, I did that. I got them packed in.’ Anyway, those numbers were fantastic, too. Kids were fighting to get into the second showing, even though they had already seen it once.”

There was one final screening, this time in San Diego. Yet again, the numbers came back huge. “There were a bunch of Warner suits in the lobby,” says Magnoli. “They go, ‘Okay, three times in a row, reviews are through the roof. Al, we were wrong. We’re gonna go from opening this in two hundred theaters to as many as we can to open this movie properly, probably more like nine hundred.’ ”

Howard Bloom used the San Diego screening as his chance to start working the media on Purple Rain. “Cavallo called me and said, ‘We’re having a screening in San Diego, and the press is not supposed to know about this’—okay,

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