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writers, and other artists to exercise so-called termination rights. The provision, which took effect in 2013, enables the creators of music to win back their U.S. rights after thirty-five years, so long as they can show that they weren’t employees of the record label, even if they signed a contract that transferred all the rights to their work. These rights, though, are not automatically awarded, and to obtain them usually requires extensive litigation.
    That thirty-five-year window reaches back as far as 1978,when Prince signed with Warner Bros. No further details of the deal or of future plans were announced—except that the first fruit of this agreement would be a newly remastered, deluxe thirtieth-anniversary version of Purple Rain . (His actual enthusiasm about this, however, still remains to be seen: the dates marking the anniversaries of first the sound track and then the movie release both came and went, and still no date had been announced for the reissue.)
    Regardless of any anniversary, of all of Prince’s groundbreaking work, it is Purple Rain that endures first and foremost. It will always be the defining moment of a magnificent and fascinating—if often erratic—career. It carries the weight of history. Its success, on-screen and as a recording, was a result of the supreme confidence, laser-focused ambition, and visionary nature of the most gifted artist of his generation.
    Dancing on the line between fact and fiction, Prince utilized his mysterious persona to hypercharge the film’s story with tension and revelation. He let us in—only partway, certainly not enough to rupture his myth, but more than he ever did before or since. Defying all odds, a group of inexperienced filmmakers and actors, working against the clock and the brutal Minneapolis weather, clicked for just long enough to make a movie that the public was starving for, even if they didn’t quite know it at first.
    â€œWe just wanted to do something good and something true,” says director Albert Magnoli. “The producer was on the same page, and we had an artist who wanted the same things, a group of musicians who felt the same way. It was one of thevery few times when everybody actually wanted to make the same movie—which sounds obvious, but is actually very, very rare in the movie business.”
    â€œI think part of the success of Purple Rain was that [Prince] did open up and examine himself, and that it was real,” says Lisa Coleman. “It was an authentic thing; you could feel it, and there was all this excitement around it. And I don’t think he’s ever done that again.”
    Purple Rain came along at precisely the right moment—not just for Prince, but for the culture. The summer of 1984 was an unprecedented season, a collision of blockbuster records and the ascension of the music video that created perhaps the biggest boom that pop will ever experience. It was also a time of great transformation for black culture, when a series of new stars, new projects, and new styles would forever alter the racial composition of music, movies, and television. While the magnificence of the Purple Rain songs remains clear thirty years later, the album and the film were also perfectly in tune with the time and place in which they were created, and their triumph was partly the result of impeccable timing and circumstances that could never be repeated or replicated.
    The first time we heard the songs on the radio, the first time we put on the album, the first time the lights in the movie theater went down, we all did just what the man told us to do: we went crazy.

TWO
    Alone in a World So Cold
    â€œCan you keep a secret?”
    These—I kid you not—are Prince’s first words to me when I meet him in April of 1993. (And since the answer is yes, all I can tell you is that you really wouldn’t be all that interested.) I had received a call in New York on Friday saying that