Define Auteur: In defence of Under the Cherry Moon

In 1986, The Purple One told the world a fairy tale in black and white: ​“Once upon a time, there was a bad boy named Christopher Tracy… He loved all women, but he died for one.” The fairy tale was both film and music, part comedy and part tragedy. Perhaps above all else, Under the Cherry Moon was Prince’s love letter to cinema, but it was also his attempt to make his place within it.

One of the things I’ve heard repeated as I’ve spent these last months reading biographies, interviewing collaborators, and discussing Under the Cherry Moon with friends and fans is that it isn’t a good film because it was made by a musician instead of a filmmaker. But I don’t know what to call co-writing, scoring, directing, and starring in a film with such a singular vision as Cherry Moon except auteur filmmaking of the highest order, and I have to wonder why Prince’s insistence on having full control over the production has been construed as diva behavior while we champion the artistic integrity of filmmakers like David Lynch and Woody Allen for insisting on precisely the same authorial privilege. 

Part of the issue is that in strictly defining Prince as a musician, we have automatically excluded him from the creative rights we afford to filmmakers, but I also think he was simply too flamboyant, too horny, and too Black to fit neatly within auteur discourse, which does determine how films are received, for better or worse. Reviews of Cherry Moon​’s relished in a kind of gleeful viciousness and in retrospect, they seem less willing to meaningfully engage with the film than to put Prince in his place. He may have been pop royalty, but as far as critics were concerned, his domain extended only so far; cinema was where ​“real” filmmakers reigned. In the 40 years since Cherry Moon was released, this cultural hierarchy has eroded and as such, it’s time that we give Prince – the filmmaker – his due. 

The film itself is an equal-parts awkward mish-mash and brilliant mélange of Hollywood references and tropes. A lounge pianist by day and gigolo by night, Christopher Tracy (Prince) professes to love only fun but truly desires the kind of soul connection that might transcend death. As working class hustlers trying to get ahead, Christopher and his co-conspirator Tricky (Jerome Benton) are directly descended from the comedic duos in Howard Hawks’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot, all of whom conspire to improve their circumstances by romantically ensnaring some dupe with money. Christopher’s playboy roguery comes into conflict with his romantic nature when he sets his sights on Mary Sharon (Kristin Scott Thomas), a young heiress soon to come into a sizable fortune. As in Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night, their initial feelings of mutual disdain give way to intrigue, desire, and ultimately love. However, as in George Cukor’s Philadelphia Story, Mary is caught in a complex love quadrangle between Tricky, Christopher, and the man she is actually engaged to marry. Meanwhile, her thuggish father does all he can to keep her and Christopher, whom she really loves, apart. The film’s conclusion is shades of Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca, with love’s fullest expression coming at the expense of its enjoyment. 

Until recently, Cherry Moon has been defined almost entirely by its critical reception in 1986. To say the film wasn’t well received is to put it lightly. Its only accolades were winning five Golden Raspberry Awards out of eight nominations and making Siskel & Ebert’s ​“Worst of 1986” Thumbs Down list. In hindsight, many of the criticisms levied at the film were less diagnoses of its failures than indications that critics simply didn’t understand what it was trying to do or be. Reviewers regularly took the film’s being shot in black and white as indication that it was a period film; as a result, they saw its oddball mix of fashion and technology from different eras as a creative failure rather than an intentional choice, as though a department helmed by Academy Award-winning production designer Richard Sylbert simply couldn’t figure out how to periodize. ​“It wasn’t set in any time,” costume designer Marie France confirmed when I asked her. ​“It’s a fantasy.” Prince’s performance was similarly mistaken for narcissistic ineptitude rather than what it was: a playful appropriation of the silent era’s hyper-expressive performance style, as well as the visual codes it used to construct its starlets as objects of desire. What one reviewer described as vain ​“pouting and primping” was not Prince playing himself, but rather Prince playing Clara Bow. The entire conceit is so arch and delightfully camp in its execution that one wonders why audiences in 1986 didn’t get the joke – or realize that Prince was telling it.

Production on Under the Cherry Moon started in April 1985, when Prince set to turning a rough film treatment and a handful of songs he had written while on the Purple Rain album tour into a feature film and soundtrack. Without a script to show the studio, Prince’s management team secured a three-picture deal with Warner Bros., which was banking on a repeat of Purple Rain​’s exceptional performance. Handing off his notes to screenwriter Becky Johnston and director Herbert Ross, Prince retreated to the studio to begin working on the film’s companion album, Parade. Johnston began her film career in the No Wave cinema movement, but she had little success breaking into Hollywood until Prince’s management team hired her to write Cherry Moon. As director, Ross brought much-needed industry experience to the production, and his facility with oddball musicals like Pennies for Heaven made him a natural fit. 

Together, Johnston and Ross constructed a script from Prince’s early pages, but as script development progressed, so too did tensions between Prince and his director, both of whom saw the other as encroaching upon their creative authority. Johnston remembers the meeting when these tensions came to a head: ​“Prince was saying, ​‘I want to shoot the movie in black and white,’ and Herb Ross was like, ​‘Well, all due respect, Prince, but I’m the director and that’ll be my decision.’ And then the next time I came in for the meeting, Herb wasn’t there anymore. He was fired.”

Ross’s dismissal from the project made it clear to all involved that Cherry Moon was a very different project than Purple Rain, wherein Prince had supplied the raw creative material and let the filmmakers turn it into a movie. However, Cherry Moon wasn’t about Prince or his music – the film contains only one brief musical number – but about love as he understood it. It was his creative dream, and he expected the people he hired to help him make the film that he envisioned. While he was relying on industry veterans for guidance, some things were not negotiable. Shooting in black and white was one of them. The studio had already tried to talk him out of it, managing to win only the minor concession of shooting on color stock with hopes of persuading him out of his monochrome vision in postproduction. After all, American culture was in a neon era speeding toward an electronic future; 1999 and Purple Rain had made Prince the icon of both. 

The average consumer associated black and white stock with old Hollywood and art films, and they had little nostalgia for the former and little interest in the latter. These were legitimate reasons for caution, but they likely only instigated Prince further. Any time he was expected to cater to his audience’s expectations or follow popular trends, he took a hard left turn into what he often described simply as ​“the alternative.” If fans wanted more of what he’d already done, they could rent Purple Rain from Blockbuster. He was making something new, something they hadn’t even imagined yet. 

Despite his lack of filmmaking experience, Prince did expect to help make the film, resulting in an extremely unorthodox production that could be as maddening for those working on it as it could be magical, as Johnston quickly learned. Shortly after Ross’s departure, Prince began coming to the Warner Bros. studio lot for working sessions in which he would lay his own ideas into Johnston’s script. In June, Prince flew Johnston to Paris so they could tailor the script to its new location in the French Riviera, insisting that they begin working as soon as she arrived and continue through the night. She remembers this writing session as a kinetic marathon of rehearsal and improvisation: ​“It wasn’t like you were sitting there talking [about the script]. He loved to act scenes out and run dialogue verbally. He would act every part out.” She remembers that next morning as the best part of her experience on the film: ​“We were in his suite, which overlooked the Champs-Élysées, and when dawn broke, he said, ​‘Do you want to hear some of the music I’ve written for the movie?’ And he played a bunch of the songs on his keyboard and sang them for me as the sun came up.” It could have easily been a scene from the film itself.

If Johnston’s trip to Paris was the high point of her tenure on the film, its end marked the beginning of the production’s many troubles. Warner Bros. requested significant rewrites on the Paris script, and Johnston produced a new draft that the executives loved but Prince hated. Refusing to shoot the Warner Bros. script, Prince flew Johnston out (this time to Minneapolis) for another marathon writing session, but the studio’s attempt to rewrite the script had shifted the atmosphere. Prince showed little interest in collaborating, effectively dictating to Johnston what he wanted in the new draft. ​“There was some discussion, but I was pretty much just a scribe at that point,” she recalled. As she left to type up the new draft, he made her promise not to change a single word, but when he received her pages, he could tell that some of the language had been altered. ​“All I had done was make it grammatically correct, reshuffled words,” Johnston told me. ​“He said I had to change it [back], and I did. And then he fired me,” she said laughingly. Looking back, it’s clear that Johnston was a casualty of Prince’s fear that he was losing control of the film.

Mere weeks later and only one week into shooting, director Mary Lambert (who had been brought in to replace Ross) was also let go, in part because she was changing production details that Prince had already approved. Costume designer Marie France recalled one such instance when, days before shooting Mary Sharon’s birthday scene, Lambert directed France to replace the handmade cut-velvet gown worn by Kristin Scott Thomas with something else. When France sought Prince’s approval, he told her to disregard Lambert’s direction. ​“She was gone after that,” France told me. ​“That day or maybe that week. That might have been the last straw.” It was also the last straw for Lambert, whose statement explaining her departure was both diplomatic and incisive: ​“It’s just become quite apparent that Prince has such a strong vision of what this movie should be…that it makes no sense for me to stand between him and the film anymore.” Lisa Coleman, keyboardist for The Revolution and one of Prince’s closest musical collaborators, felt there was an incompatibility between how film directors expected to work and how Prince did. ​“The directors were trying to do what he was wanting,” she explained, ​“but they were under a lot of pressure because he was always like, ​‘Let me do it myself.’” She remembered that sometimes when she was playing the piano, Prince would lean over her to play the chord the way he wanted it to be played. ​“I think film is a director’s medium,” she said. ​“That’s who’s driving it. That’s who’s holding the paintbrush. But Prince would reach over and take that paintbrush.” With no screenwriter, no director, and shooting already underway, there was no choice but for Prince to paint on his own.

Prince’s decision to take over as director has been widely seen as a disastrous move, one motivated by both hubris and desperation, which is not altogether untrue. The move incensed Hollywood, in part because it was a flagrant violation of union rules (unenforceable on overseas productions like Cherry Moon) that prevented anyone on a film from firing the director and then taking over their duties. But it was also a direct challenge to cultural hierarchies that Hollywood had a vested interest in maintaining. If the be-thonged author of pop smut like ​“Head” could direct a feature film, then all the cultural capital afforded to directors as auteurs was called into question. To be fair, directing Cherry Moon himself hadn’t been Prince’s first choice, but he also wasn’t entirely unprepared for the role when it became a necessity. He had been directing in one capacity or another for years: casting talent in roles he’d written, building narratives, coaching performances, and generally overseeing production. He’d also always intended to make films, and Purple Rain had allowed him to observe the process up close. Film was just another instrument for him to learn, and he set about learning it the same way he did any other: watching someone else play, picking it up himself, and then letting it rip. 

Once Prince had complete control of Cherry Moon, it was no longer a feature film; it was a large-scale multimedia project that played in the spaces where music and cinema made contact. Since its inception in his earliest handwritten pages, the film’s narrative wrapped around a diegetic song that would also have a material life. In the film, Christopher chases a love like the one described in the popular ballad ​“Under the Cherry Moon,” but the song he’s referring to (Track 4 on Parade) was written by Prince about the love that Christopher chases, finds, and loses. Prince conceived of the film and the album as an integrated world before either entered production, but concept became reality when he took over the set. 

Paces away from where cameras were rolling, Coleman and Wendy Melvoin (guitarist for The Revolution) were in a recording truck working on Parade. ​“Prince would come in sometimes between scenes, listen to what we were doing, maybe offer a suggestion, and then he’d run back to the set,” Coleman told me, remembering that he sometimes adjusted scenes that had yet to shoot so they better fit what Coleman and Melvoin had written. The recording truck also allowed Prince to reconnect with his primary creative language while he was learning another through trial by fire. ​“If he was on the set too long, he could get reinspired by coming in the truck for an hour and playing bass,” said Coleman. ​“I’d see his face change as he played.” Recording the album on set was partially a solution to a logistical issue, but Prince also needed to maintain contact with the music in order to sustain the creative clarity that directing the film required. 

If Under the Cherry Moon was as much of a disaster as critics said it was in 1986, one couldn’t tell from its recent sold-out screenings in Los Angeles, where audiences recited dialogue, sported replicas of Mary Sharon’s iconic beaded headdress, and turned the theater into a dance party when the end credits rolled over ​“Mountains.” ​“When I saw the film for the first time,” Coleman told me, ​“I loved that Prince was letting out the side of him that I knew so well – the goofy guy, the prankster. In a way, Cherry Moon is more biographical than Purple Rain.” After one of the L.A. screenings, Johnston told me that she felt Prince’s often-mocked loverboy persona, in all its absurd pageantry, now seemed up to the minute. Whatever Prince did, he did it entirely, and he did it in a way that no one else would have imagined or dared. And whatever he was doing, his message – expressed so clearly in Cherry Moon​’s exit music – was always the same: love will conquer all, if you just believe. 

The love that went into this film has bloomed in the last forty years, providing us with uncomplicated pleasure and life-affirming joy at a time when we are most in need of them. Whatever one feels about his films, whatever the films’ charms or failures, Prince was a fascinating and original filmmaker. He would have turned 68 today, and next month his first feature film turns 40. This is the time to celebrate both.