Prince

In the summer of 1983, Prince gave his managers one condition for renewing his contract: he wanted to star in a feature film financed by a major studio. He was twenty-five years old, stood five feet eight inches tall, and Warner Bros executives saw the idea as commercial suicide. No one in the boardrooms would bet a dime on a story set in the nightclubs of Minneapolis.

But the musician refused to step back and forced the studio to hire Albert Magnoli to rewrite the script on the fly. Because deep down, Prince wasn't looking for a conventional musical, but a mythological showcase for his own band.

Filming began in subzero temperatures.

When Purple Rain hit theaters in July of 1984, the U.S. box office exploded. The film grossed more than $68 million against a modest budget of $7 million, dethroning established blockbusters during its opening weekend.

That same summer, he pulled off the feat of simultaneously topping the box office, the album chart and the singles chart with When Doves Cry. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave him the Oscar for Best Original Song Score. And the boy from Minneapolis believed he was untouchable behind the camera.

The Black-and-White Delirium of the French Riviera

That triumph gave him complete creative freedom for his next film project. For Under the Cherry Moon in 1986, he chose to shoot on the French Riviera and fired director Mary Lambert just days after work began. He then decided to take the director's chair himself, with no prior technical experience on set.

He wanted to emulate the sophisticated comedy of 1930s classic Hollywood, relying on the black-and-white cinematography of Michael Ballhaus. He played Christopher Tracy, a gigolo who seduces wealthy women in Nice, wearing satin suits and delivering dialogue that bordered on self-parody.

The public turned its back on him immediately.

The specialized press tore the film apart, and it earned five Razzie Awards at the 1987 ceremony, including Worst Picture and Worst Director. That commercial stumble buried his aspirations of being taken seriously as a filmmaker by the Los Angeles film industry.

But Prince refused to accept defeat.

From Concert Redemption to War with the Studios

At the end of 1987, he released Sign o' the Times, a concert film that intercut live footage recorded in Rotterdam with elaborate theatrical reconstructions shot at his Paisley Park studios. Film critics unanimously praised the frantic, rhythmic editing, which brought the artist back to the center of the cultural conversation.

Two years later, Tim Burton called him to write songs for The Batman in 1989. Prince accepted the assignment with a dark concept album that accompanied the superhero blockbuster and sold eleven million copies worldwide.

His last attempt at fiction came in 1990 with Graffiti Bridge, a belated sequel to his first big hit that proved to be a disaster with both audiences and critics. That blow closed the doors of Hollywood to his auteur projects for good.

Starting in 1993, his contract with Warner Bros blew up. He appeared at award shows with the word "Slave" written on his face, dropped his legal name in favor of a graphic symbol, and waged a ruthless fight over ownership of his master recordings and film rights.

After his death in April of 2016 at Paisley Park, the executors of his estate opened the basement vault where he kept his personal archive. Among thousands of audio tapes, they found more than fifty unreleased music videos and dozens of hours of concert footage in 35-millimeter that never made it to a movie screen.