Purple Reign: Remembering When Prince Changed Music Forever At The 1984 'Purple Rain' Premiere

When Prince hit the red carpet for 'Purple Rain,' music & movies changed forever.

Thursday, April 21, 2016 - 20:02

In 1984, MTV was at the red-carpet premiere of Prince’s debut rock movie, ‘Purple Rain’.

Prince arrived in a purple stretch limo, and glided down the red carpet holding a single rose.

So why had the likes of Eddie Murphy (wearing a leopard-print jacket and bare chest), Lionel Richie and Little Richard come out to celebrate the musician and his operatic movie loosely based on his own life?

“Cause Prince is bad!” Murphy said.

Truedat.

By ’84, Prince was known as one of the most talented, charismatic and unpredictable pop stars on the planet. But with his debut movie “Purple Rain” — and the album that accompanied it — Prince was like no one else in entertainment. The disc hit the top Billboard spot, spawned two #1 singles and went platinum a staggering 13 times. And the movie won an Oscar and grossed nearly $70 million at the US box office.

And yet both the premiere and the film were part of a new beginning, a fresh way of approaching pop culture that brought together artists, celebrities, technology and, increasingly, the inclusion of fans in the entire process.

“It now becomes an extension,” Lionel Richie said. “What we’ve been doing for a long time is taking each song and making a video out of it. What [Prince] has made now is a motion picture out of his album. It’s a very important step.”