Prince – Shelved Project – I’ll Do Anything

Introduction

Prince has done many projects, started them, aborted them, reused then and frequently just shelved them. I’ll Do Anything is one of those.

I’ll Do Anything

I’ll Do Anything is a 1994 comedy/drama by director James L. Brooks. A substantial part of the movie’s story was meant to be a satire on the film industry, but it also addresses relationships. Lead actor Nick Nolte plays an actor who suddenly finds himself responsible for his 6 year old daughter (whom he hadn’t seen for over two years). Besides Nick Nolte actors Whittni Wright, Julie Kavner, Albert Brooks, Tracey Ullman, Anne Heche, Ian McKellen, Rosie O’Donnell and Woody Harrelson have leading/supporting roles in the movie. It was one of the biggest flops of 1994 and grossed around $10 million (costing over $40 million).

Musical

Originally the movie was intended to be a musical. The movie used songs written by Carole King, Sinéad O’Connor, Prince and others. During preview screenings the musical was very badly received. Brooks rewrote large parts of the movie in three days and re-shot many scenes over the course of three weeks. In the meantime a second version seems to have been put together, which was a sort of hybrid of a regular movie and a musical. When the cast suddenly burst into song halfway through the film, the preview screenings were even more disastrous than the first screenings. So, the music was scrapped entirely.

The musical version has never been released. Director Brooks once said he would love to release a “director’s cut” of I’ll Do Anything, where the musical was added as a bonus. The chance of this ever happening is practically zero.

Prince

In the world of Prince I’ll Do Anything is one of many projects that didn’t make it, and it resides within the Paisley Park Vault, although some songs have been released on the albums Girl 6 and The Vault… Old Friends 4 Sale.

In the case of I’ll Do Anything the coherence between the songs is dictated by the musical’s story line. In 1992 Prince was approached by James L. Brooks and was asked to write some songs for his planned ‘old fashioned’ musical. From the end of March to mid April 1992 Prince wrote 10 songs, which he recorded in Paisley Park and in Australia, where he had just started his Diamonds And Pearls world tour. The songs were I’ll Do Anything, Make Believe, My Little Pill, Don’t Talk 2 Strangers, Poor Little Bastard, The Rest Of My Life, There Is Lonely, Be My Mirror, Wow and I Can’t Love U Anymore. Apparently Empty Room was considered, but (luckily) was never attached to this project.

Selection

Out of the 10, 8 songs were picked for the musical, after which Prince had no input at all on the songs, arrangements, instrumentation and production. The songs were re-recorded and sung by the actors. Following the first preview screening many songs were provided with new vocals, as some actors’ voices were beyond terrible. The Carole King and Sinéad O’Connor songs were both part of the movie, but weren’t selected for the planned soundtrack album.

Release

Following the disastrous preview screenings the musical was cancelled, making the soundtrack obsolete as well. The re-recorded songs with the actors were never made public.

Prince reused some of the songs, he initially intended for the musical, later under his own moniker. Don’t Talk 2 Strangers was released in 1996 as part of the Girl 6 soundtrack for the Spike Lee movie with the same title. In 1998 Chaka Khan released her version of the song on her NPG Records album Come 2 My House. The Rest Of My Life, My Little Pill and There Is Lonely were released in 1999 on the Prince album The Vault… Old Friends 4 Sale. The rest of the 10 original songs recorded for I’ll Do Anything have never been released (yet).

Prince – Platinum (bootleg)

Bootleg

The Prince versions of the I’ll Do Anything songs have appeared on many bootlegs. Also, a bootleg recording of the songs as they would have appeared in the movie is supposedly on the market. And, the musical version of the movie is in circulation. In August 2020 there was a hush-hush announcement that the “Musical Cut” of I’ll Do Anything would be streamed online. Somehow the Prince Estate got wind of it and sent a cease and desist letter to the organizers. The broadcast was cancelled.

Review

To put it mildly, I’ll Do Anything is not part of the highlights of Prince’s body of work. Maybe, you’ll need to have a soft spot for musicals (which I don’t) to appreciate it, but I never listen to it. I’m pleased that the phenomenal Empty Room has never been part of the I’ll Do Anything tracklist. The only song I like is Don’t Talk 2 Strangers. I have never heard any of the re-recorded and resung versions, but I don’t consider that to be a loss, at ll. The descriptions alone make me not want to hear them. I’ll Do Anything is far from essential listening, even for Prince afficionados.

Press

In the press Prince was the one who was blamed for the debacle. He was personally held accountable for the musical flop, which was rather short-sighted, but it did reveal the climate in the press in 1994. Many were already done with Prince and his remarkable behavior and opinion.

To close off this sub-article I hereby present two articles on the I’ll Do Anything debacle and Prince, the first stems from 1994 and the second from 2020, when Prince and his career was rated more positive.

Los Angeles Times, 02/20/1994

PRINCELY BOOTLEG : Some People’ll Do Anything to Hear These Songs

By Chris Willman

Feb. 20, 1994 12 AM PT

Purely for the perverse palette, Rhino Records has two CDs out in its popular “Golden Throats” series, consisting of misbegotten recordings by famous actors–from William Shatner to Jack Webb–who briefly thought they were singers, doing pop standards by Dylan, the Beatles and others.

Now there’s an entirely contemporary, de facto “Golden Throats Vol. 3” making the rounds of camp fans’ cassette decks–though it’s not in stores and never will be. It’s the lost original soundtrack to “I’ll Do Anything,” featuring Julie Kavner, Albert Brooks and Tracy Ullman doing Prince, and it’s the most sought-after bootleg in town.

The tapes being circulated include Prince’s demos for the nine songs he wrote for the ill-fated musical incarnation of James L. Brooks’ film, followed by the actors’ renditions of those same songs, plus a lone Sinead O’Connor contribution. All musical numbers were eventually cut from the finished product after disastrous test screenings, except for a snippet of a children’s tune, written by Carole King and sung by young Whittni Wright, that remains.

Many who’ve heard the tape agree that director Brooks made absolutely the right decision to remove the Prince songs.

“No matter how bad anybody thinks the music would’ve been–and I was expecting it to be horrible–it’s worse,” says one astonished professional songwriter who has played the tape for friends at parties. “It’s like ‘Springtime for Hitler’ in ‘The Producers.'”

The main theme of the original musical was a Prince ditty called “Wow,” the lyrics of which are generic enough to pop up in six different reprises throughout the movie: Sample chorus:

*
Wow! This is crazy
Wow! This is wild
If there ever was a time for reaction
Baby the time is now
Seems like we’re spending most of our lives
Just waiting for the big bang
Extraordinary stuff that makes us say
Extraordinary things like
Wow!
*

One of the reprises accompanies a trimmed childbirth scene, in which an actress moans and screams her way through the song, singing “Ow!” instead of “Wow!”

Albert Brooks croons two songs: “I’ll Do Anything” (lyric: “What good is a captain if he ain’t got a crew / What good is a me if I AIN’T . . . GOT . . . A YOU!”) and “There Is Lonely.” Brooks’ singing voice has been described charitably as gravitating toward the Jimmy Durante or Tom Waits end of the gravelly scale, and less charitably as an Oscar the Grouch affectation.

But there are two more torturous tunes that draw the greatest winces from illicit listeners. One is Kavner’s “My Little Pill,” a sort of update of “Mother’s Little Helper” related to the truncated drug subplot, and recited in a maddeningly childlike sing-song voice. The other is Wright’s rendition of O’Connor’s mopey “This Lonely Life” that won’t have anyone comparing her to the other singing Whitney.

One track is mysteriously missing from the bootleg tapes: Nick Nolte’s infamous singing debut on his sole number, “Be My Mirror.” Speculates one source, “He probably spent his entire salary from the movie buying up every single copy of his vocal.”

The tapes that do exist are hard to come by, and have apparently come from inside Brooks’ company, Gracie Films. Though Warner Bros. Records had the soundtrack on its release schedule at one point, a source there close to top executives says he doubts that any tape copy ever made its way inside the building. And a source with friends at Paisley Park Records’ recently disbanded L.A. office claims that Prince called there recently asking that all copies of the “I’ll Do Anything” music be destroyed.

Los Angeles Times, 02/20/1994

Independent, 09/02/2020

The Prince musical so disastrous it was never released: the story of I’ll Do Anything

The Purple One’s song and dance numbers, along with ones by Carole King and Sinead O’Connor, were cut from the 1994 film. The original still exists, but no one can get to see it. Adam White investigates.

Wednesday 02 September 2020 14:24 BST

On 22 August, lovers of obscure film tuned into a secret internet live stream of an unreleased Hollywood disaster. At midnight UK time, a rare and barely seen “musical cut” of the forgotten 1994 comedy I’ll Do Anything was due to be broadcast, one that featured the song and dance routines otherwise left on the cutting room floor. Until, that is, there was a last-minute hitch – the estate of the late Prince, who wrote the majority of the film’s songs, threatened to sue the site’s owners if the stream went ahead. So, for two hours, the screen was filled with a fuzzy photograph of a legal letter, and not Nick Nolte, Tracey Ullman and the woman who voices Marge Simpson bursting into song.

I’ll Do Anything is only ever remembered for what it wasn’t. The version released to cinemas was a non-singing, non-dancing non-event; a muddle of Hollywood satire and father/daughter squabbling that promptly died a death amid middling reviews and low box office. Its backstory is one for the ages, though, reflective of cinematic auteurism gone awry, and what happens when few are willing to stand up to a master.

In the early 1990s, filmmaker and mogul James L Brooks was one of the biggest figures in the entertainment industry. He had written and directed Terms of Endearment (1983) and Broadcast News (1987) and created a string of TV shows – Lou Grant, Rhoda, Taxi – that ran for years in the Seventies and Eighties; his name was on the production credits for Say Anything… and Big, and that’s his company Gracie Films at the end of every episode of The Simpsons. I’ll Do Anything was designed to be his tribute to the industry that had made him, its fantastical magic as well as its pitfalls, all of which he believed could only be conveyed through song.

Unusually, Brooks didn’t want to write the songs himself, nor work with a composer to craft a movie musical as per genre tradition. Instead he wanted to recruit A-list pop stars to write the songs, which would then be inserted into the script. Many names were approached, including Jackson Browne, Mariah Carey and Janet Jackson, before Brooks settled on three: Prince, Sinead O’Connor and Carole King.

An intriguing cast was assembled. Nolte would play a struggling actor nervously bonding with his estranged daughter (six-year-old newcomer Whittni Wright), who is foisted upon him by his bitter ex (Ullman). Marge Simpson voice actor Julie Kavner would play a Hollywood worker bee who embarks upon a relationship with a self-involved film producer played by Albert Brooks. Surrounding them are Ian McKellen, Rosie O’Donnell, Anne Heche, Woody Harrelson and Joely Richardson (replacing Laura Dern, who had wisely dropped out to do Jurassic Park instead). But a problem was that the cast members who had to sing and dance couldn’t actually sing and dance. McKellen, who would go on to be one of the few good things about the similarly disastrous Cats adaptation in 2019, wasn’t asked to do either.

Only one major voice apparently expressed concern about the film. Polly Platt, a writer, producer and set designer, had lurked unappreciated on the fringes of some of the most important filmmaking of the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties. She was also a producer on I’ll Do Anything, and clashed with Brooks over what she felt was a movie musical with no reason for being a movie musical – as revealed in the most recent season of the film history podcast You Must Remember This, in which author and historian Karina Longworth explores the myths and legends within Hollywood lore.

One anecdote from Platt’s unpublished memoir, which was read aloud during the podcast, involved Prince visiting the set and watching early footage of a musical number in which Kavner, who sounds like Marge Simpson both in and outside of a recording booth, slowly murdered Prince’s work. “She sang off-key and was worse than bad, she was awful,” Platt recalled. “I watched Prince listen to his song being mangled, and he was expressionless, no winces, no looking around. I ventured over to speak to him, despite his ban on being spoken to. ‘This is not how the song will be in the movie,’ I told him. ‘We will have someone else sing the song on the soundtrack later.’ He nodded, as if I had commented on the weather. He stayed a few minutes more and left as quietly as he arrived.”

Platt’s promise didn’t pan out. Ironically for a film in which disastrous test screenings are a major plot point, I’ll Do Anything wasn’t recognised more widely as a misfire until its own test screenings. There, Brooks tested a variety of different cuts of his film – some with songs, some without, some with professional singers dubbing over the film’s cast. “The audience absolutely rebelled against the way we presented the music,” Brooks told the Los Angeles Times in 1993. “It was up there with the top five worst professional times in my life.”

Ultimately, the songs would be axed entirely, despite early trailers featuring footage of the song and dance numbers and boasts about Prince’s involvement. “I thought music would articulate that which you couldn’t legitimately articulate in dialogue,” Brooks told The New York Times, “but the music broke the sense of reality instead of enhancing it … I feel like I made three movies. The first was a musical, the second was the compromise, and the third is what you see now.”

What was released in cinemas is frustratingly flat. I’ll Do Anything is never quite funny enough, or moving enough, or mean enough, to truthfully be anything at all. There are sparks of life here and there: Kavner and Albert Brooks, trading raspy barbs, comfortably steal the show; there are some witty lines at Hollywood’s expense, but nothing especially sings, either (pun intended). The film grossed just a quarter of its $40m budget in cinemas, and barely made a dent on home video. Brooks would bounce back with 1997’s Oscar-winning Jack Nicholson romcom As Good as It Gets, and I’ll Do Anything was rapidly forgotten.

But what of all those songs? Or the “musical cut” that never officially saw the light of day? Only King’s track, “You Are the Best”, still exists in some form in the film itself – with its chorus sung acapella by Wright in a brief moment of cutesiness. Of the others, Prince would repurpose one song, “Don’t Talk 2 Strangers”, for his soundtrack to Spike Lee’s Girl 6 in 1996, and it would later be covered by Chaka Khan. Prince would also re-record two other I’ll Do Anything tracks, “My Little Pill” and “There Is Lonely”, for a 1999 album of past rarities. The five other tracks Prince supplied to the film, bearing titles like “Wow” and “I Can’t Love U Anymore”, have never been properly unearthed. A low-quality copy of O’Connor’s track, titled “This Lonely Life”, has done the rounds in fan circles.

The “musical cut” has had a similar fate, with a number of different unfinished workprints being traded on the bootleg circuit. More than one thread on Reddit suggests it has been rented, under the table at least, in a few of Hollywood’s second-hand video stores over the past two decades. Just a handful of film lovers have been lucky enough to see it for themselves.

“It’s honestly kind of a train wreck,” jokes screenwriter Tyler Ruggeri, who watched a two-and-a-half-hour “workprint” cut of the musical version via the bootleg circuit. “The transitions in and out of the musical numbers are extremely jarring because it’s like, ‘Whoa, they’re singing now, but I don’t quite know why.’ They’re just kind of there. I think that if Brooks were really a student of musicals or had affection for the genre, he would have known the structure of how these things work, but I don’t think he did. I will say it’s the kind of flawed movie that could only be made by really talented, genius-level people. They’re not hacks – it’s not that kind of a mess. It’s the kind of thing that only really smart and ambitious people could try to pull off, and they just got it wrong.”

In 1994, Brooks said he would be interested in eventually releasing the music from the film in some form, and potentially on Broadway. Danny DeVito was also interested in featuring some of the “musical cut” in a documentary about the making of the film – neither has come to pass. In fact, there’s been zero movement on getting Brooks’s original vision out there. Ruggeri suggests that it’s because the released I’ll Do Anything sparked few ripples outside of the filmmaking community. This may have been down to its interest in very niche particulars about Hollywood – casting directors, test screenings, the women who work in script development (“D-girls”, as they’re belittlingly known). Ultimately, beyond industry insiders, nobody cared enough.

“I don’t know who, in regular mainstream America, is gonna relate to any of that,” Ruggeri says. “I think that’s why the movie was never a Showgirls or a Gigli – it was never a huge bomb that later became a cult classic or found an audience that embraced it after the fact. It seems to only loom large in the minds of people who work in the film industry. If you’re a film producer or an executive, it remains almost a cautionary tale.”

He wishes it wasn’t kept under wraps, though. “I went through four years of film school without ever having seen a rough cut or a workprint of a real movie,” he says. “And I think it’s really fascinating to see people on the level of Brooks fail. It’s empowering in a way to look at something like that and see them really go for it yet come up short. As an educational experience, or just as someone who’s fascinated by filmmaking in general, I think it would be really valuable to have it out there.”

While his estate swung into action to stop August’s live stream, Prince may be the key to I’ll Do Anything‘s musical cut being released. Since his death, whole albums of tracks have been unearthed from the star’s vault, and there may be some interest in exhuming what was, at one point in time, the closest we’d ever get to a Prince-sanctioned musical outside of Purple Rain. Sure, his material is being sung by the vocal equivalent of a bag of screaming cats, but it’d be something at least.

Independent, 09/02/2020