A STRETCH OF PURPLE

Ready for the new Prince film?

Cineplex Odeon Films opens “Sign ‘O’ the Times” (name of his recent double album) Nov. 20. It’s being promoted as a “concert” movie (Prince also directed) culled from his shows in Antwerp and Rotterdam. But we learned that dramatic vignettes “connected” to the songs figure prominently.

In fact, what we were told by a source is there simply wasn’t enough good musical footage for a feature--so that Prince had to come up with a story to fill out a feature length.

Prince’s spokeswoman downplayed the dramatic segs: “The show is very theatrical and there are about half a dozen dramatic vignettes. But that hardly constitutes a storyline. We don’t want the public to think they’re going to see a drama because they’ll be disappointed. The picture’s the concert and that’s dramatic enough.”

So the vignettes are part of the performance footage?

No, they were done at Prince’s studio in Minnesota. The spokeswoman said this material constitutes between 10-15% of the movie, but declined to give us more specifics since she’s only seen the completed film once.