Movie Star is the eighth track on the first disc of Prince's 20th album Crystal Ball (his fourth using the name ). The album is not clearly divided between Prince tracks and tracks, and the liner notes' discussion of this track does not use either name, but the recording date places it clearly as a "Prince" track, so it is listed as such here. The Crystal Ball liner notes state that the song was chosen for inclusion because it was "D'Angelo's favorite bootleg".
Basic tracking took place on 27 March 1986 at Prince's Galpin Blvd Home Studio in Chanhassen, Minnesota (two days after Love And Sex, on the same day as A Place In Heaven and Witness 4 The Prosecution). Although this track was not included on a late April 1986 configuration of the Dream Factory album, it was included as the seventeenth track (fifteenth song) on the 3 June 1986 configuration (segueing directly into A Place In Heaven, which includes the final line of dialogue from Movie Star in its opening bars) and as the seventeenth track (sixteenth song) on the 18 July 1986 configuration (with a complete ending). It was dropped, however, when the project evolved into the Crystal Ball triple LP (completely separate from the 1998 release of the same name). The Crystal Ball liner notes state that the song was written for The Time, although the band was no longer together at the time Prince recorded the track, and it is unknown if the song was considered for the band when Prince and Morris Day began work on the Corporate World album in 1989. The version released on Crystal Ball contains an opening which samples Jam Of The Year in the background of a party scene.
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