A Mac in Graffiti Bridge

There’s a Macintosh in Prince’s 1990 Graffiti Bridge movie.
It can be seen twice: at the beginning, during the first scene, and again at the end, during the end titles.

In both instances it is being used by Prince to write and/or edit music. Prince, or rather “The Kid”, the character he plays, keeps the computer in his living quarters located just under the stage of the “Glam Slam”, the club of he is the (fictional) owner in Graffiti Bridge.

Although the Mac is always shown in mid-darkness and the camera closes up only on the screen (more on that later) but it’s clearly a compact Macintosh and considering when Graffiti Bridge was released, in November 1990, the list of possible models is pretty much easy to narrow.

We can immediately cross out the Mac Classic because it was introduced in October of 1990, just one before the movie showed up in theaters. Another model we can exclude is the original Mac, released in 1984, which was too old and frankly too underpowered for serious musical use. The same is probably true for the “Fat Mac”, from 1985 which just had more RAM memory.

This leaves us with very few choices. Three actually: a Plus, a SE, or a SE/30.

Even though the image isn’t very clear one thing is discernible: the floppy slot is in the lower part of the case. It cannot be a Plus because this model had the floppy drive positioned midway between the bottom and the screen. On the contrary, the SE case had a wide space between the drive and the screen where the designers put horizontal groove lines.

It is very likely that we are looking at a SE which was released in March 1987 or a SE/30 which shares the same case but was released in January 1989. It also has just one floppy drive and is sitting atop an external hard drive.

Now that we’ve identified the hardware let’s see the software part.

We can clearly see Prince is working (or pretending to) on his song “Can’t Stop This Feeling I’ve Got”.

Unfortunately at the time the Mac’s OS, called the System, didn’t show the name of the program, just its icon in the right upper corner.
The problem was solved thanks to expert Paolo Tramannoni who identified the software in a split second: Prince is using the MIDI sequencer Performer from Mark of the Unicorn (MOTU).
It is very likely the MIDI-only version, before it gained digital audio capabilities and was renamed Digital Performer.