Pablo Torre Finds Out
The Banned Prince Documentary: Director Ezra Edelman (Finally) Speaks
Tue, 04 Mar 2025
The best documentary filmmaker in America spent nearly five years of his life making a nine-hour masterpiece for Netflix. Which has now, officially, been cancelled. In his first sit-down interview about "The Book of Prince," director Ezra Edelman seeks catharsis — if not closure — in the battle for the truth and control over the life story of one of the biggest control freaks ever. Prince was a shape-shifter who lived and died as a mystery. So why won't his estate lift the veil? And when it comes to celebrities, what does "public interest" really mean? Previously on PTFO: Pablo and Wesley Morris Watched the Prince Doc You're Not Allowed to See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Qi6x3QF-v8 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.
I'm like, this is a gift. A nine-hour treatment about an artist that, like, was, by the way, f***ing brilliant. Everything about who you believe he is is in this movie. You get to bathe in his genius. Yeah. And yet you also have to confront his humanity. Right after this ad.
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Are we starting now? Of course. Of course. We're in it. And now maybe I need a shot at tequila.
Ezra Edelman, do you want to explain why you're here?
No. You can explain. Why am I here?
Yeah. Why am I here?
Well, there's a Variety headline that I just want to read.
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Chapter 2: What happened to the Prince documentary?
This from February 6th, 2025. Oh, that's why I'm here, right. Yes. Yeah, fun.
So when Ezra and I sat down in our studio to record this episode, nobody had ever heard him talking about his controversial Prince Netflix documentary, as Variety put it, into a microphone. Which is also completely unsurprising to anybody who knows Ezra. Because the guy who won the best documentary Oscar for O.J. Made in America does not love talking in public in general.
His whole thing is letting his work, his reporting, and all of its tonnage speak for itself. And so the OJ doc made for ESPN was eight hours long, you may recall. It was so long, actually, and so unfairly good that it inspired the Academy Awards themselves to ban multi-part series from the Best Documentary Oscar category altogether.
And The Book of Prince, which Ezra made for Netflix, was going to be nine hours long. But this time, Ezra's work cannot speak for itself. Because there is, I am told, reliably, a 0.000 repeating percent chance that any of you out there will ever be allowed to watch it.
The image I've had in my head is the last shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Of just a huge warehouse somewhere in Netflix. A crate just like put away.
And yes, Hollywood is a graveyard of all sorts of passion projects, several of which, incidentally, we have loved chronicling here on PTFO in the past. But the story behind The Book of Prince does feel different to me. It feels different because Ezra, who turned 50 last year, devoted almost five years of his life to very quietly perfecting this film.
So then you're caught in a space of like, well, this is weird. I've been working really hard and there's something that's really good, but no one even knows it exists.
But then a story about this entire saga appeared on the cover of The New York Times magazine last September. And the writer, who had been following the production process for a year and a half behind the scenes, declared it a, quote, cursed masterpiece, end quote, citing the more than 70 interviews that Ezra had conducted.
And so a month after that, with that seal broken now, you may recall that Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Wesley Morris and I did an episode of this very show in which we described our own experiences seeing Ezra's movie at an early screening ourselves, long before the documentary became, you know, The Lost Ark.
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Chapter 3: Why was the documentary considered a 'cursed masterpiece'?
Look, there's a responsibility and obligation to me as a filmmaker, as a documentarian, to answer the question, well, how did that happen?
So is that the question that you set out to craft this map to answer?
I was trying to answer a question of someone who, he is an artist that has really helped people grow. go through the world feeling seen themselves. Yes. His androgyny and his sort of being able to tap into his female side, his racial sort of ambiguity at times, and his message that sort of comes from being, let's just say, open to all things.
By nature of him being 5'2", he's like, he looks like the underdog. And he is this sort of like pixie fairy purple genius. But like the guy never stopped working and really worked in service of the fans. So he lived as a mystery and he died as a mystery. But like the guy, he was a shapeshifter. And so he morphed, he changed lives.
And so the guy who became a Jehovah's Witness in, you know, the early aughts and, you know, all of a sudden was like under the... Guidance of Larry Graham. That's a different dude than the dude who did the dirty mind album in 1980 and was singing about you know That's also part of his evolution and so in a lot of ways because there's so many eras I think there's a lot of people
who loved different parts of Prince. But I was really interested in trying to find a through line for that person who evolved through all these styles, why he did, what was going on underneath, and trying to sort of find a roadmap and trying to shed light on who this person was.
Once you realize the degree of difficulty here, I want to get to your decision then to not just roll up your sleeves, but but to spend almost five years digging.
It's just more like, no one knows who this dude was. I'm gonna try to figure it out. I'm not professing to know everything that happened with this person. It's the best I could do. This isn't, by the way, like R. Kelly. And like, it's like, we already know what he's guilty of. And you're just like exposing sort of really horrid truths and that people need to know because this guy's got to go down.
This isn't that. But people sort of were defensive in terms of like as if he were that. The relationship to how much people love Prince is And it's like so who wants this? Like who wants sort of a microscopic sort of accounting of someone's life when some of it is going to be a little scummy at times? But the whole point of it is the journey.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Ezra Edelman face during production?
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Can I read something to you? I was wondering why your phone is out.
Jill Jones, who was a Prince protege, a muse, who spent essentially the 80s with him and was someone who was a girlfriend of Prince's, was in the film and to me one of the most truthful voices in the film and was someone who discussed in detail an instance where she was abused by Prince physically.
And by the way, that's not the totality of the story of her with Prince, but like you still see how much she loves him, even though she went through an experience with him.
That was hard, like a decade of her life wanting more, wanting to be an artist that was got to do her own album, wanting to be his exclusive girlfriend or the girlfriend when she always was sort of like, not that it was almost someone again, when you talk about. what it means to be a kept woman or she even, you know, she refers to him as like a pimp in the movie.
And like, by the way, this is one side, but this is what she wrote after the news came out about the film being canceled. Prince was a man who lived under the weight of expectation, both his own and those of the world that adored him. He built a persona so larger than life that it became a prison, a gilded cage, one he could never fully step out of.
Prince's struggle with drug addiction was deeply intertwined with his relentless pursuit of perfection, an impossible standard he imposed on himself to satisfy a fan base that craved his mystique, his eccentricity, and his ever-evolving artistry. At his core, he was a consummate people pleaser, trapped in the expectation to remain an enigma, always surprising, always beyond reach.
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Chapter 5: How did Prince's personal life influence his music?
But when someone tells me about a harrowing incident that she experienced, here are my two choices. Oh, why did this happen? Was this something consistent within this man's behavior? Can I contextualize what that meant to him in his head? Where did this come from? Or I can just be like, oh, they're not going to like that. That might change people's image of Prince, so I better not put that in.
Those are my choices. And then I am committing documentary malpractice.
I should point out that the Variety story does have a quote from Netflix, which says that the Prince estate and Netflix have come to a mutual agreement that will allow the estate to develop and produce a new documentary featuring exclusive content from Prince's archive. As a result, the Netflix documentary will not be released.
I read something, there was some article that had, I think it was the Times London, and said, like, some fans are happy with the decision because they believe that this film would have been an invasion of his privacy, right? And I'm like, okay, and? Of course it's an invasion of his privacy. I don't know what to do with that argument. That's not an argument.
But isn't that the fundamental disconnect when it comes to- He's a public figure.
But what that means, right? What it means- He's a public figure. I don't understand. He's an historical and historically important subject. He's one of the great artists of the last hundred years. We need to understand who these people are, how they made their art, what drove them, how they lived, how they died. It's part of how we go through the world and improve as humans.
It's like, what are we talking about here?
And then there are our favorite musicians, the people who bring us comfort because they're in the toy department of music or sports, as opposed to what legislation did Prince pass?
Woody Allen, Picasso, Michael Jackson, all of these people. R. Kelly, I think it's up to everyone's personal code about how they choose to be affected by the understanding of who that person was and their ability to still revel in and enjoy said person's art. For me, and I'm just, I'm not even gonna go deep with this, but I think it would be a little weird if when you know what R. Kelly was doing,
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