Prince is the subject of a new film from one of the greatest living documentarians, but it might never come out and almost no one’s seen it. We talk to someone who did: editor and writer Sasha Weiss. Meanwhile, the rise in pop star docs can be a good hang for fans, but when a film is a glorified press release, we miss out on a lot, says journalist Matthew Belloni. This episode was produced by Zachary Mack and Miles Bryan, edited by Lissa Soep, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Rob Byers and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Prince performs during Super Bowl XLI in 2007. Photo by Theo Wargo/WireImage. Check out his guitair solo during a performance of "While My Guitar Genty Weeps" at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2004: Director's Cut: "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" - Prince, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne & Dhani Harrison - YouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the documentary about Martha Stewart?
It's Today explained Martha Stewart is out publicizing her new Netflix documentary in the most hilarious way.
Are you happy with the documentary and how it turned out? Yeah, the documentary is fine. It left out a lot, so I'm going to go talk to them about maybe doing version two.
By telling Jimmy Fallon, among others, that she low-key hates it.
I don't like going to psychiatrists and talking about your feelings and all of that stuff. And the director was so intense on delving into it.
Powerful people like to control their images, and more and more often, celebrity documentaries allow them to do that. The Martha Doc didn't, and neither did a new and very mysterious documentary about Prince that, for reasons we're going to explain, you may never get to see. That's coming up.
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Hey there, this is Peter Kafka. I'm the host of Channels, the show about what happens when tech and media collide. And this week, we're talking to Adam Mosseri, who runs Instagram and who also runs Threads. And he told me what Threads was originally going to be called.
I called it Textagram as a joke, which unfortunately stuck as a name for months before I managed to kill it. Textagram, great name. You're making me regret telling you this.
That's this week on Channels, wherever you listen to your favorite podcast.
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Chapter 2: What are participation docs?
And often those documentaries are simply vehicles for image brandishment by the subject. Name your pop star. They've got a documentary on streaming that A, they've been paid a lot of money to participate in. B, they have a producing credit on the film. And C, they have... significant input into the outcome of that project.
So there's not going to be anything in there that is going to tell you something the artist doesn't want you to know. The Beckham docuseries, which was very popular and actually is one of the better done examples of the genre, in my opinion,
We're very working class. Be honest. I am being honest. Be honest. I am being honest. What car did your dad drive you to school in?
That was a full participation, doc.
It's not a simple answer because.
What car did you get your dad to drive you to school in?
It depends. No, no, no, no, no. OK, in the 80s, my dad had a Rolls Royce. Thank you.
They had sign off. They got paid for it. They were very much involved in the final product. And I'm not passing judgment. I get why the filmmakers do this because you want access. It's a tenant of journalism. If you want access to people, you need to give up certain freedoms in the documentary space often. That freedom is the freedom to tell the story the way you want it to be told.
Often, it has to be told the way the subject wants it to be told. Now, there's a nuance here that often big-name filmmakers, and I've debated this subject with some pretty big documentary filmmakers, who say that what they don't give up is final cut. And sometimes these filmmakers will negotiate that they get final cut. The star and the producer, they can have input.
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Chapter 3: How has the documentary genre changed over time?
So the reason why these tend to proliferate is because people like them. They just are looking to hang out with their favorite stars a little bit.
And we know why these would appeal to celebrities, right? They make a lot of money and it's a chance to kind of burnish their image. So they tell us about celebrity. Do these documentaries tell us anything about the state of the entertainment industry?
I think that the overall narrative on these documentaries is just the fact that stars these days don't need the media.
Hmm. Hmm.
They have really controlled their own narrative. You don't need a big magazine or a big documentary to turn over control to someone to tell your story. You can tell your own story and you can commission your own documentary and have an input in that. Sometimes, if you're a big enough star, if you're a sports star or if you are a big music star, you can do multiple documentaries.
You can do one for each tour. You can ladle out different levels of access for different prices. It's a whole economy of marketing yourself via documentary. I was watching the Steph Curry documentary at Sundance a couple years ago.
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Chapter 4: What makes a documentary a 'participation doc'?
You don't do anything in this life by yourself, and you know, like, the confidence of the group is your superpower, and those four guys unlocked that for me.
And I couldn't believe that this was being presented as a Sundance documentary, because it was so clearly, you know, staged and scripted. I mean, he went back to his hometown, and he was hanging out watching March Madness with his friends from Davidson. I've never asked you this.
What was your thought when Love Dove got the rebound? It was freaking like a song started playing.
And they were presenting this as if it happened all the time. And I'm like, Steph Curry doesn't hang out with his friends from Davidson. It felt a little bit like a fraud to me. Now, I was sitting next to my podcast producer, Craig, who is the world's biggest Steph Curry fan, and he loved it. He loved seeing Steph Curry hang out with his buddies and go back and walk around Davidson.
So for the fans, they don't really care. They just click on the tile and want to spend some time with their celebrity friends.
Before we let you go, tell me what you know about this mysterious Prince documentary that many people, including yourself, have been talking about.
Yeah, the Prince documentary is a perfect example of the perils of doing a participatory documentary and trying to turn it into a journalistic enterprise. The people running the estate don't like the finished product, and they have essentially been holding up the release.
Matt Bellany, host of The Town. Coming up, the Prince documentary. I haven't seen it. You haven't seen it. But we've got someone who has, and she says it's immersing. Support for Today Explained comes from Koala. There are lots of awesome things, says Koala, that have come out of Australia. On the beach, the book, not the movie, Joel Edgerton, Wake in Fright. Who wrote this?
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Chapter 5: Why do celebrities prefer participatory documentaries?
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Today, today explained. Today explained.
Filmmaker Ezra Edelman won every award in creation for O.J. Made in America. It was a movie about O.J. Simpson and also somehow about everything else.
The story of O.J. always was a story about the city of Los Angeles and about the Black community here and the Los Angeles Police Department. And so for me, the interest in doing a film about O.J. was connected to those interests.
A few years later, Edelman got access to Prince's archives, which are controlled by the artist's estate. And the deal was he would make a six-hour film for Netflix. But he didn't. The movie is nine hours, and people who've seen it say it's incredible. Most of us can't see it, though, because the estate said Edelman had violated the terms of their deal, and they've stopped the release.
Sasha Weiss, a deputy editor at New York Times Magazine, is one of a handful of people who have seen this movie. Sasha, welcome. What was your favorite part?
There's a great scene. It was on the night when Prince was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004, and a bunch of great musicians got together to play While My Guitar Gently Weaves. And Prince does this absolutely heartbreaking, virtuosic, incredible guitar solo. He's wearing a black suit, a red bowler hat. He looks beautiful and elegant.
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Chapter 6: What is the controversy surrounding the Prince documentary?
When Prince died, he had no will, which is one of the vexing mysteries of Prince. Why did he not leave a will when he seemed to care so deeply about his musical legacy? So there was a lot of fighting and then, you know, a lot of legal fights. And then for a time, the estate was in the hands of this bank called Comerica Bank. And that was when the deal was struck with Netflix.
Chapter 7: How do audiences perceive celebrity documentaries?
for, according to my reporting, tens of millions of dollars, Netflix gained exclusive access to Prince's vault, which is his archive, which lived in Paisley Park. All of his master recordings, recordings of music rehearsals, notes, and some diaries, and some photographs, and all of the archival material
When Edelman came onto the project in 2019, his understanding was that he and Netflix would have final cut and that they'd have exclusive access to the vault and that the estate had the right to review the film for factual accuracy, which Edelman welcomed because he's a very thorough journalist. And he said, you know, great. I want it to be right.
So that was the that was the deal that he understood he was entering into. What happened next? Prince's estate changed hands in the middle of the process of Ezra Edelman making this film. So when Netflix originally struck the deal with Prince's estate, there was one set of people who were in charge.
By the time the film started to come undone, there was a new group of people in charge, and they objected to the film that was made. So that was one thing. Another thing was that the Netflix executive, whose name was Lisa Nishimura, who signed on the project, negotiated the original deal, brought on Edelman as the filmmaker, was laid off toward the end of the process of making the film.
So the film lost its most powerful internal champion at Netflix, its best negotiator with the estate, the person who had the most clout to potentially bring about some better understanding and negotiation. In the summer of 2023, a full cut of the film was shown to the estate for factual review, and they responded with a 17-page memo demanding all kinds of changes. And these were not fact changes.
These were, for the most part, editorial changes. So to give a few examples, they demanded, for instance, that Edelman and his team reshoot Paisley Park because they didn't like the way that it looked in the film. There's a scene that talks about Prince's death in an elevator in Paisley Park, and one of his bandmates points out that the song Let's Go Crazy that has a lyric about an elevator...
And his bandmate is suggesting that it kind of presaged his death, that maybe in some bizarre way Prince, you know, kind of orchestrated it that way. They demanded that they remove the song from that scene in the movie. Another example, Wendy Melvoin, who is a very important singer.
bandmate of Prince's in the revolution, a really huge collaborator of his, talks about Prince calling her up when he became very religious and asking her to renounce her homosexuality. They asked that Edelman take out one of his former manager's assessments that the Rainbow Children, his 2001 album, contained anti-Semitic lyrics. So, you know, things that were Damning. Negative.
They asked him to take out. And Edelman was adamant that he wouldn't take out.
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