Director of Prince Doc Blasts Singer’s Estate, Netflix Over Cancellation of Movie: ‘They’re Afraid of His Humanity’

Director Ezra Edelman spent nearly five years meticulously piecing together his sprawling, nine-hour documentary about Prince. In an appearance this week on the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast, the Oscar-winning director of O.J.: Made in America called the decision by Netflix and the Prince estate to pull the plug on the film a “joke.”

“The estate, here’s the one thing they were allowed to do: Check the film for factual inaccuracies. Guess what? They came back with a 17-page document full of editorial issues — not factual issues,” Edelman said. “You think I have any interest in putting out a film that is factually inaccurate?”

The Yale-educated director known for his deep-dive process, spent years developing and meticulously editing his six-part The Book of Prince doc for Netflix — after being hand-picked for the project by former Netflix VP of independent film and documentary features Lisa Nishimura — only to have the Prince estate object to the way the late singer was depicted in the film; the estate announced last month that the project would never be released and that it was working on its own documentary featuring “exclusive content” from the archive of the singer who died of an accidental fentanyl overdose in April 2016 at age 57.

“This is reflective of Prince himself, who was notoriously one of the most famous control freaks in the history of artists,” said Edelman of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame icon known for fiercely protecting his name, image and likeness. “The irony being that Prince was somebody who fought for artistic freedom, who didn’t want to be held down by Warner Bros., who he believed was stifling his output. And now, in this case — by the way, I’m not Prince, but I worked really hard making something, and now my art’s being stifled and thrown away.”

Before the public saw even a frame of the film, it was in the headlines last September when a New York Times magazine profile described elements of the project that touched on Prince’s alleged physical and emotional abuse of his partners, as well as allegations that the singer had suffered abuse as a child. At the time, the two companies that control Prince’s assets, Primary Wave Music and Prince Legacy, said that they were “working to resolve matters concerning the documentary so that his story may be told in a way that is factually correct and does not mischaracterize or sensationalize his life.”

Following the shelving of the film, Edelman said that he believes Netflix is “afraid of [Prince’s] humanity.” Torres, who has seen the movie, said he came away with the takeaway that “this is one of the most impressive artists that has ever lived.”

That sentiment appeared to confirm Edelman’s feelings about the project. “This is the thing that I just find galling. I mean, I can’t get past this — the short-sightedness of a group of people whose interest is their own bottom line,” Edelman said.

“The lawyer who runs the estate essentially said he believed that this would do generational harm to Prince. In essence, that the portrayal of Prince in this film — what people learn about him — would deter younger viewers and fans, potentially, from loving Prince,” the director added. “They would be turned off. This is, I think, the big issue here: I’m like, ‘This is a gift — a nine-hour treatment about an artist that was, by the way, f–king brilliant.’ Everything about who you believe he is is in this movie. You get to bathe in his genius. And yet you also have to confront his humanity, which he, by the way, in some ways, was trapped in not being able to expose because he got trapped in his own myth about who he was to the world, and he had to maintain it.”

Though neither Netflix nor the Prince estate have detailed what specific issues they have with the doc, among the controversial allegations reportedly featured in the project are claims from one of the singer’s former lovers, Jill Jones, who allegedly describes a night when Prince slapped and punched her in the face. Another former paramour, Susannah Melvoin — musician and twin sister of Prince and the Revolution guitarist/singer Wendy Melvoin — reportedly told the director that after she moved in with Prince he would not let her leave the house, monitored her phone calls and tried to keep her from seeing her sister. It also reportedly featured accounts of Prince asking Wendy Melvoin to renounce her homosexuality as a prerequisite for getting the Revolution back together.

“The whole point of it is the journey. And the whole point of it was actually reflecting a journey that he went through,” Edelman told Torres. “Prince’s whole thing was that he was a Gemini and so this sort of push-and-pull of who he was in all these facets, male/female, black/white, artist/businessman, it goes on and on. In terms of this binary in his head was this idea of good and evil, which, sorry, God and sex, and that was another basic dichotomy of his art. He was always sort of weighing his moral account of how he was going through the world and he believed in karma in terms of how he treated people.”

The movie also reportedly features an interview with Prince’s ex-wife, Mayte Garcia, in which she alleges that he left her alone after the couple’s son died six days after his birth due to a rare genetic disorder. At press time it did not appear that Netflix or the Prince Estate had responded to Edelman’s interview; at press time a spokesperson for Prince had not returned Billboard‘s request for comment.

“The image I’ve had in my head is the last show of Raiders of the Lost Ark, of just a huge warehouse somewhere in Netflix. A crate and just like put away,” Edelman said, noting that viewers will never see his work because he doesn’t “feel like getting sued.”

Watch Edelman discuss the doc’s cancellation below.

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