Ezra Edelman
speaker
564 appearances
5 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 9 Apr
Ezra Edelman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And I think that's a lot of the story of Prince, you know? And I would say that the film most of all is interested in this really complex psychology and kind of holding all the contradictions at once. What does it take to be this kind of musical genius? What does it take from the soul of the person who is the musical genius?
And what does it take from the people around him who are supporting him, who are working with him? I think those are some of the questions that Edelman was interested in. What was the agreement between Prince's estate and Edelman? The original agreement, which was struck in 2018, was between Netflix and Prince's estate.
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.
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.
You know, my read on that is that they felt that it would turn people away from Prince, that it would ruin Prince's reputation, that it would besmirch people's image of Prince as a kind of secular saint.
Absolutely. I think the film is really fair-minded. One of the complexities of the film that Edelman really engages carefully and painstakingly is about Prince's relationship with women. I think a lot of us think of Prince as... a promoter of women.
He had amazing female collaborators throughout his whole career, kind of bolster of women, and someone who embodied himself a complex sexuality and embraced his own femininity in really kind of flamboyant and beautiful ways that I think open pathways for lots of people who loved him.
So, you know, I think Prince as a kind of almost like a non-binary person before the culture totally had that language, you know, he was a path breaker. He was a path carver. But it was also true, according to the testimony of tens of women that Edelman and his team interviewed, that Prince could be abusive and that Prince could be exceedingly controlling, that Prince could be demeaning.
And even as Edelman presents this, and he has a really, really upsetting interview with Jill Jones, who was a longtime collaborator and a sometime girlfriend, who talks about a moment when he hit her in the face and really beat her up. And it's a terrible story. And she talks about what a blow it was to her ego and her sense of self for many, many years to be involved with Prince.
And it's harrowing. It's really upsetting. But he also includes testimony from a lot of other women who have a really different relationship to their time in Prince's orbit.
You know, some of his collaborators felt really bolstered by him, felt like he helped them find an identity, felt like being kind of molded and chosen and brought into his orbit as young women really shaped their lives in really amazing ways. As a viewer, you know, you're sort of sitting and stewing in these contradictions. And we also are asked to hold all of that and sort all of that.
So it's a very textured, multi-layered, poly-vocal story. account of his relationship with women.
Showing 541–560 of 564 · page 28 of 29
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