Matthew Belloni
Appearances
Today, Explained
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I'm Noelle King with Matt Bellany. He's a founding partner of Puck and he's host of the Town podcast about Hollywood. Matt is the proud inventor of the term participation doc, which is a type of movie that, like it or not, is ascendant.
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When they told him, you need to make these changes, did they say why?
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And so where we are today is this documentary is in limbo. It exists, but we can't see it. Yes. Ezra Edelman is a very respected filmmaker. He won an Academy Award for O.J. Made in America. It was a great movie. Everyone said it was a great movie. He's known for doing exhaustive research, not just for being a great filmmaker, but for being a fairly serious person. Do you think he did his job?
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What is your understanding of what would need to happen for us to see this movie? If Ezra Edelman were to say, okay, I'm going to take three hours out, it'll be the length that we said it was going to be. Would this be on Netflix next week, next month?
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It does make you wonder if Prince's estate has the ability to do this. And there are so many documentaries being made that are just, let's show you the good side. It makes you wonder if documentary has much of a chance.
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Sasha Weiss of New York Times Magazine. Today's show was produced by Zach Mack. Nothing compares to him. Miles Bryan assisted. Lissa Soep edited. Patrick Boyd and Rob Byers engineered. And Laura Bullard fact-checked. You can see that Prince performance Sasha talked about by going to today's show notes. Truly, this man had no equal. It's Friday. Have a smoke and enjoy it.
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The rest of the team includes Halima Shah, Avishai Artsy, Hadi Mawagdi, Amanda Llewellyn, Victoria Chamberlain, Peter Balanon-Rosen, Andrea Christen's daughter, and my co-host, Sean Ramosfer. Our supervising editors are Amina El-Sadi and Matthew Collette. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. We use music sometimes by Breakmaster Cylinder.
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Today Explained is distributed by WNYC and the show is a part of Vox. You can support our journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to vox.com slash members to sign up. Don't forget to rate and review us. Do it when you're in a good mood. Do it after you watch that Prince video. If you missed an episode this week, that's okay. Our archives are free and open to the public.
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It's Today explained Martha Stewart is out publicizing her new Netflix documentary in the most hilarious way.
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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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For a long time, I think people have assumed that documentaries are not participation docs, that some filmmaker who wants to approach a subject as, you know, a real person with flaws and also gifts is going to do an honest take about them. Is that how it used to work? Like, how much of a shift is this?
Today, Explained
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Hey, Matt, if I am watching a celebrity doc and I want to know whether it's a participation doc or not, other than looking at whether or not the celebrity was the producer, are there certain kinds of narratives that I'm looking for? Is there a certain type of interview or interviewee that I'm looking for? How do I know? Well,
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I care a lot about this because I'm a journalist, and if something isn't journalistic, I'm suspicious of it. Do audiences care, though?
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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?
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Before we let you go, tell me what you know about this mysterious Prince documentary that many people, including yourself, have been talking about.
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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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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.
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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.
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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?