Pablo Torre

This from February 6th, 2025.

Oh, that's why I'm here.

Right.

Yes.

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.

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.

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.