Sasha Weiss
speaker
220 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 3 May
Sasha Weiss’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 May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
and take it all in and allow ourselves to pity him sometimes, allow ourselves to adore him and worship him, and allow ourselves to criticize him and to sit with the wild brew of who Prince was. And also to make the argument that knowing this enriches our understanding of the art he made. It deepens our understanding of the art he made.
It deepens our love of it because we know where it comes from or we know something about where it comes from and how he transforms the raw material of his selfhood into something transcendent.
So, as part of the original agreement that Netflix struck with the Prince estate for access to the vault, the estate was going to have an opportunity to review the film for factual accuracy.
Ezra Edelman welcomed this. He's a journalist. Nobody wants to get anything wrong. Nobody wants to get anything wrong. You can review the film for factual error. Now, in the years that Ezra spent working on the film, there were these ongoing complicated legal battles over Prince's estate, in part because Prince left no will. So the estate changed hands.
It changes from being overseen by a bank and courts in Minnesota to now being overseen by a lawyer who used to work for Prince in the 90s, members of his family, and a music company. And the new people in charge watch the film. And they submit this list that's 17 pages long with all kinds of quibbles and queries and objections. almost none of which have to do with facts.
They have to do with things about Prince that they don't want included in this documentary. And Edelman, you know, makes a few changes to try to kind of compromise with them, but he's not going to change, for instance, one of Prince's collaborators talking about how when he became devout and extremely religious, he asked her to renounce her homosexuality before he would collaborate with her again.
He's not going to take out an assessment of his album, The Rainbow Children, which was kind of widely shared at the time that there were anti-Semitic lyrics. He's not going to take out elements of the story that are sad or unfortunate or portray Prince in a negative light because they're part of the story and they're part of the arc.
And he's not going to allow extra journalistic facts to determine the shape of his film. So this back and forth continues for many months, and the estate manages to hold up the film on questions of length. They claim that they had agreed to license music for a six-hour film and no more. And this was no simple thing.
Like, to cut this film by three hours would be... Like, the metaphor that I keep thinking of is like... unknotting a hand-woven Persian carpet. Extremely difficult to disassemble. It would be like starting all over. But also, it wasn't ever clear that this would satisfy the estate anyway, because they had made their strong objections to the project very clear.
So the project seemed to be at an impasse. And ultimately, last month, Netflix comes out with the following statement. The Prince estate and Netflix have come to a mutual agreement that will allow the estate to develop and produce a new documentary featuring exclusive content from Prince's archive. Translation, Ezra Edelman's film is dead. He's cut out. It's thrown away.
And if there's ever going to be a film, it's going to be a film made by the estate.
Well, all of the parties have been tight-lipped about the situation for contractual reasons, but that's my sense of it. Yeah. So the day after this news came out, I was able to talk to Ezra. Well, it's kind of a grim day.
And he was devastated.
And, you know, we were talking a little bit about the state's rationale or what we perceive as the state's rationale. And he thinks it's absurd.
The lawyer for the estate said to Ezra at one point in this process, he fears the film will do generational harm to Prince.
Yes. I think the fear is, in a cross way, this will get Prince canceled.
He was a jerk. He was a difficult boss. You know, he was mean. Right? That it would demystify this icon. You know, fundamentally, they're concerned about their bottom line.
But I think, you know, Ezra sees it the opposite way.
She thinks that a complex, meaningful engagement with Prince just deepens our relationship with him and kind of revives his legacy. And, I mean, I totally agree. Like, Prince is present, but it's not like he's a vital figure in the culture right now. And I bet anything that if this film had come out, there would have been a whole huge...
discourse around Prince and a complex one and an interesting one. And I think it would have brought him again to the fore of the cultural conversation. And I mean, when Ezra did show a very small group of people an early cut of the film as he was working on it, he saw that kind of reaction.
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