The Banned Prince Documentary: Director Ezra Edelman (Finally) Speaks
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What is the main topic of this episode?
Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. I'm like, this is a gift. A nine-hour treatment about an artist that, like, was, by the way, f***ing brilliant. Everything about who you believe he is is in this movie. You get to bathe in his genius. Yeah. And yet you also have to confront his humanity. Right after this ad.
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Are we starting now? Of course. Of course. We're in it. And now maybe I need a shot at tequila. Ezra Edelman, do you want to explain why you're here?
No. You can explain. Why am I here?
Yeah. Why am I here?
Well, there's a Variety headline that I just want to read.
That's why I'm here? Quote, Controversial Prince Netflix documentary will not be released. Estate is free to create new project.
What happened to the Prince documentary?
This from February 6th, 2025. Oh, that's why I'm here, right. Yes. Yeah, fun.
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. The image I've had in my head is the last shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Of just a huge warehouse somewhere in Netflix. A crate just like put away. 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.
So then you're caught in a space of like, well, this is weird. I've been working really hard and there's something that's really good, but no one even knows it exists. 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.
And if you just wanna know what's in the movie, I do recommend that you go watch that episode that Wesley and I did. But if you're like most other people in Ezra's life, here's just a fair warning, you're probably gonna have the same cursed reaction. Nor did the best documentarian in America feel like opening up about any of this across from me, in front of a microphone, in this studio. Until now. Like, what do you do with the experience of putting everything of yourself into something? And there's this sort of like pattern of addiction that comes from like taking on something big, taking on something bigger, working really hard, seeing if you can figure it out. Then you get some sort of dopamine hit from the world, how they respond to it. So what do you do when you have all that, but it's five years? And it was the most painful thing and the most difficult thing.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic of this episode?
0:00–1:37
2
What happened to the Prince documentary?
1:37–10:09
3
Why was the documentary considered a 'cursed masterpiece'?
10:09–18:23
4
What challenges did Ezra Edelman face during production?
18:23–30:51
5
How did Prince's personal life influence his music?
30:51–44:30
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from Pablo Torre Finds Out
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