Ezra Edelman, Oscar- and Emmy-winning director of the docuseries O.J.: Made In America, directed a nine-hour Prince documentary for Netflix that will seemingly never come out. Last year, after reports emerged that the doc contains some unflattering allegations about Prince — physical altercations with a girlfriend, antisemitic lyrics, asking Wendy Melvoin to renounce her homosexuality — multiple companies managing Prince's estate took legal action against Netflix. Last month Netflix announced that it had mutually agreed with the estate to shelve the documentary and let Prince's people make their own. Now Edelman is on the warpath.
The director was a guest on the podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out today, and he did not mince words about the "short-sightedness" of Netflix and Prince's estate. "It's a joke," Edelman told Torre. "This is the thing I just find galling. Like, I can't get past this — like, the short-sightedness of a group of people whose interest is their own bottom line. They're afraid of his humanity." Edelman said when Prince's team was supposed to be checking the film for historical accuracy, they instead returned a long list of requested editorial changes. "You think I have any interest in putting out a film that is factually inaccurate?" he said, while noting that the estate's actions here are an extension of the late Prince's own control-freak tendencies.
Edelman argued that his film is not in any way a hit piece: "This is a gift — a nine-hour treatment about an artist that was, by the way, fucking brilliant. Everything about who you believe he is is in this movie. You get to bathe in his genius." However, Edelman said that as a work of journalism, his movie does not back down from the darker sides of Prince's legacy: "People had issues with how he treated people — he was emotionally abusive, he was physically abusive."
It sucks that instead of this complex portrait of Prince, we're going to get some more image-controlled sanitized crap. Watch two clips from the interview below, along with the full episode.
"There's multiple people who told me that, based on Prince's brain, he basically almost felt that he was being punished for his sins. People had issues with how he treated people — he was emotionally abusive, he was physically abusive."Director Ezra Edelman explains the complex… pic.twitter.com/6ypTAX1AL1
— Pablo Torre Finds Out (@pablofindsout) March 4, 2025
