The Banned Prince Documentary: Director Ezra Edelman Speaks (PTFO Vault)

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Pablo Torre: Okay, so hello. It is me, Pablo, entering, invading even your ears because I have done something I have not done before. Which is, take the advice of someone who once told me that if people wish to support you financially, if they wish to support your journalism, your very strange future of journalism, meaning your newsroom, your ambitions, your desire to investigate things people don't want you to investigate, you should let them. And so I am. On Substack, my newsletter at www.pablo.show — we'll put a link in the show notes of this episode — I have turned on paid subscriptions. And if you didn't know I have a Substack, guess what, it's free and that's still there for you and it's worth it. But the paid subscribers who support this show and us will get legitimately cool personalized benefits to come. We will make it worth your while. pablo.show is where you sign up. Click the link in the show notes. Help support us, please. Thank you, thank you, thank you on that front.

Pablo Torre: And this, this episode today is a handpicked episode from deep inside the PTFO vault that we sincerely hope you enjoy. Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre. And today we're going to find out what this sound is.

[Sound clip plays]

Clip: I'm like this is a gift. A nine-hour treatment about an artist that like it was by the way brilliant. Everything about who you believe he is is in this movie. You get to bathe in his genius and yet you also have to confront his humanity.

[Sound clip ends]

Pablo Torre: Right after this ad.

[Ad break]

Pablo Torre: Are we starting?

Ezra Edelman: Of course, of course we're in it.

Pablo Torre: And now maybe I need a shot at the killer. Ezra Edelman, do you want to explain why you're here?

Ezra Edelman: No.

Pablo Torre: You can explain.

Ezra Edelman: I, I, I will. Why am I here?

Pablo Torre: Yeah. Why am I here?

Ezra Edelman: Well, there's a Variety headline that I just want to read.

Pablo Torre: Oh, that's why I'm here?

Ezra Edelman: Quote, "Controversial Prince Netflix documentary will not be released. Estate is free to create new project." This is from February 6th, 2025.

Pablo Torre: Oh, that's why I'm here.

Ezra Edelman: Right.

Pablo Torre: Yes.

Ezra Edelman: Yeah. Fun.

Pablo Torre: 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 O.J. 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.

Pablo Torre: 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 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.

Ezra Edelman: 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.

Pablo Torre: 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 want to know what's in the movie, I do recommend that you go watch that episode that Wesley and I did.

Pablo Torre: But if you're like most other people in Ezra's life, here's just a fair warning, you're probably going to have the same cursed reaction.

Ezra Edelman: Oh my god, this is like, when can I see this? Is this coming out? I'm like, motherf***er, like, this s*** isn't going away. And like, that was the life I've been living for the last six months, and I'm like, no, you can't see it. I don't feel like getting sued.

Pablo Torre: 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.

Ezra Edelman: Like what do you do with the experience of putting everything of yourself into something? And there's a sort of 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?

Pablo Torre: But you ultimately agreed to sit here across from me, your friend. And why? Why did you say yes in the end?

Ezra Edelman: It's somewhere between you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't. Having dealt with the mishigas that has come with the fighting to try to get the film out into the world. The way that the story has been framed in the world by certain people. And then ultimately now the finality of the news of, oh, the rights to this now are in the hands of the estate. But yes, maybe the whole saga has officially concluded and I lost. And this happens to be such a sort of extreme high profile episode in documentary filmmaking, yes, that I'm like, okay, okay, well let's just get this out because I am after some catharsis if not closure to move on. I'm like, dude, just get over yourself and get back to work, right?

Pablo Torre: You might have won a second Academy Award.

Ezra Edelman: No, I couldn't have. And no, I wouldn't have. And that was never the intention. I believe that this would have been worthy of — if you followed the news, you should know it's serialized, it's episodic — instead of the point being you made something worthy of to you. To me. I don't know.

Pablo Torre: Correct. Instead.

Ezra Edelman: Please don't make me tell you all the flaws that exist in the film because I can do that too. But instead what you got is the eighth stage of grief, which is podcasting.

Pablo Torre: Is that the eighth?

Ezra Edelman: I believe so.

Pablo Torre: Yeah, I think that's right.

Ezra Edelman: Correct. This is my reward. This is my consolation prize. Sydney Cross from you and your cardigan.

Pablo Torre: I think people need to be caught up on what the f*** you spent that time doing. Like, what does it take to make something that leaves you feeling like this?

Ezra Edelman: There was a pretty consistent immersion in this that really did take this long. I mean, it's a little bit sadomasochistic. Yeah, but there's a sense of like, I like challenges. And if someone calls you up and says, hey, what do you think about Prince? We have his entire vault that's never been accessed or seen. And then I'm like, I also know Prince is basically this mysterious figure. And I know that his story in some ways hasn't really ever been told. Here's the puzzle. And this is the puzzle solver that we're going to pay to do this.

Pablo Torre: There's a reason why Prince's stories have ever been told.

Ezra Edelman: Prince was not someone in life that was interested in sharing. And he cultivated an air of mystery and he did it in a pretty impressively consistent, domineering, and ironclad way. He famously, if not notoriously, lived a life that was sort of marked by pretty dramatic sort of severing of relationships and separations. And by the way, there have been plenty of books written about Prince, but none have really connected the dots of his life to really sort of go, how did we get from a teenage virtuoso genius who was the youngest artist signed by Warner Brothers and given complete creative control to a guy who died of a drug overdose in an elevator in Paisley Park? In essence, died in a box within a box that he built himself. Especially the guy who, in much of the public's consciousness, didn't do drugs.

[Sound clip plays]

Clip: The medical examiner's report says Prince died from fentanyl toxicity, that it was self-administered, and his death was an accident. Fentanyl is an opioid pain medication usually prescribed for chronic pain for patients who have grown tolerant to other pain medications. Doctors say it is 30 to 50 times more potent than heroin.

[Sound clip ends]

Ezra Edelman: Look, there is a responsibility and obligation to me as a filmmaker, as a documentarian, to answer the question, well, how did that happen?

Pablo Torre: So is that the question that you set out to craft this map to answer?

Ezra Edelman: I was trying to answer a question of someone who — he is an artist that has really helped people go through the world feeling seen themselves. Yes. His androgyny and his sort of being able to tap into his female side, his racial sort of ambiguity at times, and his message that sort of comes from being, let's just say, open to all things. By nature of him being 5'2", he looks like the underdog. And he is this sort of pixie fairy purple genius. But the guy never stopped working and really worked in service of the fans. So he lived it as a mystery and he died as a mystery. But the guy, he was a shapeshifter. He morphed, he changed lives. And so the guy who became a Jehovah's Witness in the early aughts and all of a sudden was under the guidance of Larry Graham, that's a different dude than the dude who did the Dirty Mind album in 1980 and was singing about you know head.

[Singing] Till your love is red. Hey, ooh baby. Love you till your day.

Ezra Edelman: That's also part of his evolution. And so in a lot of ways, because there's so many eras, I think there's a lot of people who love different parts of Prince. But I was really interested in trying to find a through line for that person who evolved through all these styles, why he did, what was going on underneath, and trying to sort of find a road map. And trying to shed light on who this person was.

Pablo Torre: Once you realize the degree of difficulty here, I want to get to your decision then to not just roll up your sleeves, but to spend almost five years digging.

Ezra Edelman: It's just more like, no one knows who this dude was. I'm going to try to f***ing figure it out. I'm not professing to know everything that happened with this person. It's the best I could do. This isn't by the way like R. Kelly where it's like we already know what he's guilty of and you're just exposing sort of really horrid truths that people need to know because this guy's got to go down. This isn't that. But people sort of were defensive in terms of as if he were that. The relationship to how much people love Prince. And it's like, so who wants this? Who wants sort of a microscopic accounting of someone's life when some of it is going to be a little scummy at times? But the whole point of it is the journey. And the whole point of it was actually reflecting a journey that he went through.

Ezra Edelman: Prince's whole thing was that he's a Gemini. And so this sort of push pull of who he was in all these facets — male, female, black, white, artist, businessman, it goes on and on. In terms of this binary, in his head was this idea of good and evil, which, sorry, God and sex. And that was another basic dichotomy of his art. And he's always sort of weighing his own moral account of how he was going through the world. And he believed in karma in terms of how he treated people. And I think one of the things that was fascinating is that Prince had a baby with his wife, Mayte Garcia. Mayte was pregnant. There was something wrong. She claims Prince declined medical intervention.

[Sound clip plays]

Clip: The faith that he had just, it just made me believe that everything was going to be okay.

[Sound clip ends]

Ezra Edelman: Who tragically was born with Pfeiffer syndrome. And they made the decision to take the baby off a respirator after eight days. 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 in very specific — I'll say for how it was reported, one instance. The point is, this all weighed on him. And so this sort of dramatic life event he thought partially he was responsible. But the way that certain people, maybe the estate, is characterizing sort of, oh, the film's bad or the film's this, it's negative. I'm like, there's a point.

Pablo Torre: Well, allow me to quote just for the record here what the estate said in that Variety article. Because the line from the article says that representatives for the late artist's estate previously claimed a first cut of the film was filled with, quote, "dramatic factual inaccuracies" and, quote, "sensationalized renderings of certain events from his life," according to sources close to the situation.

Ezra Edelman: I mean, whatever. Or it's a joke. I mean, the whole idea is like, wait, so the estate had — here's the one thing they were allowed to do. Check the film for factual inaccuracies. Guess what? They came back with a 17-page document full of editorial issues, not factual issues. Do you think I have any interest in putting on a film that is factually inaccurate?

Pablo Torre: It is a question of who gets to claim that they have what feels like editorial authority or, less highfalutin, who has the truth on their side?

Ezra Edelman: Well, it's more like who has control. I mean, again, this is reflective of Prince himself, who was notoriously one of the most famous control freaks in the history of artists. The irony being that Prince was somebody who fought for artistic freedom, who didn't want to be held down by Warner Brothers, who he believed was stifling his output. And now in this case, it's like, by the way, I'm not Prince, but I worked really hard making something and now my art's being stifled and thrown away.

Pablo Torre: But the underlying tension here is what does it mean when one of the greatest and most influential and significant Americans in pop cultural history is being cast — as their estate would have it — as the victim of a documentarian posthumously? A posthumous victim of a story that is being told for the benefit of said director. How old are you, Pablo?

Ezra Edelman: I am 39.

Pablo Torre: What was your relationship to Prince before you saw this movie?

Ezra Edelman: Extraordinarily minimal. He was represented in cartoons. He was the guy performing with "slavery" on his cheek. He was a symbol, the artist formerly known as.

Pablo Torre: Were you a fan?

Ezra Edelman: I wouldn't self-identify as a fan, but certainly I knew that this guy is really good at what he does.

Pablo Torre: What was your relationship to Prince after having seen this movie?

Ezra Edelman: My main sensation watching it was, this is one of the most impressive artists that has ever lived.

Pablo Torre: This is the thing I just find galling. I mean, I can't get past this, of the short-sightedness of a group of people whose interest is their own bottom line. They're afraid of his humanity. The lawyer who runs this estate essentially said he believed that this would do generational harm to Prince. In essence, that the portrayal of Prince in this film, what people learn about him, would deter younger viewers and fans, potentially, from loving Prince. They would be turned off. This is, I think, the big issue here.

Ezra Edelman: 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.

Pablo Torre: Yeah.

Ezra Edelman: And yet you also have to confront his humanity, which he, by the way, in some ways was trapped and not being able to expose because he got trapped in his own myth about who he was to the world. And he had to maintain it.

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Pablo Torre: Can I read something to you?

Ezra Edelman: I was wondering why your phone is out.

Pablo Torre: Jill Jones, who was a Prince protege, a muse, who spent essentially the 80s with him and was someone who was a girlfriend of Prince's, was in the film and to me one of the most truthful voices in the film and was someone who discussed in detail an instance where she was abused by Prince physically. And by the way, that's not the totality of the story of her with Prince, but you still see how much she loves him. Even though she went through an experience with him that was hard. A decade of her life wanting more, wanting to be an artist that got to do her own album, wanting to be his exclusive girlfriend or the girlfriend when she always was sort of like, not that. It was almost someone, again, when you talk about what it means to be a kept woman or she even, you know, she refers to him as like a pimp in the movie. And like, by the way, this is one side. But this is what she wrote after the news came out about the film being canceled.

[Sound clip plays]

Jill Jones: Prince was a man who lived under the weight of expectation, both his own and those of the world that adored him. He built a persona so larger than life that it became a prison, a gilded cage, one he could never fully step out of. Prince's struggle with drug addiction was deeply intertwined with his relentless pursuit of perfection, an impossible standard he imposed on himself to satisfy a fan base that craved his mystique, his eccentricity, and his ever-evolving artistry. At his core he was a consummate people trapped in the expectation to remain an enigma, always surprising, always beyond reach. The tragedy lies in the fact that so many refused to acknowledge the truth of who he really was. He understood this better than anyone. He knew that revealing his true self, stripped of the carefully crafted persona, would lead to rejection. And in a way, he was right. The recent choices made by Netflix and his estate only reinforced this truth. The world is unwilling to accept Prince as a man, only as a myth. Without the elaborate stagecraft, without the veil of mystery, his raw humanity is deemed insufficient. His struggles, his journey, his sacrifices, all the elements that shaped him will remain obscured. Instead, the world will likely receive a sanitized, polished version of Prince, a carefully curated illusion that erases the depth of his reality.

[Sound clip ends]

Pablo Torre: Yeah, I should have interviewed her.

Ezra Edelman: Yeah, you should have.

Pablo Torre: But I mean, this is—

Ezra Edelman: But I want to address what she's saying there, which is an argument on behalf of not merely this film coming out, but of how we should approach people with the aforementioned significance that is both cultural and also profound. How do we tell the story that same idol does not want to be told about themselves? With O.J. Simpson and with Prince, it's been here is the best attempt that I have. I, Ezra Edelman, at cracking a safe.

Pablo Torre: How have those two safes, O.J. and Prince, for people who will never see the Prince film, how are they different?

Ezra Edelman: I don't think these are similar exercises. O.J., by dint of what he had gone through, had been one of the more picked over Americans in our recent cultural history. So I didn't expect there to be that much revelatory intimately that I was going to find about O.J. that hasn't already in some ways been reported on. I was more interested in taking a larger view of a story that sort of ended up being so fixated around a year period and a night and what happened and all this stuff that I didn't frankly care about, to understand the greater sociological, historical context that led us to this moment and why everyone sort of lost their minds the way they did.

Pablo Torre: I want to point out, by the way, that when O.J. died, I think bothered you more than I ever have in my life.

Ezra Edelman: Yeah, so did a lot of people.

Pablo Torre: You did zero interviews.

Ezra Edelman: Like, I already did it. In my mind, so the other thing is, this is, by the way, this is the first time I ever thought about this, is I guess I'm a little like Prince in that way. I just want to move on. So yeah, I'm not interested in being a person who gets on TV and all of a sudden adds my two cents about O.J. I don't care.

Pablo Torre: But with Prince, it felt like you were drilling into something as opposed to zooming out.

Ezra Edelman: That's correct. I had this conversation. A couple people saw the film and they thought it was going to be more like O.J. They thought it was going to be what Prince means to people and all this stuff. And I'm like, no, this is about this person who no one ever knew about. I was after the truth about this person's existence, some of which, by the way, is his effect on others in terms of him as an artist and his popularity. But a lot of it was trying to be ironically told from his perspective of what he was doing and his own thrust going through his life.

Pablo Torre: I also want to establish that there are lots of films, lots of documentaries categorized as such in which access is integral to the task at hand and they can be excellent. And they also could be fraught with issues. And you are taking an approach that is deliberately different. And now I just wonder if it also feels like it's endangered. Because the question of who wants this is a good one.

Ezra Edelman: I do believe a lot of people want this. Look, I've gone through the journey with however few people have seen this movie. It's in six chapters. And their relationship to who Prince is changes throughout the course of it. By the end of it, everyone loves him or everyone's more curious about him and his music than, for instance, before, even if they didn't know anything about him. It's what the estate to me has always gotten backwards, which is that we live in a time at which it's harder than ever to cancel, quote unquote, somebody. And this is not a film that your takeaway ends up being as a viewer, "Get this guy the hell out of here." No, it's like the problem is it's kind of what Jill said. It's like, man, he struggled so much. He was so insecure and he had so much trauma and his unwillingness and his insecurity prevented him from being open about said trauma because he had to present himself as this perfect genius. And his inability to share his truth was one of the reasons why he suffered his addiction in silence. And you would argue that but for the way he was, other people in his position might have been more able to get help. And I think that's one of the tragedies about his story.

Ezra Edelman: But it's connected to who he always was. He created a mystery. He obfuscated the truth of who he was to become famous as an artist. And then we were complicit in how we absorbed said artist and we loved it. But then you get trapped in that. You keep having to change. You keep having to evolve. But your true self is always hidden. And so when the true self is then laid bare, having died of an overdose, it's like, what do you do with that? That can't be hidden. That's stark. That's the truth.

Pablo Torre: There is a thing on Prince's Twitter account that the estate seems to have posted when that Variety story came out. And it was kind of like a mini trailer for a forthcoming other project that is deliberately not the Ezra Edelman project. But the quote from Prince posthumously is, "Despite everything, no one can dictate who you are to other people."

Ezra Edelman: By the way, I don't disagree with that. But I think the question we are left with as a media industry is what are we trying to do when it comes to people who don't want their own story told? Right now we live in a culture and in a documentary universe and in some ways in a journalistic universe where the subject gets to dictate who they are to everybody. And that is not the way that the fourth estate was set up. So my issue is that in trading for access, you now have a lot of companies and filmmakers making deals with the subject, sanitizing their story and or their image. That to me, it's like, of course, it serves them. You don't have to put in what you don't want put in, but it is truthful.

Pablo Torre: But that editorial power of decision making, what deserves to be in what feels like an authoritative treatment of someone's story? Why should it be you?

Ezra Edelman: Well, I'm not saying it should be me. I'm just saying because I take the responsibility seriously and I try very hard and I have integrity as a person, as a filmmaker. I'm not here, by the way, to give you like to prove why I should be worthy of doing anything. I think the exercise is very hard. I think the danger and the problem I'm finding is that what's the compromise? Of course, there are movies being made with subjects that have some say in how the story is told or are getting paid for the access, which to me is a no-no and gets to be a producer of their own story. And what happens that these streamers or whoever the distributors are, they get a film about whomever?

Ezra Edelman: The incentives align. So no, and by the way, at this point, the public doesn't seem to care or know the difference. And that's the sad thing. They're being served slop and they're getting used to the fact that this is like, "Oh, I guess this is like short rib." And I'm like, it's not, it's slop. And I think that's the bigger issue.

Ezra Edelman: This film about Prince, to me, it's a full meal. And it's not something you can just tear through. It's tough at times. It's not meant to be clipped. It's not meant for the algorithm. In the sum, it's greater than its parts. That's the point. There's hopefully an experience you've gone through. By the way, I'm talking about this as if anyone's going to see it. They won't.

Pablo Torre: What does it feel like to catch yourself doing that, though? It's the tree falling in the forest thing.

Ezra Edelman: It still exists. But look, part of the whole thing with Prince is that his genius was validated over and over again by his output. And you are somebody in a very different way whose swings are so big recently that when no one gets to see it, it's an indescribable feeling that I've been wrestling with for a while. I don't want to make this woe is me. People's films get shelved all the time in the feature space and the documentary space. There's no guarantee of anything ever. This is just unique because of the subject, the time, the high-profile nature, the public interest in some ways.

Pablo Torre: But the genre in which a documentarian is holding to account a celebrity in service of what feels like the public interest. Yet the way you just described that, holding our public figures to account.

Ezra Edelman: I wasn't making a film about Richard Nixon after Watergate. I was telling someone's story. And once you see certain things, you can't unsee them. There are things I might be interested in as topics to pursue that come from me. But when someone tells me about a harrowing incident that she experienced, here are my two choices. I can ask: Why did this happen? Was this something consistent within this man's behavior? Can I contextualize what that meant to him in his head? Where did this come from? Or I can just be like, "Oh, that's not going to like that. That might change people's image of Prince, so I better not put that in." Those are my choices. And then I am committing documentary malpractice.

Pablo Torre: I should point out that the Variety story does have a quote from Netflix, which says that 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. As a result, the Netflix documentary will not be released. I read something, I think it was the Times-London, that said some fans are happy with the decision because they believe that this film would have been an invasion of his privacy.

Ezra Edelman: And? Of course it's an invasion of his privacy. I don't know what to do with that argument. That's not an argument.

Pablo Torre: But isn't that the fundamental disconnect when it comes to... He's a public figure.

Ezra Edelman: He's a public figure. I don't understand. He's a historical and historically important subject. He's one of the great artists of the last hundred years. We need to understand who these people are, how they made their art, what drove them, how they lived, how they died. It's part of how we go through the world and improve as humans. What are we talking about here?

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Pablo Torre: There are Richard Nixons, and then there are our favorite musicians. The people who bring us comfort because they're in the toy department of music or sports, as opposed to what legislation did Prince pass? Woody Allen, Picasso, Michael Jackson, all of these people. R. Kelly. I think it's up to everyone's personal code about how they choose to be affected by the understanding of who that person was and their ability to still revel in and enjoy said person's art. For me, I think it'd be a little weird if, when you know what R. Kelly was doing and what he's singing about, it's a little like, I can't do this. It's right in front of me. That's a little different for me than Michael Jackson. I can listen to Michael Jackson's music and have an understanding of that. And yet I could also go to the Michael Jackson Broadway show.

Ezra Edelman: And by the way, the estate's working on a Broadway show about Purple Rain. Everyone's seen Purple Rain. This is a movie that, while Prince didn't officially get a screenplay credit, it's a fictionalized but sort of veiled fictionalized story of Prince's life. Prince in his first motion picture. Before he created the music, he lived every bit of it. And in it, Morris Day throws a woman into a dumpster and he slaps Apollonia. Who Prince is in that movie in some ways is revealed, though it was always couch disfiction. And now they're doing this adaptation of Purple Rain for Broadway. From my understanding, they're changing Prince's character to make it more palatable, or to at least tidy up the gender politics. I think that's literally a phrase I read in the New Yorker piece about the playwright about who the character is, to ostensibly make it more palatable for an audience in 2025.

Ezra Edelman: This is exactly my issue. The guy made a movie that's about himself. Warts and all in many ways, he could always hide behind the fact that it was fiction. But it wasn't fiction. In our film, we use that to basically sort of play with the truthiness of his existence. There's so much in that that is real. And now we've arrived 40 years later, and rather than just celebrating the 40th anniversary of Purple Rain, no, we're going to revisit it and revamp it and sanitize it and in turn sanitize Prince's image for current audiences, for younger audiences, to make him a less troubling figure. That is messed up. I'm sorry. Removing the complexity from a deliberately complicated person. It's not surprising. It's Broadway. But this is what we're dealing with. I don't think my documentary stood much of a chance if this is what's happening.

Pablo Torre: It's just sad that seems like an exercise that can make someone not want to try and take a swing like this again.

Ezra Edelman: It was a tenth of my life, if you look at it that way. I hadn't until now. Why would I? I think it probably affects you differently physically, mentally, when you get older. And it affected me. So I don't think I need to do that anymore.

Pablo Torre: But the reason that you deserve to have swings like this, the reason you deserve to take these swings, the reason you deserve to have this editorial authority in which I want that guy trying to crack this safe, I want that guy making the decisions, is because what the media broadly speaking, what journalists really need more than ever are people who take that task so seriously that it makes them unhappy. Because we're going to test it. We're going to throw estates at that. We're going to throw cease and desist letters at that. We're going to throw the business, the money at other people. If it's this painful, it tells me I want that guy to try.

Ezra Edelman: But it is that painful. Look, I'm sitting here doing your podcast, but Caroline Waterloo, Tamara Rosenberg, Nina Kristic, Brett Granato, Gabe Rhodes, Ben Sazansky, Marley Cogan, Danon Hinton, Jenny Troyer, Deja Lee Carroll — they made the film. They were also putting themselves on the line and investing so much in themselves to make this thing as a PA, or an archival assistant, or as a producer, or as an editor. The way you go through the world is to amass credits. People see what you do and they go, "Oh, wow, that was really good. You worked on that." And right now this doesn't exist in the world. It's a big zero. It's a negative space. Why can't there be, as Brett Cardano, one of my editors said, it'd be nice if there were something on IMDb that said, "The Book of Prince, unreleased." And then the people who worked on it.

Pablo Torre: Yeah, and I don't think it is changing anytime soon.

Ezra Edelman: No, I think the problem is this is a runaway train.

Pablo Torre: Or has it already hit us and we don't know it?

Ezra Edelman: Well, that's the most depressing thought in a very depressing series of thoughts that have been uttered.

Pablo Torre: Okay, do you feel right now, though, that one of the things I love about you is your earnest ambition to create a podcast that is trying to find stuff out, to tell the truth, to be journalistically rigorous. And you have found an audience for that. So I think you should feel good about that. The whole trick of what you do, what I do, what anybody who wants to do this thing that is not being incentivized by the algorithm, the whole trick of it is, guess what? It's surprising how many people want this delicious piece of broccoli with cheese melted on it.

Ezra Edelman: I agree. It's still entertaining. It's still tasty.

Pablo Torre: That is what I want people to remember when they are deciding whether this is just vegetables, whether this is the thing that people did not ask for, but they got because some guy feels like morally scolding them into caring about journalism. The whole point is that it can still be entertainment if you do it right. And that gets back to the general breakdown that's always been between documentaries and Hollywood movies. So in essence, that's what we're talking about here. There's a Hollywood movie, which is a play on Broadway, inspired by true events.

Ezra Edelman: And so the issue is that now the estate is going to put out its own documentary, but that's not a documentary. By definition. It's going to be a hagiographic propaganda love letter to Prince the artist. Are you going to learn anything about Prince? I doubt it. Are you going to learn anything dark about Prince? I doubt it. Are you going to learn anything complicating about Prince? I doubt it.

Pablo Torre: The troubling thing, of course, is that it may very well be wildly popular.

Ezra Edelman: Oh, it will be wildly popular. You know why? Because people want to see Prince, and deservedly so. The guy was one of the great entertainers, performers, musicians of all time. And that's what's really sad. You see him perform in our film. I mean, I cried watching him in his 1982 performance during the Controversy tour when he was singing "When We Were Mine." He is a magnetic performer.

Pablo Torre: There are scenes in your film that feel like great scenes in sports movies where the music is a payoff because you went through the journey of pain and suffering. And you do tear up and you are in awe as you would be with a great athlete. The difference here is that that pain and that suffering really only pays off if you actually depict the pain and the suffering. Man, I wish someone made a movie that had all that stuff in it.

Ezra Edelman: Well, it's been fun talking to you, Pablo.

Pablo Torre: In some ways, that's like, what are you gonna do?

Ezra Edelman: I don't know.

Pablo Torre: So what I'm left thinking at the end here, what I want to find out is, now with the benefit of hindsight, would you do this over again and have it turn out the same way?

Ezra Edelman: No. Absolutely not, for what's happened.

Pablo Torre: Would I have done anything differently in the process that led to this result?

Ezra Edelman: No. I feel like I honestly, earnestly tried my hardest to make the best film and reacted to the circumstances I was presented with as truthfully and honestly to who I am and my belief system as possible. And at no point did I ever think it was okay if this were going to be the result. So it wasn't like, "Well, I'm going to do this and if this is what happens, I'm going to live with it." It's just more like, in the same way, you make the choices that are in front of you based on who you are. And I think based on the circumstances I was presented with at every point, I did what I believe to be the correct thing. And that I'll live with. There's nothing about this that I won't get over.

Ezra Edelman: It's just not really possible. So in a way that won't surprise you, when you end up with circumstances that are so dramatic and in such an unforeseen way, the basic need for vengeance and the basic desire to channel your anger — I have had those impulses. But I'm like, this is it. This happened. If I allow this thing to consume me and eat me up from the inside, then that's kind of on me. So I've had to figure out a way to get beyond those feelings because I can't win that. I lose. So why it happened? I don't know. And I just feel like I comported myself correctly throughout the entire exercise. That's the only thing I can control.

Pablo Torre: I think I have good news for you at the end here.

Ezra Edelman: What?

Pablo Torre: I just found out what closure sounds like for Ezra Edelman.

Ezra Edelman: Anything for you, Pablo.

Pablo Torre: This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Metal Ark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.

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