The Purple One’s legacy lives on–just not at Netflix. According to reports, last month, a nine-hour documentary about the expansive life of Prince was scrapped by the streaming giant.
Although the late musician’s family was supposedly thrilled by the decision, Prince fans and the project’s director Ezra Edelman surely were not. Today (March 4) the Oscar- and Emmy-winning director blasted Netflix and Prince’s estate for discharging the visual during an appearance on Pablo Torre Finds Out.
“It’s a joke,” said Edelman. “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.”
He then claimed Prince’s estate attempted to have several parts (accusations of physical altercations with a former girlfriend, antisemitic lyrics, and asking Wendy Melvoin to renounce her homosexuality) of the documentary reframed after watching a draft that examine controversial part of Prince’s life. “You think I have any interest in putting out a film that is factually inaccurate,” asked Edelman.
He closed by stressing his frustrations over Netflix’s decision to buckle to pressures from the estate. “This is a gift — a nine-hour treatment about an artist that was, by the way, f*cking brilliant,” declared Edelman. “Everything about who you believe he is is in this movie. You get to bathe in his genius… People had issues with how he treated people — he was emotionally abusive, he was physically abusive.”
Watch Ezra Edelman’s full appearance on Pablo Torre Finds Out above.