The Secret Netflix Masterpiece You're Not Allowed To See

EPISODE 157: When docs cry.

This is an episode about one of the greatest movies ever made. Whether you already knew that Prince Rogers Nelson was a cultural icon seeking world domination, amid the MTV era, or not.

Because The Book of Prince, directed by my friend Ezra Edelman, is a Netflix documentary that dares to be both a work of art and journalism. (A kind of sports journalism, even, which you’ll see in a bit here.)

Which is why — if the status quo persists — it will never be released.

A few weeks ago, The New York Times Magazine reported that after Netflix screened the film for the lawyer in charge of Prince’s estate, Londell McMillan, for factual accuracy — which was the estate’s contractual right — McMillan’s big concern wasn’t necessarily factual. It was that the documentary will get Prince “canceled” and devalue the estate’s bottom line.

Netflix had reportedly paid tens of millions of dollars for exclusive access to Prince’s personal archive, his long-rumored vault inside his 65,000-foot home in Minnesota, Paisley Park. And while the estate did not get final cut on the film — a nine-hour treatment (!) that took four and a half years (!!) to make — Netflix told The Times that, quote, “there are still meaningful contractual issues with the estate that are holding up a documentary release.”

The principal issue, according to Puck, being the documentary’s length — which the contract stipulated could be no longer than six hours.

Ezra, as we will detail in this episode, is my friend. But he is declining comment to me and everyone else on those issues.

His movie, meanwhile, is complete. Finished. And locked inside a vault of its own, as Prince’s estate prefers. There are no plans for the public to ever see it.

But the reason I turn now to Wesley Morris — the only writer to ever win two Pulitzer Prizes for Criticism — is because the two of us, more than a year ago, already did.

DKN/YOUTUBE SPOILER ALERT:

Rigorously,

Pablo