Prince is one of the greatest artists pop music has ever produced. His success transcended borders, and his eccentricities absorbed his personality until he became a recluse of his own talent, a perfectionist to the point of neurosis. To date, only one documentary filmmaker has won an Oscar. has scraped off the multiple layers of the pop idol to produce a mastodon nine-hour audiovisual. The problem: we may never see it.
Behind the project of this definitive documentary about Prince was Netflix: in 2019, Lisa Nishimura, vice president of independent films and documentaries for the platform, contacted Ezra Edelman. He was the brand new winner of an Oscar with a production that delved for five meticulous hours into another key figure (although for very different reasons) for the American black community: the title of his documentary was ‘OJ Simpson: Made in America’. For this new assignment, he would have material never seen before: the endless unreleased recordings and material of all kinds that were hidden in the basement of Prince’s house, and which experts know as “The Vault.”
As The New York Times tells in its article ‘The Prince We Never Knew’, Netflix even paid, according to people familiar with the negotiations, tens of millions of dollars to the artist’s heirs to access the archive. This provided them with a commitment from the heirs that the director and platform would have the right to a final cut of the documentary, a production that would only be reviewed by the rights owners to ensure that it did not include any inaccuracies or falsehoods. The possibilities were too tempting: Prince had been an artist exceptionally jealous of his privacy and his creative processes, and there are still many questions surrounding him.
Who was Prince
The documentary aimed to answer all the enigmas that have always surrounded him. Among others: what was it about changing your legal name for a symbol? Have all of Prince’s countless clashes with Warner Bros. to regain ownership of his sound material been explained? Were all those eccentrics worth it? stunts like going out to play with a striking “Slave” painted on your forehead? Prince’s career has often been called irregular, where undisputed masterpieces came together with albums that were difficult to approach, bordering on the experimental. How did your creative process work? And above all… why did there seem to be two Princes, with one of them only in sight when the artist disappeared from the public eye, a Prince that very few knew?
Edelman was confident that he could put the documentary together with all that material, but after reviewing it he got an unpleasant surprise: All that countless music, images and recordings were not as good as I expected. Yes, there were thousands of hours of unreleased concert recordings, alternate takes of the songs that had made Prince famous, tons of photographic material and making ofs of records and concerts.
There was also priceless material, such as the 16 mm recording. from the concerts of his 1981 album ‘Controversy’ and one of his last live performances accompanied only by a piano in 2016. But what there was not too much personal material: it was an excellent archive of Prince the artist, but as one of the editors says from the documentary in ‘The New York Times’, “it wasn’t much different from an Instagram account or a Facebook page.” They needed to find out more about the person, because they had plenty of material about the character.
The solution, obviously, was to interview all kinds of people personally linked to Prince. And it wasn’t easy, because they only received refusals, which led Edelman to think there was a dark secret in Prince’s private life that the people closest to him wanted to hide. After months of hard work, all kinds of professionals linked to Prince (members of his band, sound technicians, bodyguards, girlfriends, friends, record company executives and even his own sister) agreed to record a total of more than 70 interviews.
Contrary to what Edelman initially thought, there were no big secrets or hidden personalities that the interviewees were trying to hide. Each of them spoke for between 10 and 12 hours and the director came to the conclusion that they were all at a point of unusual dependence on the artist, whom they feared as much as they wanted to protect. The project dragged on over time, until in its fourth year of development, as the article in ‘The New York Times’ tells us, the director found the key when interviewing Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman, guitarist and keyboardist. of Prince’s band, Revolution, in their moment of greatest creative brilliance, when they recorded albums like ‘1999’ or ‘Purple Rain’.
What is seen in the documentary
The documentary, described in depth in the complete article, offers a multifaceted and complex portrait of the singer and composer: He had a very pronounced feminine side (sometimes he sang from the personality of an alter ego that blurred genders), but at the same time he was controlling and manipulative. He began a relationship with Melvoin’s twin (the guitarist was a lesbian and Coleman’s partner), and for a time he prohibited the sisters from seeing each other, monitored their calls, and forbade him from leaving the house. And yet, everyone who appears in the documentary speaks of extreme fragility, a lack of self-confidence derived from childhood abuse and having been expelled from their home at a very young age.
The documentary also delves into a traumatic event in Prince’s life, the death of his son shortly after his wife gave birth. The documentary uses it (with the statements of the mother, who is now around fifty years old) as a symbol of Prince’s eternal contradiction between his reclusive and secret private life and his brilliant public face. For example, the couple gave an interview to Oprah to promote their new album, just hours after the mother lost the baby, and when the tragedy had not yet been made public.
The documentary team would still face another obstacle, beyond Prince’s complex personalityafter reaching a nine-hour interim cut in spring 2023. His legacy and the administration of it has always been in chaos, involving fraticidal wars between his sister Tyka and five half-siblings. The documentary took so long to make that whoever negotiated the rights with Netflix, a fund controlled by a bank, was not the one who owned them when the documentary was finished (they already belonged to Primary Wave, a company made up of several heirs, a producer and a lawyer who had occasionally worked with the artist).
Edelman was banned from using the files without much explanation, other than that the heirs were not happy with “the content or the tone.” In March 2023, the director’s main supporter at Netflix, Lisa Nishimura, was fired after restructuring and layoffs in the company, internal movements that were understood by many experts as “the sign of a change in strategy” of the platform. Edelman received 17 pages of notes with changes the heirs wanted made.
The lawyer representing the heirs ended up shelving the matter, in a refuses to reveal the multiple facets of Prince who has some racial claim (According to some critical voices echoed by Janina Edwards, author of the ‘The New York Times’ article, who has seen the nine hours of the documentary, this type of detailed and somewhat destructive analysis of icons is never done with white pop personalities; it is inevitable to think of the case of Michael Jackson). There is a more prosaic explanation, which Edwards also explains: the lawyer fears that the content of the documentary could lead to a cancellation of Prince that devalues his legacy. In the end, they cling to legalisms: by contract, the heirs can paralyze the release of the documentary if it lasts more than six hours, and that is what they have done. Edelman refuses to cut it.
Once again, the losers are the fans, because the mysteries of Prince’s personality, mysteries that would give us a portrait of the brilliant musician oblivious to mysticisms and secrets, will remain hidden. Whether it is to protect his legacy or for purely pecuniary reasons is something that we may never fully know, but it is clear that those nine hours deserve to come to light. And we can’t have anything nice. Even the least beautiful (but necessary) is also taken from us.
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