A Nine-Hour Prince documentary we may never see.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/08/magazine/prince-netflix-ezra-edelman-documentary.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes

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Dig, if you will, a small slice of Ezra Edelman’s nine-hour documentary about Prince — a cursed masterpiece that the public may never be allowed to see.

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It’s 1984, and Prince is about to release “Purple Rain,” the album that will make him a superstar and push pop music into distant realms we had no idea we were ready for. The sound engineer Peggy McCreary, one of many female engineers he worked with, describes witnessing a flash of genius during the creation of his song “When Doves Cry.” Over a two-day marathon recording session, she and Prince filled the studio with sound — wailing guitars, thrumming keyboards, an overdubbed choir of harmonizing Princes. It was the sort of maximalist stew possible only when someone is (as Prince was) a master of just about every musical instrument ever invented. But something wasn’t right. So at 5 or 6 in the morning, Prince found the solution: He started subtracting. He took out the guitar solo; he took out the keyboard. And then his boldest, most heterodox move: He took out the bass. McCreary remembers him saying, with satisfaction, “Ain’t nobody gonna believe I did that.” He knew what he had. The song became an anthem, a platinum megahit.

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In the next sequence, it’s the evening of the premiere of “Purple Rain,” the movie, which will go on to win the Academy Award for best original song score in 1985. Prince’s tour manager, Alan Leeds, was with him in the back of a limo on the way to the ceremony. He remembers one of Prince’s bodyguards turning to Prince and saying: “This is going to be the biggest day of your life! They say every star in town is there!” And Prince clutched Leeds’s hand, trembling in fear. But then, as Leeds tells it, some switch flipped, and “he caught himself.” Prince’s eyes turned hard. He was back in control. “That was it,” Leeds says. “But for maybe 10 seconds, he completely lost it. And I loved it. Because it showed he was human!” In the next shot, we see Prince emerging from the limo and walking down the red carpet in an iridescent purple trench coat over a creamy ruffled collar, his black curls piled high. He swaggers, twirling a flower, unbothered: a creature of regal remove.

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These four moments happen back to back, about three hours into the film. I watched it for the first time on a winter evening in 2023, and during this particular sequence, my body clenched as it registered contradictory intensities: amazement, pity, disgust, tenderness. Like most Americans who grew up in the 1980s, I had an image of Prince emblazoned in my mind: wonderfully strange; a gender-bending, dreamy master of funk. He flouted and floated above all categories and gave permission to generations of kids to do the same. Edelman’s film deepened those impressions, while at the same time removing Prince’s many veils. This creature of pure sex and mischief and silky ambiguity, I now saw, was also dark, vindictive and sad. This artist who liberated so many could be pathologically controlled and controlling. The film is sometimes uncomfortable to watch. But then, always, there is relief: the miracle of Prince’s music — a release for me and a release, above all, for Prince.

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The sequence I just described is 20 minutes long. Imagine sustaining this density of character analysis for 520 more, which is what Edelman has done. In the process, he offers one answer to a question that has agonized the culture at large for the last decade. How should we think about artists whose moral failings are exposed? Edelman manages to present a deeply flawed person while still granting him his greatness — and his dignity. Wesley Morris, a critic at The Times and one of a small group of people who have seen the film, told me, “It’s one of the only works I have ever seen that approximates the experience of suffering with and suffering through and alongside genius.”

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The film took Edelman almost five years to finish, and it nearly broke him. Whenever he makes a documentary, he told me, “It’s like willingly walking into the jail or locking myself up into a box like Houdini and being like, ‘Can I get out?’ ” But he had been locked in for a long time, often working nights and weekends, chasing down recalcitrant subjects who seemed haunted by their friendships with Prince and researching in Prince’s personal archive, which was filled with gaps and elisions. Prince kept slipping away from him. “How can you tell the truth about someone who, when you’re talking to people, they all had different things to say?” Edelman told me. “How can you tell the truth about someone who never told the truth about himself?”

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Over a year and a half, I had observed as Edelman continued to perfect his film, working to capture the essence of Prince, even as it became slowly, painfully clear that it would most likely never air. The Prince estate had changed hands, and the new executors objected to the project. Last spring, they saw a cut and, claiming that it misrepresented Prince, entered into a protracted battle with Netflix, which owns the rights to the film, to prevent its release. As of today, there is no indication that the film will ever come out. It has been like watching a monument being swallowed by the sea.

[Buzzrock 15031]

I think I would rather have not known. That really sucks. 

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1 hour ago, Buzzrock said:

I think I would rather have not known. That really sucks. 

When I saw the tagline, my first thought was "it's going to be on some obscure service" or expensive to stream by itself, or it's bad and nobody willl watch it,, and then saw it was 9 hours, and the estate was holding it up.

Sounds like it could have been up there with the Beatles and Beach Boys documentaries that have been released in the past few years.

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9 hours ago, Buzzrock said:

I think I would rather have not known. That really sucks. 

Seriously

[GhostOfTomJoad 9453]

I hired a guy for a one year contract assignment as an audio engineer/general AV specialist for a corporate gig in 2019. Don was almost 70 and looking for a steady thing after 50+ years as an audio tech. He toured with pretty much every big act of the 70s - 80s including Bowie, ZZ Top, Stevie Wonder (said he was the absolute best to work for)....and some guy named Prince. He actually helped build his first home recording studio in his small house in Chanhassen. If anyone's heard the demo recordings Piano & A Microphone 1983, he was the tape operator & only other person in the studio when Prince cut those tracks.

He worked for him for 2 or 3 years, and got cut loose just before the Purple Rain tour. He described Prince as a genius & an asshole, but attributed most of the assholish behavior to a guy who couldn't explain to the mere mortals he employed what was in his head & how to capture that sound on tape.

But Prince had a fun side. He confirmed there were lots of pickup basketball games & motorcycle rides (Prince's bike was a small Honda w/ a CVT; the rest of the crew mostly road Harleys). Once they were having a crew lunch at a local diner when Prince saw someone pull up in a Jeep Wrangler that he fell in love with. Don was dispatched on the spot to find out where the owner got it & then purchased an identical one for Prince that he then customized.

When Prince fired him it was surgical & cold. One of the managers pulled him aside weeks before the tour & said his services weren't needed anymore, thanked him for the hard work, and a gave him a nominal check. He was pissed at the time but everyone around Prince knew how it worked. When he'd learned everything he could from you Prince set you aside & moved on. His lasting memory of him outside of recording those demos was watching him Prince mimic Elvis' dance moves while he watched his old movies on VHS.