The Five Spot: We Are Going To Need A Documentary About The Making Of The Prince Documentary

Also this week: A fun new show to watch and my semi-justified rage at Tom Cruise

The Five Spot is a weekly Friday roundup where I rank and riff on my five favorite things from the week. Most of the entries will be about film and TV, but there might also be ones about weird local news or sandwiches I ate or anything else, really. The whole thing is an exclusive for paid subscribers, so if you want to read the top four entries, you can do that by upgrading…

Off we go…

FIVE: Doves are crying

Something like 5000 years ago, in 2018, the estate for Prince and the director of OJ: Made in America, Ezra Edelman, put pen to paper on a deal for a sweeping documentary about the late artist. Which was exciting, to me, mostly because it combined two of my favorite things:

• A talented filmmaker diving headfirst into an interesting subject with all the time and resources necessary to make something cool

• Literally anything that has to do with Prince

This second is especially true. Prince was a fascinating man, a petite musical prodigy who lived in a purple house in Minnesota and rode around on a motorcycle and bent gender to his whims by wearing lace and singing in a falsetto while also stalking around like a panther. Reasonable arguments can be made that he was the most fascinating person who ever lived. There are stories about him all over the internet that are so wild you would assume they were fake if they were about anyone else. Go watch the Super Bowl halftime show he put on in 2007. I say this every time I discuss this performance but it is my position that Prince summoned the rain personally that night — football game be damned — to make it look cooler when he did Purple Rain.

Anyway, if you read the intro a few minutes ago and thought “Hmm, I don’t remember a sweeping documentary about Prince being released in the six years between that announcement and today,” there’s a good explanation for that: it was not released! And not because it’s not finished. It very much is finished. But this is where things get weird. Puck had the story first but Page Six piggybacked with some extra information about the project. Like, for example, the thing where Edelman made a nine-hour cut of the project and Prince’s estate considers that a violation of their original agreement for a six-hour version. Also, there’s this…

The creative differences have been further complicated by Prince’s estate being divided in two in 2022, meaning Edelman needs approval from both sides: the family and those who manage the artist’s rights.

… which is just delightfully messy and such a perfectly Prince thing to get in the way of a huge passion project like this. Some of the other quotes in here are even better. Look at this sentence.

A music insider tells Page Six exclusively that the estate as a whole is “incredibly nitpicky,” as it is the executors’s job to protect Prince’s legacy “with kid gloves.”

And look at this collection of words that must have made the veins on Edelman’s forehead pop up like a mountain range on a topographical map.

“You never saw Prince release anything subpar. Everything was carefully curated and fine-tuned. The estate still holds that high standard,” our source explains, claiming the current version of the project “does not accurately portray the legendary Prince.”

Reading it all and thinking about it non-stop for a few days has led me to three conclusions, which I will share below:

• This all sounds like a nightmare, which is a bummer because I really want to watch however many hours of this documentary these people are willing to give me

• I would also very much like to watch a nine-part documentary about the making of this documentary, with tons of interviews with everyone involved where they give bitchy little quotes about each other in talking head segments, and then I would like to see that second documentary get adapted into television series that is either an awards darling or just the trashiest garbage you’ve ever seen

• I feel like Prince is loving all of this very much from beyond the grave

I stand by each of these points equally.

FOUR: I am furious at Tom Cruise