Oscar-winning filmmaker Ezra Edelman’s Prince project is joining a select list of documentaries with a dubious distinction – fated not to see the light of day. It happened with Lily Tomlin, the 1986 documentary directed by Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill that has rarely been exhibited publicly. And in the 1970s, the Rolling Stones sued to keep director Robert Frank from releasing his documentary C**ksucker Blues, a film that chronicled a drug-fueled Stones concert tour of the U.S.
In the case of The Book of Prince, Edelman’s docuseries on the musician, Netflix scuttled the project under pressure from Prince’s estate, which saw a cut of the series and didn’t like its portrait of the Purple Rainmaker. Edelman sharply criticized that decision in an interview that aired last week on the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast.
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On the new edition of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast, hosts John Ridley and Matt Carey discuss what Edelman had to say about the Netflix move and the state of celebrity-authorized bio-docs, which he likened to “slop.” For his part, Ridley says many of these projects shouldn’t be considered documentaries but branded content.
In the episode, we also turn our attention to a documentary that, fortunately, is being seen – WTO/99, directed by Ian Bell and produced by Alex Megaro. It’s a moment-to-moment capture of what happened when the World Trade Organization came to Seattle in 1999 for an annual meeting, and protesters – tens of thousands of them – attempted to disrupt the event. It descended into chaos for reasons illuminated through propulsive archival footage.
WTO/99, which just held its world premiere at the True/False Film Fest in Columbia, MO, shows the emergence of a political movement that would become key, decades later, to Donald Trump’s rise – against globalism and wary that free trade would come at the expense of American jobs.
That’s on the latest episode of Doc Talk, hosted by Oscar winner Ridley (12 Years a Slave, Shirley) and Carey, Deadline’s documentary editor. The pod is a production of Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios.
Listen to the episode above or on major podcast platforms including Spotify, iHeart and Apple.