After Netflix Scrapped His Prince Documentary, Ezra Edelman Warns That Viewers Are Being Served “Slop” With Celeb-Access Projects

deadline.com:

The changing nature of the documentary business has seen an influx of celebrities (and their representatives) producing their own series and films over the last few years.

Ezra Edelman, the Oscar-winning director of ESPN’s O.J: Made In America, is warning that viewers are being served “slop” with this approach.

It comes after Netflix scrapped his nine-hour, six-part series about Prince and instead struck a deal with the musician’s estate to “develop and produce a new documentary featuring exclusive content from Prince’s archive”. “Right now, we live in a culture and in a documentary universe, and in some ways in a journalistic universe, where the subject gets to dictate who they are to everybody.

And that is not the way that the Fourth Estate was set up. So, my issue is that in trading for access, you now have a lot of companies and filmmakers making deals with the subject, sanitizing their story and or their image, that to me, it’s like, of course, it serves them,” Edelman said on the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast. “I think the exercise is very hard.