When it was confirmed last year that Ezra Edelman’s long-awaited Prince documentary for Netflix had been shelved – Prince’s estate and its partners were reportedly unhappy at the way he had been portrayed in the finished cut – it all kind of kicked off.
A hugely frustrated Edelman vented on a podcast – “I am after some catharsis, if not closure, to move on” – and Londell McMillan of Prince Legacy LLC later hit back, saying, “You will not disrespect Prince on my watch.”
Now Mayte Garcia, Prince’s first wife, has had her say on the matter. “I didn't see it, so I can't really give my [opinion of] what I think about it – I only heard what they said,” she began. “I think it should show some of the personal side – I mean, I shared it in my book. He shared a lot in his music… I think that if there’s anything negative, I understand why they didn’t put it out.”
Prince first met Garcia in 1990, when she was just 16, and she joined the New Power Generation (his backing group at the time) in 1992. She was believed to have been Prince’s muse when he was writing and recording his ‘Love Symbol’ album, which was released that same year, and they married in 1996. Their child, Amiir, was born on 16 October, 1996, but died just six days later due to being born with Pfeiffer syndrome type 2.
The couple divorced in 2000, and Garcia would later document her relationship with Prince in a book, The Most Beautiful: My Life with Prince, which was released in 2017. She says that this is in the process of being turned into a movie, but believes that any future documentary project – the Prince Estate is now believed to be going ahead with its own – should focus primarily on his work.
“I think his music should be more highlighted because it's so exciting,” she argues. “I mean, it's his journey, his albums and the concerts and the tours and the movies.”
Garcia also suggests that even Edelman’s sprawling multi-part series wasn’t long enough to cover everything.
“When I heard it was eight episodes or something like that, I'm like, how? I mean, if you focused on just the beginning, that's six episodes right there. So, I hope that they show a little bit of him being a human. And that's the part that I shared. But mostly I think it should be his music and what a genius he was because he wasn't normal.”
The fear, of course, is that any ‘official’ documentary that comes out now will now be sanitised to the point of blandness, with all of Prince’s harsher edges shaved off. “It's going to be a hagiographic, like, propaganda love letter to Prince the artist,” predicts Ezra Edelman. “Are you going to learn anything about Prince? I doubt it. Are you going to learn anything dark about Prince? I doubt it. Anything complicating about Prince? I doubt it.”
Garcia also says that she’s planning her own documentary about Prince’s philanthropic work, having just relaunched the charity, Live 4 Love, that the couple established when they were married.
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