Our first Coffee with the Convoy. January 25th, 2022. My hair — I look like an aging, Swedish serial killer.
Thunder Bay, Ontario — just days before Chris Barber and Tamara Lich in Big Red - plus hundreds of other truckers rolled into Ottawa and history, I had the pleasure of hosting what I believe was the first podcast on-the-road with the Freedom Convoy. I had never done a livestream before and barely knew what one was, given that my show was audio only.
My producer Matt, who was with me from the beginning, set it up — figuring it out as he went along. Matt was, by trade, a music producer who worked for me because he believed in the podcast and what we were doing. A devoted and caring human being, we pulled if off. Mostly.
The great ethics professor, Julie Ponesse, fired for not getting the vaccine — took part as did Jake, a trucker about to hit the road. And Dr. Francis Christian appeared.
But former, Premier Brian Peckford, who’d been an early COVID dissident was having tech trouble, which scuttled his appearance and I’ve felt bad about that for years.
So, it is a pleasure to have him weigh-in on the high court’s judgement against the government for its hysterical, anti-democratic invocation of the Emergencies Act. How many decisions do we need before there is accountability, a question Tamara Lich eloquently posed on X last week. Convoy participants have lived through nothing BUT accountability; aggressive law-fare driven by zealous Crown attorneys, who know very well they represent the elites on this one. And they are facing a crippling class action suit that could drag on for years.
My close about Netflix was driven in part by the other side of my life — as a doc director. Oscar-winner Caroline Waterlow, who was a consulting producer on my Amazon Ted Bundy series and her collaborator, director Ezra Edelman, perhaps the best of his generation, suffered a loss at the hands of the streamer that is gobsmacking. First, video below from the night their film: OJ: Made in America won Best Documentary.
Netflix has canned the pair’s opus on Prince - after they spent years crafting it. Wow.
The New York Times Magazine — behind a paywall, describes Edelman’s personal process of creating this nine-hour doc series.
As I say on the podcast, I’m not a big Prince fan per se but knowing more about people like Prince who shaped culture and music is an obsession of mine. I would have watched this series with relish. OJ: Made in America was life-changing for me. Imagine the hands that crafted that epic, turning their focus to someone as mysterious, brilliant and damaged as Prince.
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?”
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.
We often see films like this as entertainment but they should also be about obsessive truth-telling. This is something our culture needs more of, not less. Too often now, bio-docs are editorially compromised by access. I loved the series about Victoria Beckham because it was pretty and full of eye-catching things — but I also knew it wasn’t even close to the truth. She very likely asked for some kind of control before signing on.
One of the highlights of this now-secret Prince project is said to be the behind-the-scenes framing of Prince’s performance with Tom Petty and Steve Winwood at the Hall of Fame induction of George Harrison in 2004. Love Prince or not — this is an absolute masterpiece. If you are in a hurry go to 3:30, crank it up and watch to the end.
Legend.
Those of you who went to concerts like this in the olden days — will understand how much fun these guys were having on stage.
Big snow happening here.
Dog is asleep beside me on the couch.
Fire is going.
Happy.
