On my bookshelves, there are two gaping holes, spaces for long-awaited entries in favorite literary series. One is for The Winds of Winter, the sixth volume in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. One is for the fifth and final installment in Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson.
If you offered me the chance to start reading one of those books tomorrow, I would take the Caro book without hesitation.
Turn Every Page
The Bottom Line
A detailed and personal dual portrait that will be a must-see for a certain audience.
In the interim, Lizzie Gottlieb’s new documentary Turn Every Page succeeds in further whetting that appetite instead of eliciting the, “Dammit, stop doing other things and finish your book as I petulantly demand!” response that bubbles within me whenever Martin pops up as an executive producer on a show that has nothing to do with Westeros. Subtitled “The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb,” Turn Every Page is an utterly engaging gift to a certain sort of wonky aficionado, and I am very much that sort. I watched 112 minutes of it and would have happily watched more.
Turn Every Page is a story of two Bobs, one of whom happens to be the filmmaker’s father.
Caro is the writer of four volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, as well as the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Power Broker. He’s simultaneously one of the most deliberate and prolific writers of the past century, and surely one of the most significant chroniclers of 20th-century America.
Gottlieb is the former editor-in-chief at Knopf, a publishing titan whose stable of authors has included Toni Morrison, Ray Bradbury, Salman Rushdie, Nora Ephron and Bill Clinton. He discovered and helped retitle Catch-22. He has been Caro’s primary editor since 1970.
Caro is 86. Gottlieb is 91. Both men have frankly discussed that the final LBJ book may be the culmination and conclusion of their careers and joked about it marking the end of their lives.
Lizzie Gottlieb has been working on Turn Every Page for at least five years. Some of that time was dedicated to getting both men comfortable enough to share their respective processes with her — time well-spent, even if the lone scene of Caro and Gottlieb actually at work together had to be filmed without sound at the candid but cagy Caro’s insistence.
Turn Every Page has rewards regardless of the level of Caro/Gottlieb-based specificity you might crave.
There are lengthy recollections about the origins of their collaborations, including the 350,000 words of The Power Broker that had to be cut, not because of redundancy or lack of quality, but because of fears that the binding simply couldn’t handle all those pages. There are stories about key breakthroughs Caro experienced when he realized he didn’t want to do the Fiorello LaGuardia biography that he was contracted for after The Power Broker, when he decided he would need to move to Texas for several years to internalize Johnson’s youth and several steps along the way. Not every random viewer will be giddy to see Robert Caro and his wife, Ina, sitting surrounded by box upon box of documents at the LBJ Library in Austin, but for the documentary’s target demo, it’s akin to getting footage of Mozart sitting down at a piano with a pile of blank sheet music.
Gottlieb doesn’t do anything interesting when it comes to the general structure or aesthetics of Turn Every Page, but she has a patience that was very clearly passed along from her father. It’s also very clearly a match for Caro, as becomes apparent when he recounts, in typically drawn out and detailed fashion, the challenges of getting LBJ’s brother Sam to tell anecdotes from their childhood and explains the method that eventually broke through Sam’s hagiography to approach the truth. It’s a story that takes several minutes to tell, and that some documentarians would have trimmed to 30 seconds. It’s significantly better in this form.
Stepping back, Gottlieb has made a film that’s more generally about writing and editing and publishing, about creativity and creation. That includes astonishing details like Caro’s collection of carbon paper for every word he’s written over the years on his handy typewriter; or Gottlieb musing on the individual words Caro overuses; or general observations on different forms of editing methodology, how every editor is different and every writer is different and how this unique and apparently often contentious partnership has developed. The scope of Caro’s project has perhaps upstaged an appreciation of his writing and Gottlieb’s role in that writing, and that’s given a spotlight here in the images of countless pages of marked-up prose or in the sound of that prose as read by celebrity fan Ethan Hawke.
Finally, stepping back even further, there’s the level on which Turn Every Page is incredibly personal. It’s partially just how Caro and Gottlieb’s familiarity with Lizzie Gottlieb is informing every interview, which explains why the stories in Turn Every Page are captivating even if you’ve read interviews with either man before or read Caro’s semi-memoir Working. More than that, though, Lizzie Gottlieb gives what in different hands might have been a dry and nerdy treatment of writing, rewriting, note-taking and semicolons a real emotional undercurrent. You never lose sight that this is a movie about two men racing to complete their lives’ work, that this is a daughter championing her father’s legacy, and of the loving gravity that mortality brings to every interaction. It’s as heartfelt as it is brainy.
Turn Every Page is by no means a sad documentary. It’s just a documentary about making sure that when the end is in sight, you get that ending right. That’s pretty universal and pretty moving, whether you’ve read thousands of pages of Robert Caro’s writing and thousands of pages edited by Robert Gottlieb or not.