What happens when two geniuses in their respective fields engage in a sometimes contentious, life-long collaboration? The answer to that question can be found in Lizzie Gottlieb’s “Turn Every Page — The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb” (Yes, Gottlieb is the director’s father). The film is a book lover’s delight.
Caro is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,” the controversial, cinder-block-sized 1975 biography of the urban planner responsible for creating modern-day New York City. Moses did this by building many of the city’s expressways, the Triborough Bridge and other new roads and relocating large numbers of people, often poor people, whose lives were forever, often unpleasantly altered.
Caro goes on to write an epic, multi-volume, still unfinished saga about Lyndon Baines Johnson. Planned as a three-volume effort, the books are now awaiting a fifth and final volume still to be completed. Both Caro and Gottlieb are elderly (Gottlieb is 90). Caro, who believes that “the writing is hard” and “the research is great,” is a master of the art of nonfiction. He hunts and pecks on a vintage electric Smith Corona, using carbon paper to make copies. His lamp has a racing charioteer on it.
Gottlieb is the computer-literate former editor of the publishing house Knopf and the now retired former editor of The New Yorker. He has edited the works of Toni Morrison, Michael Crichton, Len Deighton, John le Carre and Nora Ephron. Gottlieb persuaded Joseph Heller to change the title of his unpublished novel “Catch-18” to “Catch-22” by convincing him that the number 22 was funnier.
Caro’s great theme is political power, how to accumulate it and how to wield it. Both Moses, who was not an elected official, and Johnson, who had a legendary ability to pass legislation, including a voting rights act, Medicare and his war on poverty, were masters of the craft. Caro’s great power is to write about his subject in the manner of the world’s greatest storytellers. Gottlieb’s is to make Caro an even better, and often less voluminous writer.
In the case of “The Power Broker,” Gottlieb had to convince Caro to cut a manuscript of 1,000,000 words down to 700,000 in order to make the book a single volume. The two men have been known to come close to blows over a semicolon, and yet a deep reserve of respect and friendship flows between them. They are literary brothers. In order to understand more about Johnson’s childhood, Caro moved himself and his wife from New York City to Texas Hill Country for three years. We see archival footage of Johnson barnstorming rural Texas in a vintage helicopter. “The Path to Power,” the first volume of the Johnson series, was published in 1982.
We hear from such Caro and Gottlieb fans as Conan O’Brien, Ethan Hawke, New Yorker editor David Remnick, critic Daniel Mendelsohn and President Bill Clinton, whose books have been edited by Gottlieb. Gottlieb’s private passions are the New York City Ballet and vintage, plastic ladies handbags; his collection takes up shelves in his and his wife’s bedroom. Caro walks in a neighborhood park every day in a blue blazer, gray slacks and tie. I can’t help but think that this beautifully made film could have been named after the Chet Baker song that plays over the credits: “Do It the Hard Way.”
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'TURN EVERY PAGE – THE ADVENTURE OF ROBERT CARO AND ROBERT GOTTLIEB'
Grade: A-
Rated: PG (for some language, brief war images and smoking)
Running time: 1:52
How to watch: Now in theaters
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