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.
