“Words matter, mood matters, rhythm matters, commas matter, semicolon matters – and the fights go on,” we’re told in the latest trailer for Lizzie Gottleib’s “Turn Every Page – The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb.” The doc serves as an homage to the lifelong achievements of Pulitzer prize-winning author Caro and legendary editor Robert Gottlieb, the director’s own father. Through Caro and Gottlieb, the film documents the seldom-seen perspective of the writer-editor relationship, in a literary partnership that has spanned “50 years, five books, 4,888 pages – and they’re not finished yet,” the trailer details.
“Turn Every Page” follows the duo as Caro, 86, races against the clock to finish the swan song of his writing career, “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” and Gottlieb, 91, eagerly waits to go over the manuscript with the editor’s pencil. The possibility that Caro may not finish this capstone project at all and his longtime partner may not even get a chance to edit is a specter that “looms over every scene,” the film’s director told us.
“I wanted to capture the delicate power balance between them, the steadfast dedication to craft, collaboration, and the incredible industriousness with which they approach the process of writing and editing,” Lizzie Gottlieb explained. “I wanted to really understand what it takes to create something that changes how people understand power, and that will endure.”
Robert Gottlieb has edited the writing of Toni Morrison, Joseph Heller, Doris Lessing, Bill Clinton, John le Carré, Nora Ephron, and Salman Rushdie. Yet, as Lizzie Gottlieb revealed to us, “One of his most complicated, celebrated, and mysterious relationships” is with Caro. She emphasized, “I wanted to make this film to try to understand a wildly productive, oddly contentious, hugely important collaboration, and through that, to open a window into a secretive creative process, a vanishing world of book publishing, and the way truths about power in America are revealed.”
“Turn Every Page – The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb” hits theaters December 30. It premiered at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.
