This engrossing 2022 documentary chronicles the 50-year-and-counting collaboration between two literary lions: political biographer Robert Caro, who turned 87 on October 30, 2022, and his editor, Robert Gottlieb, who turned 91 on April 29, 2022. The dynamic duo firstteamed up for the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1974 bestseller The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York; at the time this film was shot, they were working on the fifth and final volume of Caro’s epic The Years of Lyndon Johnson, still unfinished at the time of the movie’s release. (Gottlieb’s track record as an editor also includes such novels as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, as well as nonfiction landmarks like Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment and Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death.)
The running theme in the Caro/Gottlieb canon—the uses and abuses of power in politics—seems especially urgent now, in a time when so many people feel disenfranchised in, and disengaged from, the American democratic system. To write about the controversial and complex careers of New York City public works czar Robert Moses and U.S. president Lyndon Johnson, Caro interviewed thousands of people and—with his wife and sole research assistant, historian Ina Caro—pored over countless documents. The movie’s title references the advice Caro says he got from his editor when he was a young investigative reporter at Long Island’s Newsday newspaper: “Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamn page.”Directed by Lizzie Gottlieb—the daughter of Robert Gottlieb and his wife, actress Maria Tucci—Turn Every Page focuses on the partnership involved in putting a great book to bed, ranging from what to cut and how to set up a scene to when to use—and not use—a semicolon. “The great thing about Bob is also the maddening thing about him,” Gottlieb says about Caro. “Everything is of total importance. The first chapter of the book, and a semicolon—they’re of equal importance. . . . I’m like that too. It takes one to know one.” PG, 112 min.