I am looking forward to watching the documentary “Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb“
Here is the trailer:
Lizzie Gottlieb, the daughter of Robert Caro’s editor Bob Gottlieb, recently spoke with Literary Hub’s Lisa Liebman.. Here is a taste of interview:
Lisa Liebman: You said that it took Caro quite a while to open up and trust you and the process. What were you doing when that happened? Was it filming with him at LBJ’s boyhood home, the place that he got Johnson’s brother to honestly recount childhood memories? Did you use the same technique?
Lizzie Gottlieb: At first Bob didn’t want to do this project at all. I think he rightly felt that a writer shouldn’t want to have their editorial process made public because [it’s] supposed to disappear, and the reader should feel that the writer is writing directly to them. So for those secrets to be revealed—what was changed by an editor, or by that collaboration—feels intrusive and maybe not appropriate. You don’t want readers to read a book and think, Oh maybe the editor was right: this should have been different….You want them to just experience the book. My father’s joke about that is, nobody wants to hear an editor say, “And then I said to him, Leo, don’t just do war, do peace, too.”
So I think Bob was skeptical or suspicious, appropriately, of what I might want to show and why I might want to show it. His process of coming to trust me was a gradual one [that] started when we had an initial conversation, and he went from saying that he didn’t want to speak publicly about his writing process, to realizing that he had never seen a film about a writer and an editor, and that it might be meaningful for people to understand that. And I think he liked the fact that it was taking me so many years to make the film. He was like, That’s my kind of girl.
By the time we went to Texas and we sat in that boyhood home of Lyndon Johnson and he told us the story of how he recovered the story of Johnson’s youth, he really believed that we were doing something honorable, and that we were looking for the truth. So maybe I was learning from him. I was doing a bit of a Caro: trying to take the time I needed to get to the truth of the story I was trying to tell.
Read the entire interview here.