Turn Every Page, the documentary from Sony Pictures Classics, will open in New York and Los Angeles on December 30. Directed by Lizzie Gottlieb, the film explores the remarkable 50-year relationship between two literary legends--Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Caro and his editor, Robert Gottlieb--as they race to complete their joint work.
Their working relationship has forged one of publishing's most iconic and productive partnerships. Caro, whose book The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (edited by Gottlieb) continues to be a bestseller after 48 years, is now 87 and working to complete the fifth and final volume of his masterwork, The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Gottlieb, 91, waits to edit it.
Directed by Gottlieb's daughter, Lizzie Gottlieb, Turn Every Page "explores their remarkable creative collaboration, including the behind-the-scenes drama of the making of Caro's The Power Broker and the LBJ series. With humor and insight, this unique double portrait reveals the work habits, peculiarities and professional joys of these two ferocious intellects. It arrives at the culmination of a journey that has consumed both their lives and impacted generations of politicians, activists, writers and readers, and furthered our understanding of power and democracy," Sony Pictures Classics noted.
Gottlieb "has been the editor in chief of Simon and Schuster, Knopf, and the New Yorker," said Lizzie Gottlieb: "While my father is very close to many of his writers, there is something different and special and strange about his relationship with Caro. They have been working together for 50 years and are now in a race against time to finish their life's work..... These men are camera shy and not prone to sharing their process with the public, but I realized that they might open up to me. If I could capture what goes on between them, I could open a window into a secretive creative process, a vanishing world of book publishing, and reveal one of the great untold stories of creative alchemy."