In the mid 1960s, American journalist Robert Caro set out on a mission. Over the course of the next seven years, he chronicled, in painstaking detail, the career of New York city planner Robert Moses — his rise, fall, and everything in between. The result was over a million words, assembled into a manuscript that became The Power Broker. He began to send out the beginning of the manuscript, desperately hoping someone would take the hefty pile of pages.

Luckily for him, the head of Knopf publishing house fell in love with it instantly. It was long, but it sucked the reader in, and Caro’s skill and eloquence was revealed through every sentence. The leadership at Knopf set Robert Caro up in meetings with a series of editors. The first four were inconsequential, because during the last meeting, Robert Caro met Robert Gottlieb. 

Robert Gottlieb has a star-studded network of authors whom he has edited. The legendary editor has worked with Toni Morrison, Bill Clinton, and on Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. A graduate of Columbia University and Cambridge, Gottlieb has worked for Simon & Schuster, Knopf, and the New Yorker. Quickly shooting up through the ranks at every house he worked for, Gottlieb’s editorial and intellectual skill was no secret.

Gottlieb knew within fifteen pages that he wanted to work on The Power Broker. But, despite the quality of the writing, he knew he couldn’t sell anyone on two volumes about Robert Moses and intricate details of New York City politics. So he and Caro set out on a mission to cut nearly 350,000 words from Caro’s mountainous manuscript. (For comparison on that word count, this article is roughly 1,500 words.) The book was finished in 1974, at around 1,200 pages. Despite its daunting length, the book sold and sold, and 50 years later, continues to sell — the book had sold over 500,000 copies.

Caro and Gottlieb are now 87 and 91 years old, respectively. Titans of their respective industries of journalism and editing/publishing, they have published four more books together, all part of an epic around the life and times of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Though originally planned to be a trilogy, Caro is still hard at work on volume five. Morbid questions surround the pair: will they both still be alive to get the last book out? The underlying message of questions like this is clear: nobody but Caro could finish this book, and nobody but Gottlieb could edit it.

For the past five years, Gottlieb’s daughter Lizzie, a documentary filmmaker, has been working on a documentary about the partnership between her father and Robert Caro. At times fiery, their close partnership is unlike Gottlieb’s work with any of his other writers. Intrigued by this difference, Lizzie set out to find answers. The documentary film ‘Turn Every Page,’ answers some of them, and premiered at Film Forum in lower Manhattan in December 2022.

Originally, Robert Caro didn’t want this documentary to be made. Lizzie Gottlieb had to beg for him to take part, and eventually convinced him, after years of argument. Even so, he had his own terms and conditions, including but not limited to no filming while editing. 

At a few points throughout the documentary, Lizzie Gottlieb and other interviewers would ask Caro a question, and he would shake his head. He shows a closet in his office where, at the end of each day, he leaves the day’s word count written on the wall. When Lizzie Gottlieb asked if she could film it, he initially beckoned her over, before changing his mind. There are words written there too, a few thoughts about the day’s work, which he didn’t want the camera seeing. Quickly, he slammed the door shut.

Later on, a similar instance happened. Back in his office, he was showing off the wall where he puts up his outlines to look at while he writes. The cameras moved in closer to get a better view of the wall, but Caro pushed them away, telling the videographer that they didn’t need to see that. Occasionally cagey but more often willing to share about his past and his writing process process, Caro is exactly the man I expected him to be.

In the process of writing The Power Broker, Robert Caro conducted 522 interviews. He spoke with experts for sure, but also with men and women on the street. For his reporting on the devastating impacts of Robert Moses’s building projects, it only made sense to speak to the people devastated by them. He visited neighborhoods across New York, all united by Moses projects cutting through them.

Robert Caro is a meticulous man. His interviews for The Power Broker were only the tip of the iceberg; for his books on Lyndon B. Johnson, he went even further. The exchange of power still fascinated him, but he was done with New York, so he and Gottlieb settled on Lyndon B. Johnson as his next project. From the Texas Hill Country to the Senate to the White House — that was a story Caro wanted to tell.

Born and raised in New York, Caro could understand Robert Moses’s world. But LBJ was from the Texas Hill Country, a whole other world. At the beginning of his research, Caro went down to Texas to visit, but found that the locals didn’t want much to do with him, and he didn’t get the scoop for which he was hunting. Instead of giving up, he decided to move his family to the dirt-poor middle of Texas in order to truly get into LBJ’s head.

In addition to on-site research, Caro also spent lots of time sifting through files in the LBJ presidential library. Alongside his wife, Ina Caro, he spent months in the library, poring over documents and searching for the tiny details that made the man who he was. Sometimes in his research, he stumbled upon cracks in commonly known stories. Without giving away too much of the movie, Caro found himself tracking down a man presumed dead in order to answer questions about election integrity in the race that got LBJ to the Senate.

Caro’s devotion to the minute and his resistance to cutting out a single paragraph has produced five books, totaling over 4,000 pages, four of which detail the life of one man. He works at his own pace, refusing to be rushed. At one point, the interviewer tiptoes around the question in the back of everyone’s mind: will the final LBJ book be completed before his or Gottlieb’s death? Caro’s answer was frank — “Are you asking me when I think I’ll die?” 

Lizzie Gottlieb does an incredible job ensuring there is value in every shot of the documentary. Running a bit shy of two hours, it never feels rushed yet never lags. New quirks of Caro and her father’s personalities are revealed in every interview spot, and by the end of two hours we have grown fond of these two men. Not everyone has a writer for a grandfather like I do, but I’m sure many people watching could see a bit of a past English teacher or an older relative in the two of them.

In the final minutes of the documentary, Lizzie Gottlieb gets what she’s been hoping for during the whole filmmaking process — a glimpse into the editing room. But before that, Caro and Gottlieb take a tour of the Knopf offices hunting for a non mechanical pencil. It proves more difficult than either expected, and the video of the two wandering around is almost uncomfortably long, but serves a purpose. 

The world has changed around Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb. The publishing world they debuted in simply does not exist anymore, but the two men haven’t changed at quite the same rate. Caro still writes his drafts longhand and on a typewriter; the editing show comes to a screeching halt if the right kind of pencil is not on hand. 

Lizzie Gottlieb does a superb job making the most of every moment of this documentary. She is sure to get information right from the source, whether that means from Caro, her father, or one of the many expert talking heads brought in (a special shoutout to Bronx Science alum and founder of Sustainable South Bronx, Majora Carter ’84, who is interviewed in the film). Even if you wouldn’t consider yourself interested in the topics of the documentary, it’s definitely worth two hours of your time. Funny, smart, and made with care, the personalities and intelligence of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb shine through every shot of the film.

‘Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb’ is available for streaming (a payment is required to rent on demand) through Sony Pictures, HERE. 

Lizzie Gottlieb does an incredible job ensuring there is value in every shot of the documentary. Running a bit shy of two hours, it never feels rushed yet never lags. New quirks of Caro and her father’s personalities are revealed in every interview spot, and by the end of two hours we have grown fond of these two men. Not everyone has a writer for a grandfather like I do, but I’m sure many people watching could see a bit of a past English teacher or an older relative in the two of them.