The two Bobs — Robert Caro, left, and Robert Gottlieb — have worked together for five decades. The documentary “Turn Every Page,” gives viewers insight into the writing and editing process.
Making movies about writers is notoriously difficult, though the temptation is clear. After all, filmmakers, like authors, are storytellers, and are drawn to other people who tell them. But as with any other kind of story, clichés often do those movies in: The poet laments via ponderous voice-over narration. Words clack across the screen letter by letter in Smith Corona font.
Let me use this column, then, to draw attention to the less celebrated art, one that is not cited on the cover of that book but is showcased in the film: the work of the editor. Bob Gottlieb! Now I was nervous. What had I said to the legendary Gottlieb? I quailed, fleeing the scene. The former editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, the former editor of The New Yorker, the former president, publisher and editor-in-chief of Alfred A. Knopf, a man whose writers included Toni Morrison and Chaim Potok, Michael Crichton and Doris Lessing, Joseph Heller, Nora Ephron, Barbara Tuchman, Sidney Poitier, Salman Rushdie, John Cheever and John le Carré.
Of course, a good editor does more than that. In order to make “The Power Broker” physically publishable, Gottlieb helped Caro cut roughly 350,000 words from the book. Later he intuited that Caro’s next project should be different from the book he was contracted to write; separately, the two Bobs both landed on Lyndon Johnson as its subject. On the page, words like “loom” can provoke endless debate.
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