Review: 'Turn Every Page' reveals literary alliance of titans Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb

“No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft,” grumbled H.G. Wells of the complex and not always cordial artistic collaboration that is the relationship between writer and editor.

Perhaps Wells might not have been so defensive had he experienced the intensely symbiotic association that has endured for the past half-century between the greatest political writer of his time and a legend in the book editing profession.

Such is the compelling takeaway from “Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb,” a spirited, revealing documentary that chronicles the successful yet necessarily private alliance between two literary titans as they methodically work toward the completion of Caro’s long-awaited fifth and final volume of his definitive Lyndon Johnson biographies.

After encountering considerable resistance from both individuals, director Lizzie Gottlieb (Robert Gottlieb’s daughter) was finally allowed to shine light on their closely guarded process, albeit with Caro’s contention that the two never be interviewed together in the same room.

A former newspaper reporter who still bangs out pages on his trusty Smith Corona Electra 210 typewriter, Caro, now 87, has forged a reputation on his painstakingly exhaustive approach to research that has earned the adjective “Caro-esque,” as represented by those first four “Years of Lyndon Johnson” volumes.

A lifelong voracious reader who contends that editing is “an intelligent and sympathetic reaction to the text and what the author is trying to accomplish,” Gottlieb, now 91, has edited between 600 and 700 books, authored by the likes of Joseph Heller, John le Carré, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison and, more recently, Bill Gates.

“He could see any blob of clay and imagine a sculpture,” praises former President Clinton, whose 2005 memoir, “My Life,” benefited from Gottlieb’s well-sharpened HB No.2 pencil.

The project that first brought Caro and Gottlieb together in 1973 was the manuscript for “The Power Broker,” a commanding assessment of influential New York urban planner Robert Moses, which required a 350,000-word pruning in order to be contained in one volume without literally bursting the spine at the seams.

That book, which would go on to win Caro the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes, has endured, enjoying something of a resurgence during the COVID lockdown, amounting to a 1,344-page badge of merit.

While the filmmaker wisely keeps the spotlight on her two intriguing subjects, she also mines keen insights from contemporaries and self-described fans, including Barack Obama; Caro’s longtime agent, Lynn Nesbit; Conan O’Brien; and Ethan Hawke.

Most illuminating are the observations provided by their wives, whose nuturing half-century-plus marriages to their work-obsessed husbands have seen Ina Caro agreeing to move the family to rural Hill County in Texas for three years for all that LBJ research, and actor Maria Tucci reluctantly putting up with husband Gottlieb’s completist collection of odd plastic handbags on display over their bed.

At the end of the day, it’s all about “making public your own enthusiasm,” Gottlieb says of the shared goal between editor and writer.

Not that the two Bobs haven’t contentiously sparred over the years — Gottlieb contends that a semicolon is “worth fighting civil war” over — but the pair ultimately seem to manage to land on the same page more often than not.

Too bad H.G. Wells isn’t around to take notes.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.