Three Fun Things for June 16, 2024
A film about two 20th century publishing giants, an album of Tom Petty covers, and a fascinating piece on film photography.
1. Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb (Streaming, Criterion Collection
One reason I put off watching this documentary about the legendary author Robert Caro and his equally legendary editor, Robert Gottlieb, is that there’s a finite amount of Caro material in the world and I feel the need to make it last. (This is silly. One can always reread the Power Broker.) Caro himself inspires this feeling: In more than 50 years, the man has written five monumental books, plus one about writing that, for similar reasons, I haven’t gotten around to reading. If this documentary was going to offer new insights into the minds behind some of the greatest nonfiction books of the 20th century, I was happy to wait a while before absorbing them.
But this film was lighter, funnier, and more impressionistic than I expected (although with that subtitle, I should have had a clue). Director Lizzie Gottlieb—Bob Gottlieb’s daughter—has a light touch, interviewing both men separately in a number of settings before finally, at the end, bringing them together for a visit to their publisher’s office, where they wander around for several minutes, two men out of time, asking everyone they encounter if they have a yellow #2 pencil.
You won’t learn too much about Robert Caro’s “process,” or even the proper way to use a semicolon, from this film. What you will learn is that, according to Gottlieb, “everything is of equal importance” to Caro, from semicolons to the direction the sun was slanting into the windows of LBJ’s childhood home as he interviewed the President’s brother, Sam Houston Johnson. You’ll also learn about a type of relationship that has been driven to extinction by a publishing industry that no longer has patience for slow, meticulous authors like Caro—a lifelong relationship between editor and writer. Caro and Gottlieb aren’t friends, although they are friendly; they don’t socialize, and most of their interactions take place insider the editing room. Both men separately told director Gottlieb that editing is too private a process to let anyone observe, and when she finally talks them into letting her film them in the editing room, the scenes are overlaid with music, leaving the viewer to speculate about what they might be saying.
As someone who started my own career calling in stories over pay phones and debating pages covered in a sea of blue grease pencil marks, I was struck by how much of the world Caro and Gottlieb inhabited is probably no longer legible to contemporary authors and journalists, from organizing chapters by pinning pages on the wall to writing first drafts in longhand on legal paper, something I used to do myself while working a quiet job at a theater box office near the Texas Observer. “Turn every page,” of course, refers to the editorial imperative to read every document—and while I often fear this idea has been lost in an era when so many outlets have decided editors don’t matter, the existence of Turn Every Page made me feel a little hopeful that those values haven’t been lost just yet.
Petty Country (Out June 21), featuring Steve Earle, “Yer So Bad”
You don’t have to turn the twang dial up too far Petty solidly in country territory, but it’s always delightful to hear his songs in a different voice—even when, as with Dolly Parton’s cover of “Southern Accents,” the cover makes me fonder of the original. Steve Earle’s cover of "Yer So Bad,” a deeply silly song from Petty’s 1990 album Full Moon Fever, is an exception: Earle’s world-weary voice, backed by peppy banjos, updates and softens Petty’s more sneering original. Name anyone, besides Petty himself, who could deliver the line, “My sister got lucky, married a yuppie” better.
3. “The Lost Art of the Negative,” New York Times
Returning for a moment to the world of analog media, this NYT story about photo negatives made me think about something I haven’t considered: When a film photographer picks up their prints or, more likely, receives scans of their images, they often leave the negatives behind. (Film, believe it or not, is going through a resurgence.) That’s a problem, because it’s the negative images that carry the copyright, not the prints—the same way an author’s words, not each physical book, constitute a written work. “Put simply,” per this brief but fascinating piece: “Whoever has the negatives has the mechanism to reproduce the work but not the copyright to do so; the artist sans negatives has the right but not the means.” Even if you don’t remember the anticipation of dropping a roll of film off at the drug store, this story shines a light on issues that remain relevant at a time when we all have the ability to store thousands of images on a device in our pockets.