Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticThe enthralling documentary “Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb” opens with white-on-black credits accompanied by the staccato pecks of a typewriter, which will be music to some viewers’ ears.
Robert Caro, the author at the center of the documentary, writes towering books of nonfiction — “The Power Broker,” his 1,280-page study of how Robert Moses literally shaped the city of New York, and “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” his four-volume biography that’s currently awaiting its fifth and final volume — but taps out these imperially detailed and captivating tomes on an old electric typewriter, X-ing out passages as he goes along, backing up each page with an extra sheet and a piece of carbon paper.
You can’t get much more analog than that. As “Turn Every Page” reveals, Caro is still married to the methods of the last century; the digital revolution hasn’t touched him.
It’s up to us to decide if this is merely a charming quirk or somehow mysteriously integral to the fact that Caro has been hailed as the greatest biographer of his time.
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