“Turn Every Page” and “Surf Girls Hawai’i”

Both of these excellent documentaries are on Amazon Prime. So I do apologize ( I am sympathetic but just don’t have that kind of willpower).

It’s not necessary to have read any of Robert Caro’s books to appreciate “Turn Every Page” but it definitely adds to the enjoyment. Caro’s first book The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York published 1974 both chronicles and meticulously examines how Robert Moses, an unelected official, rose to be the most powerful man in New York. He began as an urban planner with egalitarian ideals but over his 44 year reign transformed New York City for better and lots of worse to meet his singular vision. He was a mass of ideological contradictions–for example– he built highways so that wealthy Long Island Land Barons no longer had exclusive rights to the beaches, but he also intentionally built bridges over those highways with headroom too low for buses, to exclude those city dwellers who had no car. Read the book. The 1300 pages are gripping (not kidding). Caro’s next work was a four volume series, The Years of Lyndon Johnson. At 87 he is working on the fifth and final volume. I haven’t read it, but I did read Working, a short and wonderful book published 2019 about his researching Moses and Johnson. Caro’s editor, first at Knopf Publishing and then at the New Yorker was Robert Gottlieb. Never personal friends, though closer than that in many ways, the film is about their collaboration of over fifty years. Gottlieb’s daughter,Lizzie, is the filmmaker. She has created an affectionate, well-crafted record of the intellectual relationship between two brilliant men now working under the “time-clock of life”. Although especially inspiring to those of us of a certain age, it should appeal to anyone who cares about reading (and New York City) As a side note: I learned later that Gottlieb, age 92 died just two months ago. This makes the movie even more poignant.

Surf Girls has nothing to do with New York or power hungry men. Reese Witherspoon is one of the producers of this five part documentary series about five young native Hawaiian women, ranging in age from 17 to 27 who are training and competing in the World Surfing League Champion Tour. Similar in one respect to the previous film it is an affectionate portrait of their skills and their relationship to each other. Like Gottlieb and Caro, they are passionate about what they do and obsessed with doing it right. Gorgeous athletic bodies, the ocean and the beaches all add up to a visual treat, but the movie is also a very inspiring story of women making their way in what until relatively recently was a man’s world. It’s not likely that you will want to watch more than one episode a night–it has some tense moments and it can be slow at times, but just hang loose ’cause it’s really a pretty gnarly series.