This is Fresh Air, I'm Terry Gross. My guest Robert Gottlieb is perhaps the most acclaimed editor of his time.

His first real job was at the publishing house Saminen Schuster in 1955.

From there he became the editor-in-chief of the literary publishing house Alfred A. Knopf.

Gottlieb has edited scores of books, including fiction, history, biography, and memoir.

By such authors as Joseph Heller, Jessica Mittford, Doris Lessing, Tony Morrison, John Chiever, John LaCarrie, Catherine Graham, Bill Clinton, Nora Effren, Michael Criton, and Lauren Bacall.

He left Knopf to become the editor of The New Yorker in 1987, taking over from William Sean, and remained at the magazine for five years.

One of the remarkable parts of his career is his more than 50 years and counting as Robert Carrows editor. Carrows wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning 1974 Best Seller, The Power Broker, and exhaustive investigation into how Robert Moses reshaped New York City and how he used and abused power.

The use and abuse of power is also at the heart of Carrows' biography of Lyndon Johnson. Carrows is writing the fifth and final volume, Gottlieb is waiting to edit it, and they're hoping they're able to finish in time. Carrows is 87, Gottlieb 91.

Their often contentious collaboration is at the heart of the New Documentary, Turn Every Page, directed by Lizzie Gottlieb, who's also with us. Robert Gottlieb is her father.

Her first film was a documentary about her brother, Nikki, and his life with autism spectrum disorder. I'm going to speak with Lizzie first, and then with her father.

Lizzie Gottlieb, welcome to Fresh Air. I really enjoyed the film, so thank you for being here. I want you to describe your father's importance in the literary world.

My father has been publishing books since 1955 when he started at Simon & Schuster, and he is still editing and publishing books. He's now 91 years old, and so he's edited and published so many of the great writers of the last, oh my gosh, is it 70 years?

Alas, he says, it's 70 years, and he's still at it. And what about Robert Carrows' importance? How would you describe that?

Well, Robert Carrows means so much to so many people, and I think what he does is he describes first in the Powerbroker, and then in his series of books about Lyndon Johnson, he describes how power actually works in America.

First on an urban level with Robert Moses, and then on a national level with Lyndon Johnson. So I think the reason people who read Carrows feel so strongly about his work is that when you've read these enormous books that are thrilling and page turners, you feel that you're sort of in on a secret of how the world we live in was constructed.

Why did you want to make the film not a documentary about your father, but about his relationship with Robert Carrows? A lot of the film is about your father, but the subject you keep going back to is their collaborative relationship.

You know, I didn't want to make a film that was an ode to a great man, either of these great men. You know, I find them incredibly inspiring and magnificent. But I feel that a film needs to center on a question, a drama, conflict, you know, and there has to be something at stake.

And I think I was drawn to this story because here are these two guys who have been working together for over 50 years and are really in a race against time to finish their life's work.

And the relationship between them is wildly productive, but also peculiar and contentious and dramatic.

So I felt that if I could capture that, if I could first convince them to let me capture that, which was not easy, but if I could capture it, I thought that I would be able to kind of bring people into this secretive process and this creative alchemy of what happens between these two guys and sort of vanishing world of book publishing.

Neither your father nor Robert Carro were enthusiastic about the idea of you making a documentary about their collaborative relationship. So how did you convince them to do it?

Yeah, you know, the idea came to me like a lightning bolt. I thought this is the greatest idea. I have to do this. And I was so convinced of it that it didn't occur to me that they wouldn't also think it was a great idea.

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