2017 Films: #35. Voyeur

Netflix viewing on January 12th in Chicago. Myles Kane and Josh Koury direct this documentary about legendary journalist Gay Talese's book The Voyeur's Motel. The film follows Telese's over 30 year relationship with Gerlad Foos, a motel owner from Aurora, CO. Foos purchased a motel in the late 60s with the intent on spying on guests from an observation platform that he built. Foos spent hours spying on his guests and kept detailed notes about their habits. Foos invited Talese to visit the hotel back in 1980 and even took Telese up into his observation platform to spy on guests so he could get a feel for what it was like.

Telese kept in contact with Foos for over thirty years before deciding to put everything together for a New Yorker article that would later expand into a book. Foos' authenticity was called into question when New Yorker fact checkers found a discrepancy in when he actually bought the motel. He told Talese he bought it 1966 but records show that the didn't actually purchase it until 1969 which could invalidate his notes between that time frame.

 Upon the book's publication, The Washington Post discovered that Foos had actually sold the motel in 1983, not in the 90s as he told Talese. This forced to disavow the book until he contacted the purchaser and he informed Talese that Foos still used his keys to gain access to the platform to continue his peeping.

Say what you want about Mr. Talese as a journalist but he is a snappy dresser. 

Foos comes off as a bit of a creeper for obvious reasons. What's weird is that both of his wives seemed cool with what he was doing. Foos refers to his platform as a "laboratory" and his peeping as an experiment. Albeit a weird one. Despite his detailed notes, Foos appears to have exaggerated about witnessing a murder back in 1977. New Yorker fact checkers tried to find about the murder but there was nothing at Foos' motel. There was a similar murder that fit Foos' description but nothing ever comes of it and the article and book get published anyway.

Clearly Foos is a creepazoid of the highest degree. But I came away thinking that Talese and the New Yorker were a bit sloppy. Discrepancies were found and it didn't seem to bother anyone and they didn't do a very thorough job of tracing the sale of the motel. Foos has some credibility issues as well and seems like a bit of an attention seeker. I also can't imagine that everything Foos observed was salacious. There had to have been an endless amount of entries where people just did nothing.

The film received a 78% Rotten Tomatoes rating. Kane and Koury do a very nice job of building the narrative that kept me glued to my seat. A nice documentary that's worth watching.