Watch the Trailer for Netflix’s Gay Talese Doc Voyeur
Photo by Nicholas Hunt/GettyThe trailer for Netflix’s documentary Voyeur is here, and it takes a somewhat different approach than you might expect.
The film follows famed writer Gay Talese in the fallout from his 2016 nonfiction book The Voyeur Motel, which was about motel owner Gerald Foos. Foos installed an “observation platform” in his Colorado motel that allowed him to watch all his patrons. Talese had largely trusted Foos’ version of the events he talks about, a fact which later came back to bite him when reporters found that Foos hadn’t even been accurate with the dates that he had owned the motel. Because of this, Talese was criticized for being overly trusting and sympathetic with Foos.
All this controversy surrounding the book drew much more attention than the book itself, which was also criticized as being merely window dressing for direct quotes from Foos’ extensive journals. All this makes for good fodder for a documentary—but while you might have expected a documentary to focus on the media uproar surrounding the book, Voyeur seems to focus on the relationship between Talese and Foos.
Judging by the trailer, the film seems to very much focus on the perspectives of the two men, which is a risky path to tread, given that Talese himself was criticized for being too sympathetic to his subject. Could Voyeur have the same problem?
Voyeur releases on Netflix on Dec. 1.