Then, Foos, after enough time had elapsed that he could no longer get in trouble, sells his story, and Talese sells his book. Eagle-eyed viewer spots 'suspicious' moment she put hand under table and played with her ring, Fun and flattering, these are the tummy-compressing '80s-style leggings that reviewers say are the most comfortable they've ever worn, 'My smile lines are disappearing before my eyes!' Immediately, the film ties the figures of Talese and Foos togetheror, rather, Talese ties himself to the voyeur, explicitly, when he says matter-of-factly, Im a voyeur myself. He gives a tour of his obsessive archives, materials kept in boxes covered in collages with headlines and images from articles on and by Talese. MacDonald, presuming throughout the process that McGinnis's book would help to exonerate him, at least in the court of public opinion if not a court of law, instead learns--during a live broadcast on60 Minutes--that he's been had. BARNEY CALMAN: Only 2% of death certificates just say 'old age' so did it REALLY kill the Queen? Not exactly. This alone makes the film by turns fascinating and unsettling. Talese and Foos are essentially two old white men trying to go out with a bang (sorry), dressing up an act of sexual deviancy and illegal voyeurism with an old-fashioned wink that, much like its conceit, no longer quite works in the stringent light of late 2017. What causes someone to become a voyeur in the first place is invariably rooted in a childhood sexual experience. Not once in the film does anyone, editors included, ever show concern for those who stayed in Fooss motel, who were watched and recorded without their consent. Experts say that a feeling of having secret power over people is a crucial part of its attraction. The links between the two dont stop there. And yet Talese, far from being repulsed by his subject, seems to connect with him on a multitude of levels. It's in this moral gray area that some of journalism's greatest lessons--and implications--can be explored. Ballard, in an interview, confirmed that Foos retained a key to the property and could have entered it without him knowing. Both men have spent large periods of their lives studying the oddities of sexual behavior, one from an attic, unseen, and the other as an active participant in the 70s swinging scene for his 1980 book Thy Neighbors Wife. And there you have the reverse procedure. Its all about sexual gratification. Family was everything and always came first for Jerry. Anita, his wife and fellow voyeur, is still alive, but Foos is estranged from his son, Mark, whose views on his fathers unedifying obsession are not known. Keep supporting great journalism by turning off your ad blocker. Asked about this apparent discrepancy, Foos said Ballard didnt take possession of the property until 1981. Shes long ago accepted what he is. Release Calendar Top 250 Movies Most Popular Movies Browse Movies by Genre Top Box Office Showtimes & Tickets Movie News India Once, he saw a guests dog foul a rooms carpet and furious when they didnt own up when they checked out he frogmarched them back to the room and pointed to the stain. Nobody will ever be able to do what I did, Foos boasts early in the film. Then they all lay quietly on the bed and relaxed, discussing vacuum cleaner sales, Foos wrote drily. However, he makes no excuses for his past behavior, and its a welcome uptick in the movies tone when he finally gets help and starts a sober life. We all try to do that.. Finders Keepers is full of that ridiculous, train-wreck, cant-look-away quality that made Tiger King such a hit. Martha Washington by James Peale, 1796, via George Washingtons Mount Vernon. But a strenuously-researched book, written with the consent of its subjects, about the dynamics of a Mafia family has clear value; a rigorless profile of a single Peeping Tom does not. Foos certainly felt betrayed by Talese, and immediately regretted consenting to the project upon the publication of Talese's New Yorkerpiece. Taleses time at a sexually-liberated nudist colony in the early 80s is brought up concerning the problems caused in his marriage. Nov 30, 2017, 11:41am PST. It makes the question of what kinds of stories, and which storytellers, were rewardingand yes, its rewarding when money is involvedall the more imperative to reckon with. If I had known that [when The Post told him after the ownership gap], I wouldnt have disavowed the book. Foos is outed as a serial peeping tom in Taleses story, which creates a maelstrom of media attention, and subjects him and his wife to threatening phone calls. Although he says in the piece that he hoped to, on the condition that the confidentiality agreement would one day be voided, he also says that he originally went to Colorado merely to meet this man and satisfy his curiosity. If the latter is true, then its hard to know what the journalistic motive was in not revealing the goings-on at the motel to authorities. Having bought the 21-room motel, Foos ingeniously converted it into a perverts paradise and spent the next 26 years spying on his guests sexual behaviour. Revealing himself to wider scrutiny for the first time, Foos admits he is nervous, explaining that he fears some may not be bowled over by his decades of devoted research. He appears uninterested in even wrestling with the question. Voyeur is a fascinating, queasy portrait of exposure. Like the children, she didnt know his secret. He hailed his dingy motel the finest laboratory in the world for observing people in their natural state, logging what they did in his Voyeurs Journal in such detail that he would even visit their rooms when they were out to double check a womans bra size. After his wife died, he married another woman Anita who, oddly, was even more enthusiastic about his voyeurism. As they drove to the motel, Foos described how his kind, hard-working parents had been German-American farmers who never discussed sex or seemed interested in it. Johns life choices force his mother, Peg Wood, and his sister Marian Lytle, to cut him out of the family. Gerald Foos (left) hand-picked Gay Talese to tell the story of how he spied on guests at his Colorado motel for decades. But around 1982, Ballard said he used wood and carpet to close off the vents that Foos had installed to peer into guests rooms from the annex. Talese, 84, recounts his long and bizarre friendship with Colorado motel owner Gerald Foos in a forthcoming book, parts of which he sent to Talese after first contacting him in 1980. I would give as much money as Taleses book advance to hear what Nan Talese has to say about all of this. The confidentiality agreement Talese signed was voided by Foos; in addition to the New Yorker article, which is an excerpt, Talese has written a book on the subject, which will be out later this year from Grove/Atlantic, which even paid Foos some money for his trouble. That people fight over money, pee in the sink, and prefer the missionary position? Foos insisted that he never harmed any of his guests, since none were aware of his watching them, and so the worst that might be said was that he was guilty of trying to see too much.". But so far is he from Malcolm and her characteristic self-interrogation that, in a recent NPR interview, Talese compared himself to Alfred Kinsey and James Joyce, saying that in their times they were both considered peddlers of smut as if his critics are prudes unhappy that he is explicit about sex, rather than concerned about his factual errors and the ethical problem of writing about people without their consent. The author traveled to Aurora, where he and Foos crept into the But by the end,Voyeurmorphs into something unexpected, and evenmoreself-referential than the initial conceit of an author identifying with his subject: it becomes a documentary about journalism itself, including documentary filmmaking. His mother always dressed in the privacy of her closet, so her sexually curious son started spying instead on his aunt, who lived on a neighbouring farm. But that doesnt quite begin to cover the strange synchronicity between writer and subject that unfurls in Voyeurthe metatextual layers of Foos unburdening himself to Talese, who in turn seems to divulge more about himself than he intends to the camera. My voyeuristic urges will now be placed into effect on a plane higher than anyone else has contemplated.. Its the true-life story of Gerald Foos, an obsessive voyeur who bought a motel in Colorado and for 30 years spied on the guests and kept a meticulous record of their sexual behavior. We learn about Talese's first encounter with Foos, in 1980, when Foos contacted him because of a book Talese was writing on the free love movement, Thy The movie is built around the question of what could compel both menstudious longtime observers of human behaviorto turn themselves into subjects, given all the attendant risks of exposure. Dr John ONeill, director of the Menninger sex addiction clinic in Texas, dismisses as self-delusion Fooss attempts to intellectualise his peeping and his insistence he never hurt anyone. Meanwhile, the film also captures Talese's reckoning with his own motivations, and his ability to compartmentalize Foos into the box of "subject" in a whatever-it-takes approach to get the story. Its good to know that Talese is finally feeling responsible for something, but the problem is that Foos behavior was able to continue undisturbed for so long, not that it is now finally public. (The absurdity and bathos of the scenewith Taleses tie slipping through a slat and dangling over the bed, thus almost revealing him and Foosis just one of the bizarrely compelling, borderline unbelievable bits in the piece. The couple eventually married after Foos divorced his first wife, who died in 1984. Hes absurdly grandiose at times, apparently delusional at others, and yet almost pathetically needy for Taleses approval. Revealing As the film goes on, more and more people appear to defend Voyeur as a literary endeavor, from Taleses book publisher to his editor at The New Yorker. Throughout his recounting, Talese is constantly noting his own ambivalence, but its impossible to know how much of this is sincere. I write about film, the arts, and design. Was Talese ever concerned about what other dangerous and possibly illegal things Foos had done? Gerald Foos (left) and Gay Talese in 'Voyeur'. So much of the damage comes in the discovery, the horror of finding out that your private moments were not private. Anita, Fooss quiet and strange wife (who should be played by Kate McKinnon if the scrapped Voyeur movie ever gets made), says she misses the motel, and even We learn about Foos and hisobsession with observing human sexuality in the name of "scientific research," from the late 1960s through the mid-1980s. Its worth investing years of correspondence with Foos, and engaging in a dubiously personal relationship with his subject, to persuade him to finally go on the record. Not often do you see the moment when a man looks in the mirror and doesnt like who he sees. When the men contact the sites to have their likenesses taken down, they are almost instantly met with threats of lawsuits and exposure, as well as threats against their families. This is no time for old perverts. Both Foos and Talese are inclined to talk, and the filmmakers give them space to do so rather than interject with follow-up questions. And we learn that Talese, for all their superficial differences, identifies with Foos. He explains this to the directors of a new Netflix documentary debuting Friday because Foos has come to be that most contradictory of beings: a voyeur who wants to be seen. He wasnt exaggerating. He was never caught and we only know his astonishing story because he couldnt resist seeking the acclaim he thought he deserved. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. She/her. Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Foos watched the whole thing go down without intervening. Play it now! He was born on November 27 2008. For all his caution, he did sometimes take risks. Except that, apparently, you can. We learn that Talese never wound up writing about Foos until his 2016New Yorker piece. Like all addicts, voyeurs try to rationalise their addictions and Foos insisted he was engaged in a serious scientific study akin to that of the famous sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. Annalisa Quinn is a freelance journalist and critic covering books and culture. What could justify encouraging this? In any case, Foos himself has said previously that he didnt have access to the motel from 1983 until 1988, when it was owned and operated by a family to whom Ballard had sold it. However, Talese knows Foos was telling the truth because he invited the writer to see his twisted operation for himself. Foos wrote to Talese in 1980 with his story, guessing correctly that it would pique the interest of the writer, who had made a name for himself as a kind of undercover reporter in the jungles of free love with his book Thy Neighbors Wife. We learn about Talese's first encounter with Foos, in 1980, when Foos contactedhimbecause of a book Talese was writing on the free love movement,Thy Neighbor's Wife, to express his desire to be a subject ofor collaborator on that or future projects about sex. Play trailer 2:17. Morgan Entrekin, the president and publisher of Grove/Atlantic, told me that because of the books reliance on over 20,000 words of copyright material, we either have a choice of not using it, or paying the copyright owner a fee. When I asked about Foos, Entrekin responded by saying, Is the guy a particularly savory character? "What charges, if any, might be levied against Gerald Foos?" We are no longer accepting comments on this article. He was the subject of Gay Talese's 2016 article "The Voyeur's All rights reserved. (The murder appears to have occurred in 1977Foos is bad with datesbefore Talese entered the picture. And the man doing the staring owner Gerald Foos has just been exposed as historys most determined and dedicated Peeping Tom. Voyeur captures this evolution, from willing collaborator to bitter adversary. (His hypocrisy and moralism on certain issuessuch as government spying, which he is againstis one of the things that make him such an interesting protagonist.) 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