Diminutive in stature, Gay Talese is a giant in literary circles.
His Esquire pieces on Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra in the 1960s set the standard for nonfiction storytelling. In a 1981 book, Thy Neighbor’s Wife, he, himself, went under the sheets to chronicle the sexual culture of pre-AIDs America.
But about a year before that work was published, he received an extraordinary letter.
It was from Gerald Foos, a Colorado motel owner who had been doing some documentation of his own.
Turns out that for years, Foos had been spying on guests through fake vents in the ceilings of more than a dozen rooms. Never discovered, he had catalogued his twisted observations in an erotic census he felt Talese would find interesting.
The author did, writing about Foos first in The New Yorker and then in a 2016 book entitled The Voyeur’s Motel.
In a recently released documentary (Voyeur), Netflix examines this sordid tale and Talese’s unflinching efforts to get it out in the open.
Producers get to the root of Foos’s creepy obsession, and the audience is told why to this day he can’t face prosecution (the statutes of limitations for such crimes have expired). Viewers also learn that much of what he saw was simply the tedium of everyday life.
But adult themes aside, Talese is a reporter’s author and this is a reporter’s tale.
In Voyeur, journalists will recognize themselves tiptoeing through the minefield of a complicated story. They also will empathize with the hand-holding and reassurance that the goes with gaining a sources’s trust.
Next time you’re on Netflix, check out Voyeur. You may never look at motels the same way again.
Here We Go 