Journalism icon Gay Talese reports on Gerald Foos, the owner of a Colorado motel, who allegedly secretly watched his guests with the aid of specially designed ceiling vents, peering down from an "observation platform" he built in the motel's attic.The movie starts with a lie: Gay Talese says he's 80. He's 87. In fact, he says he's 80 twice. I'm not sure anything in this movie is real. The truth is, the film is more about promoting Gay Talese than about Foos. The guy who claims to be Foos looks like a phony. Died hair giant glasses so strange. Is it good? Not so much

We learn how a New York reporter tries to cover for a severe professional blunder. The movie tracks a voyeur, who watches people in hotel rooms for decades. From his hiding spot where he spent hours each night staring at people through a hole in the ceiling. The reporter and the voyeur can't get enough of the limelight. They thrive on the notoriety. When it goes sour, when the voyeur's errors in fact come out, our hero reporter spends the rest of the movie covering for himself. From the start, the voyeur is being filmed in intimate detail and clearly enjoying the attention. He wants us to feel him as a victim in this experience. When all is said and done, their isn't much of a story. The film benefits from great production and editing. It would have been much better had the film used the French cinema reality style with a narrator in monotone third person. This film is depressing. The take away is that the more someone proclaims their integrity and honesty, the less likely it is to be true.

I do not get all these reviews raving about the brilliance of this documentary. To steal a tag line from the 90s hit comedy Seinfeld, I think this documentary could be billed as " the documentary about nothing". Gay Talese, at 80-something, is obviously not prepared to go gently into that good night. However, in searching for ways to rage against the dying of the light, he has completely erred in judgment and instead decided to write a book (and agree to participate in a documentary) about this purported voyeur who secretly watched his motel guests over 20 years, or is it 30 years? Who knows? Because the subject, Gerald Foos, is completely unreliable as a source, erring on three major points: 1) when he bought the motel - there is a discrepancy of three years from when he says he bought the motel and when it was actually purchased; 2) he neglected to tell Talese that he'd sold the motel a few years after he bought it; and 3) his story about witnessing a woman being murdered was not founded in fact.That a journalist of Talese's stature and reputation would write a book based on only one source, a completely unreliable one at that, is bad enough. That a major publication like The New Yorker would publish an article about it and that Talese's publisher would promote this book speaks volumes, I think, about the ovine nature of people. Somebody is deemed to be a major talent, therefore we just have to let him/her write away or shoot the film and we never have to question his/her source.My doubt about the veracity of this story was aroused several minutes in, when Foos describes the catwalk he built that allowed him to spy on motel guests through grates in the rooms' ceilings without being detected. WTF. I thought? Did he build his catwalk in concrete to completely muffle the noise of his footsteps? Why didn't the dogs of motel guests bark at the sound and/or scent of a human above them?Mr. Talese, you really need to spend the last few days or months (if not years) of your life in quiet contemplation of a life lived. If you once were this famed journalist who spared no effort to get the story right, forget about it. Your glory days are long gone.

This film makes one wonder how many times your own privacy has possibly been breached Oh, we all know right now we're in a new era where we all can be potentially intruded upon just by using our computer and cell phones. But before all of that there may have been some very driven individuals that made it their obsession to spy on random people. At least there was one, Gerald Foos. Foos made himself into the ultimate voyeur by creating his own honeytrap. He bought a small motor lodge and made it where he could spy on all tenants. This went on for just under two decades. Gerald had notes regarding what he saw and, what he saw was mostly sex. That, apparently was what he primarily desired. He claims he saw more and that included a murder he may have been partly responsible for in that he tampered with the contents of a tenants room which resulted in violence…and death. This is so he claims. The motel was ultimately bulldozed prior to the publication of both a pre-book huge New Yorker magazine article and the book thereafter. It makes it hard to substantiate much of what Foos claims. Is he a writer of fiction himself or was he, at least, a big portion of what he claimed?The other part of the story is Gay Talese who Gerald picked to tell his story to. Gay is no stranger to titillation. He has a history of written articles and books that substantiate this. Is this a intersection of two great writers or, a man bearing his other life to a writer who isn't afraid to go out on a limb for a story? This film visits all of this. It's a strange bird indeed. There is one big question hovering over all of this. Why did Foos want to put out what he claims is his true story, a really seedy and unsavory one? Was it for fame or money? Was it for a kind of late life plea for some kind of transparency for things he either wants to be remembered for or forgiven for? Watching the man himself one gets the idea he's still wanting more voyeurism only he's turning it on himself for some lasting fame and some kind of payday. He's a cagey criminal as far as the surface appears. Power and money are often the two things that drive most criminals. That's not to say many aren't also sociopaths. In the end Foos was a man pursuing his own dark desires. He felt he'd done something few, if any, others had done and got away with. Many years past feeding his sick inner needs Foos is empty and he's found one last way to feed his voyeurism again. He found the right vehicle in Talese who likes to marry hard journalism with, often, the worst of human nature. Can we believe either Foos or Talese? You'll have to decide.Talese always takes a pass as saying he's only a reporter but, that is not as clear-cut as it seems. It seems, after publication of the book, there's enough actual discrepancies to which Talese has cooked his cover of being a serious reporter. Is this a disaster for the writer? It may just be more fuel on the fire to make people want to read what all the fuss is about. Since that didn't exactly work initial book sales were much poorer than expected Gay Talese immediately separates himself in a knee-jerk reaction. But, wait, there's this documentary so is this a dead story? Truth or fiction we all get one thing out of this: privacy is part of our right of freedom and good traits are to be celebrated, bad to be exposed. Foos isn't a star in the end, just a bad apple. Talese just got played somewhat even if most of the book got more facts right than fiction. It's a big cluster of a book about a cluster of a man. In that there is some truth. Most will pass, likely, on the book….the documentary, well, maybe not? This strange story is worth a watch in a way not unlike the strangeness of the story itself. I can't rate it above a six because there's no way to separate fact from fiction even if the story is definitely sensational.