User Reviews

This is an average. The story was entertaining and 7 stars, but the preposterousness of the premise and major oversights is 3 stars.

Supposedly, Foos is a voyeur. He may have peeped on some people, but the story doesn't hold water. He has all kinds of notes, but no photos? Do we really think that he'd spend all this time in endless hours of boring spectating and not film or photo the highlights? I think these were his fantasies, perhaps when people checked in. Do we really think this guy could move around in the rafters and not ever be heard? Also, looking at this dump of a hotel, do we really think that there were 3000 visitors in a year. This 21-room place would be 50% full every night for that to occur. The math, to me, doesn't add up. He could be a complete crackpot. Or, a lonely old man. His reactions to the phone call "threat" and being exposed as having money, were equally preposterous. Does this rational-talking person really think that this wouldn't happen, as he bragged about all his "exploits"? What is more amazing is that if he even did this, wouldn't at least some of the many thousands of people who stayed at this hotel over the years confront him, of not do worse? It's hard to believe that any of it happened.

Talese is no better. He may have written articles and he may have written books, but you could not, in all fairness, call him an investigative journalist. He never asked even the most obvious questions. Where on earth did Foos get the money to buy his collection? Why does Foos think a given baseball card is worth $X. Was it appraised? If he's so rich, why does he need a book written about him (because he does get a cut of the proceeds) and why does he say that he needs to get paid to talk to anyone? If he's not going to live that long, and has no friends and has no heirs, why does he even have the collection to begin with? How can Talese not have checked the tax records and other public information about the motel? I believe that either Talese never wanted to know the truth, he now delusional or has lost his way in a desperate attempt to get attention again in his career. He just wanted to write something sensational. For all we know, the people that he "voyeured" with Foos were hired by Foos as actors. It is puzzling that after he learns that he's been duped and goes on a tirade and discredits his book. Then, later, rationalizes that it was okay that the hotel was owned by someone else and that the fact that he got confirmation from the named former owner, that he had access, so now it's okay that Foos, again lied. Maybe the publisher was going to sue him, and Talese was advised by counsel to switch his position post-haste.

Sometimes we're better off not looking behind the curtain, or behind the ceiling vent.

About halfway into Voyeur I realized I was watching a sequel. A sequel to The Odd Couple. Gerald Foos was a passable Walter Matthau and Gay Talese was as good as gold as Jack Lemmon. I kept waiting for Gay to go shopping for produce so he could tell a woman how to select a cantaloupe.

This is a documentary for our times. In an era when national news organizations routinely present fake news dressed up as real news here comes a movie about fakery.

The tension builds. Will Foos be able to put one over on Gay Talese, the internationally famous author whose clothes closet rivals Cher's? But damn, the man can dress. Talese is more layered than an old time burlesque queen at the start of her act.

We wonder, is he really being fooled by . . . a man named Foos? Can this be real?

Foos claimed he spent hours upon hours, years upon years sweating and freezing in the attic of his no-tel motel in Aurora, Colorado, viewing the sex acts of strangers and jerking off 3-5 times a night. Lucky for him he kept meticulous notes and lent an air of authenticity to his story by writing to Talese way back in 1980.

I think the wrong story is marketed here. To me it wasn't about Foos and his sickness, instead it's a fascinating story about a famous writer at the end of his career, wondering if he wasn't tanking his entire reputation over a weird story from a weird guy. Even someone as talented as Gay Talese, and he is talented, is human in the end and has fears. As mismatched as they were I felt that Talese came to like Foos and moreso Foos's wife. True, maybe Talese thought of them as zoo animals who he couldn't stop looking at or maybe as strangers having sex. But there was never a second when I thought Talese looked down on them or regarded them as lesser human beings.

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.

I'm surprised at the low reviews and comments here. I can only assume that people were reeled in by the crazy plotline, only to be disappointed by what they consider an anti-climatic outcome.

Sure, I can totally understand where all the high expectations for a "grand finale" came from (I had the same expectations and the trailer did a great job to hook us all in from the get-go), however I do not think the doc did not deliver (I just think it delivered something different to everyone's expectations).

This is human nature under a microscope. There are TWO main characters. Do not forget that. I think most people who are complaining here think the doc was solely or mostly about the voyeur and what happens to him. I don't think this doc follows that exact narrative. Voyeur focuses more on shining a light equally on Foos and Talese. Great docs (and films) will often completely undress it's complex characters with little more than a few sentences and/or scenes.They will capture these subtleties and weave them at the right time and place. You can blink and miss it. But it is your job to keep your eyes/ears peeled and your mind open.

Judging this piece on how it ends is a surface-level mistake. We have to ask ourselves this: Were the characters interesting and were they exposed in a way that makes sense and gives us a great understanding of human nature? I say yes.

To complain about WHAT you see under the microscope is equivalent to complaining about the outcome of a lab study. It might not have been the outcome you expected or wanted, but the research was done well and properly transcribed.

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.

From the beginning, this documentary runs out of steam because it's just chuck full of narcissists and psychopaths, desperately all trying to pump meaning into a meaningless hobby of a boring creepy psychopath who bought a motel and for decades peeped at thousands of his guests. This delusional psychopath actually wants us to think he was contributing to society and doing a social experiment because he logged his into a greasy journal how many times each man got off and how many times the women didn't. Really? This is enough material for a full documentary? The man should be hauled off to jail but instead the journalist writing and hosting this nothingness tries to convince us that this pervert is fascinating. Don't bother wasting your time finding anything of substance here. I found all of these people rather obsessed with their creepy self-obsessed selves. They were boring and predictable, so I unplugged after 30 minutes.