About the Book
A personal and cultural exploration of the struggles between art and business at the heart of modern Hollywood, through the eyes of the talent that shaped it
Matthew Specktor grew up in the film industry: the son of legendary CAA superagent Fred Specktor, his childhood was one where Beau Bridges came over for dinner, Martin Sheen's daughter was his close friend, and Marlon Brando left long messages on the family answering machine. He would eventually spend time working in Hollywood himself, first as a reluctant studio executive and later as a screenwriter.
Now, with The Golden Hour, Specktor blends memoir, cultural criticism, and narrative history to tell the story of the modern motion picture industry--illuminating the conflict between art and business that has played out over the last seventy-five years in Hollywood. Braiding his own story with that of his father, mother (a talented screenwriter whose career was cut short), and figures ranging from Jack Nicholson to CAA's Michael Ovitz, Specktor reveals how Hollywood became a laboratory for the eternal struggle between art, labor, and capital.
Beginning with the rise of Music Corporation of America in the 1950s, The Golden Hour lays out a series of clashes between fathers and sons, talent agents and studio heads, artists, activists, unions, and corporations. With vivid prose and immersive scenes, Specktor shows how Hollywood grew from the epicenter of American cultural life to a full-fledged multinational concern--and what this shift has meant for the nation's place in the world. At once a book about the movie business and an intimate family drama, The Golden Hour is a sweeping portrait of the American Century.
About the Author :
Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound, and the nonfiction books The Sting and Always Crashing in the Same Car. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review, The Believer, Tin House, Vogue, GQ, Black Clock, and Open City. He has been a MacDowell Fellow and is a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He resides in Los Angeles.
Review :
"Rich, atmospheric . . . The Golden Hour has an appropriately retro, hard-boiled texture, as if John Lahr's biography of his own father, Bert, "Notes on a Cowardly Lion," were sprinkled into one of Norman Mailer's nonfiction novels. It assumes that life and the movies are in a state of permanent overlap. In this it may already be outdated, and yet, like a long rattling drive down Sunset Boulevard, it both lulls and arouses." -- New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)
"A determinedly artful and novelistic memoir."
-- Mark Athitakis, Los Angeles Times
"Mixing things up with the brio of an expert bartender, Specktor serves an invigorating cocktail of family saga, cultural criticism, fictionalized biography, Hollywood history and lament for a vanishing world. . . . It's a book about how the soft golden light of magic hour, which makes everything look so beautiful, eventually makes way for the darkness." -- NPR, "Fresh Air"
"Delicious, insightful . . . Specktor has a unique understanding and perspective of moviemaking, and here he explores not only the history of the industry but also of his own family--and the ways in which the two might be forever intertwined."
-- Town and Country
"There are countless memoirs about Hollywood, but what makes The Golden Hour special is that the bittersweet tale is told by Matthew Specktor, whose father, despite being in his early 90s, still works as a top talent agent. . . The Golden Hour may be nonfiction, but in its emotional depth and poetic insight, the book belongs on the same shelf as the novels What Make Sammy Run? and The Day of the Locust." -- Airmail
"Part Hollywood history, part nuanced family memoir . . . Specktor has written authoritatively about the film industry in both fiction and criticism, but this is the first time he's created a history that's confession as well as deeply researched. The combination, along with his gift for setting a scene, makes this his best book yet." -- The Spectator
"[Specktor] certainly can write: This memoir is a sterling account of how Hollywood, the company town, works and of the strange people who inhabit a world very different from ordinary reality. . . Literate and liberal with huge scoops of dish, Specktor's memoir is a sometimes shocking pleasure from start to finish. . . [joining] Peter Biskind, Joan Didion, William Goldman, and other top-shelf chroniclers of the L.A. film scene." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"This affecting memoir . . . offers a tender elegy for mid-century Hollywood. . . . Specktor enriches his family portrait with a meticulous history of Hollywood and sharp musings on the film industry's uneasy mix of art and commerce. . . . [A] potent blend of personal history and cultural critique." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Matthew Specktor's biography of a Hollywood talent agent is ambitious, tough, and as heartfelt as his subject, who also happens to be his father. Specktor skillfully alternates roles as detached reporter covering the turbulent life of Fred Specktor, and as his loving son who bears witness to his father's losses and triumphs. In his telling, The Golden Hour delivers both an ingenious perspective of Los Angeles, and the history of movie business from the birth of television to the age of streaming." -- Griffin Dunne, author of the New York Times bestseller The Friday Afternoon Club
"The Golden Hour is sheerly a marvel: blink, and this study of the sunset of the cinema century turns into a memoir, or a non-fiction novel, or a lyric fugue on memory and loss - and all with a breath-held suspense that confirms Matthew Specktor as a narrative wizard." -- Jonathan Lethem
"The Golden Hour is a multi-generational Hollywood bildungsroman that opens up into an ecstatic epic. The sweep and scope and scale of it is thrilling. Matthew Specktor is a pop Saul Bellow." -- Lili Anolik, author of Didion and Babitz
"This is a book for anyone who loves the movies; for anyone who is fascinated by family dynamics; and for anyone who wonders about the machinery that propels our culture forward. Matthew Specktor brings insight and grace to this story of his family's presence in Hollywood, pulling back the curtain on that mystifying, magic-making world. It is at once tender and clear-eyed, and a joy to read." -- Susan Orlean, author of The Library Book
"In The Golden Hour, Matthew Specktor is our perfect envoy, the sly sharer of Hollywood's inside story, which is, of course, a story of art and money and America. But most of all, this is a story of a son, and the unstinting, tender, and heartbreaking way he imagines and inhabits his mother and father. All of it is elegantly rendered through Specktor's always beautiful and seductive prose." -- Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward
