The logline for Matthew Specktor’s memoir, “The Golden Hour,” could easily imply a Hollywood tell-all. Specktor is the son of a well-connected movie agent, Fred Specktor, which meant he had run-ins with the biggest celebrities of the 1970s and ’80s.
Thanks to his father, he was shaped by the louche New Hollywood world, which meant taking Quaaludes at 10 and cocaine not long after. A former Fox 2000 exec, he grasps the ways conglomeratization has made studios risk-averse in recent years. “Do ‘Alvin and the Chipmunks’ and ‘Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem’ whisper to people in their dreams?” he laments toward the book’s end. “Or do the one thing required for an art to live on, which is to inspire people to emulate them?”
But Specktor is trying to do something subtler and more slippery than cataloging boldfaced names and bellyaching about how commerce has strangled art. “The Golden Hour” is a determinedly artful and novelistic memoir, recalling the ebb and flow of millions in Hollywood in the past half-century, not to account for winners and losers but to better understand his parents’ psyches, and his own. His life, he observes, made a certain sense when his parents’ values and the movies were in alignment; when the movies diverged, the family fractured. Funny what a little celluloid can do.
Specktor opens the story on the cusp of the ’60s, depicting his father, Fred, as a rising star at MCA, the talent agency then led by Lew Wasserman. The vibe Specktor evokes is “Mad Men” cool, an L.A. full of cars with “radios blaring Nelson Riddle and Patti Page from their blood-dark interiors, their engines’ warm rumble fading to a soft, tidal hiss.” As Fred ingratiates himself with higher-caliber clients — Bruce Dern chief among them — he swims with the current of the decade’s most convention-breaking films. He and his wife, Katherine, are good lefty activists, and the radicalism of films such as “Bonnie and Clyde” fit them comfortably. “The movies, that great repository of the American self-image, have begun to depict people who look and feel more like my parents,” the younger Specktor writes.
On the surface, all is well. In the ’70s, Fred bounces from MCA to William Morris to Michael Ovitz’s startup, CAA. Katherine, an avid reader who loves James Joyce and modern poetry, tries her hand at screenwriting, with Fred’s encouragement. Like most kids, Matthew sees himself as a function of his parents’ work and ambitions: “I am a specimen ready to be deposited into its petri dishes. Let’s see what happens when we dose this specimen with Robert Frost and ‘The Communist Manifesto.’” But he’s also increasingly disarmed by the cracks in the façade. Katherine descends into alcoholism. Fred seems to stifle his ambition, content to be a cog in the industry machine rather than somebody turning the wheels.
Or was Fred just smartly laying low? The ’80s and ’90s would be an era of massive upheaval for the industry, as Ovitz eagerly pursued deals with Japanese investors and the movies had less to do with taking the pulse of American life and more to do with satisfying market quadrants. “What’s happened to the movies, which were filled with ambiguity and intimate strangeness a few short years ago, but now are crammed with spaceships and sharks?” Specktor queries.
“The Golden Hour” is an attempt to preserve ambiguity and strangeness in the face of a culture that’s strangled subtlety. Fred Specktor, in his son’s eyes, isn’t a mere functionary but a man who tried to retain the elements of agenting that felt like making art — negotiation, persuasion. Writers like his mother, James Baldwin (one of his teachers while attending Hampshire College) and Specktor himself are pursuing a noble struggle. The book’s style reflects this sensitivity: Rather than rehash war stories or assign blame and responsibility, Specktor writes novelistically, attempting to get into the head of a host of characters, like Wasserman, Ovitz, Baldwin, and…
… Mohamed Atta, one of the 9/11 terrorists? Specktor overreaches a bit in the latter stages of the book, as he tries to show just how much 21st century filmmaking has drifted from its inclusive ’60s ethos. As the industry becomes a business of extremes — tentpoles and low-margin indies — he finds it all but impossible to determine what audiences want. To his regret, he passes on a colleague’s enthusiasm for “Fight Club” while working at Jersey Films. (“You think forty-year-old women in Ohio wanna see a movie about dudes beating each other up in basements?”) But his hopes to adapt brainy fare like Don DeLillo’s “Underworld” or Shirley Hazzard’s “The Transit of Venus” fail in the face of complex rights deals, disinterest or both.
Small wonder, then, that Specktor took to writing novels (he’s published two): “This, my secret life, is the one that feels real,” he writes of his sneaking away to his fiction. And small wonder that he wanted to write a memoir stripped of the form’s obvious scaffolding and joints: no declarations of trauma, little effort to make his life exemplify something bigger. Making feelings simplistic is something for the movies, now. But he remembers that it wasn’t always thus, and not just for him: The movies have spent a century as a key repository for Americans to dream through what it means to be a citizen. “They have colonized my imagination like a swarm of bees,” he writes of his teenage self. It was only a matter of time before he got stung.
Athitakis is a writer in Phoenix and author of “The New Midwest.”
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