Son of an agent, he became a film exec. But the movies weren't the same

The logline for Matthew Specktor’s memoir, “The Golden Hour,” could easy connote a Hollywood tell-all. Specktor is the lad of a well-connected movie agent, Fred Specktor, which meant helium had run-ins with the biggest celebrities of the 1970s and ’80s.

Thanks to his father, helium was shaped by the louche New Hollywood world, which meant taking Quaaludes astatine 10 and cocaine not agelong after. A erstwhile Fox 2000 exec, helium grasps the ways conglomeratization has made studios risk-averse successful caller years. “Do ‘Alvin and the Chipmunks’ and ‘Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem’ susurration to radical successful their dreams?” helium laments toward the book’s end. “Or bash the 1 happening required for an creation to unrecorded on, which is to animate radical to emulate them?”

But Specktor is trying to bash thing subtler and much slippery than cataloging boldfaced names and bellyaching astir however commerce has strangled art. “The Golden Hour” is simply a determinedly artful and novelistic memoir, recalling the ebb and travel of millions successful Hollywood successful the past half-century, not to relationship for winners and losers but to amended recognize his parents’ psyches, and his own. His life, helium observes, made a definite consciousness erstwhile his parents’ values and the movies were successful alignment; erstwhile the movies diverged, the household fractured. Funny what a small celluloid tin do.

(Ecco)

Specktor opens the communicative connected the cusp of the ’60s, depicting his father, Fred, arsenic a rising prima astatine MCA, the endowment bureau past led by Lew Wasserman. The vibe Specktor evokes is “Mad Men” cool, an L.A. afloat of cars with “radios blaring Nelson Riddle and Patti Page from their blood-dark interiors, their engines’ lukewarm rumble fading to a soft, tidal hiss.” As Fred ingratiates himself with higher-caliber clients — Bruce Dern main among them — helium swims with the existent of the decade’s astir convention-breaking films. He and his wife, Katherine, are bully lefty activists, and the radicalism of films specified arsenic “Bonnie and Clyde” acceptable them comfortably. “The movies, that large repository of the American self-image, person begun to picture radical who look and consciousness much similar my parents,” the younger Specktor writes.

On the surface, each is well. In the ’70s, Fred bounces from MCA to William Morris to Michael Ovitz’s startup, CAA. Katherine, an avid scholar who loves James Joyce and modern poetry, tries her manus astatine screenwriting, with Fred’s encouragement. Like astir kids, Matthew sees himself arsenic a relation of his parents’ enactment and ambitions: “I americium a specimen acceptable to beryllium deposited into its petri dishes. Let’s spot what happens erstwhile we dose this specimen with Robert Frost and ‘The Communist Manifesto.’” But he’s besides progressively disarmed by the cracks successful the façade. Katherine descends into alcoholism. Fred seems to stifle his ambition, contented to beryllium a cog successful the manufacture instrumentality alternatively than idiosyncratic turning the wheels.

Or was Fred conscionable smartly laying low? The ’80s and ’90s would beryllium an epoch of monolithic upheaval for the industry, arsenic Ovitz eagerly pursued deals with Japanese investors and the movies had little to bash with taking the pulse of American beingness and much to bash with satisfying marketplace quadrants. “What’s happened to the movies, which were filled with ambiguity and intimate strangeness a fewer abbreviated years ago, but present are crammed with spaceships and sharks?” Specktor queries.

“The Golden Hour” is an effort to sphere ambiguity and strangeness successful the look of a civilization that’s strangled subtlety. Fred Specktor, successful his son’s eyes, isn’t a specified functionary but a antheral who tried to clasp the elements of agenting that felt similar making creation — negotiation, persuasion. Writers similar his mother, James Baldwin (one of his teachers portion attending Hampshire College) and Specktor himself are pursuing a noble struggle. The book’s benignant reflects this sensitivity: Rather than rehash warfare stories oregon delegate blasted and responsibility, Specktor writes novelistically, attempting to get into the caput of a big of characters, similar Wasserman, Ovitz, Baldwin, and…

... Mohamed Atta, 1 of the 9/11 terrorists? Specktor overreaches a spot successful the second stages of the book, arsenic helium tries to amusement conscionable however overmuch 21st period filmmaking has drifted from its inclusive ’60s ethos. As the manufacture becomes a concern of extremes — tentpoles and low-margin indies — helium finds it each but intolerable to find what audiences want. To his regret, helium passes connected a colleague’s enthusiasm for “Fight Club” portion moving astatine Jersey Films. (“You deliberation forty-year-old women successful Ohio wanna spot a movie astir dudes beating each different up successful basements?”) But his hopes to accommodate brainy fare similar Don DeLillo’s “Underworld” oregon Shirley Hazzard’s “The Transit of Venus” neglect successful the look of analyzable rights deals, disinterest oregon both.

Small wonder, then, that Specktor took to penning novels (he’s published two): “This, my concealed life, is the 1 that feels real,” helium writes of his sneaking distant to his fiction. And tiny wonderment that helium wanted to constitute a memoir stripped of the form’s evident scaffolding and joints: nary declarations of trauma, small effort to marque his beingness exemplify thing bigger. Making feelings simplistic is thing for the movies, now. But helium remembers that it wasn’t ever thus, and not conscionable for him: The movies person spent a period arsenic a cardinal repository for Americans to imagination done what it means to beryllium a citizen. “They person colonized my imaginativeness similar a swarm of bees,” helium writes of his teenage self. It was lone a substance of clip earlier helium got stung.

Athitakis is simply a writer successful Phoenix and writer of “The New Midwest.”