The golden hour A story of family and power in Hollywood

In his day, talent agent Fred Specktor was a superpower. His son, Matthew, grew up in a Hollywood family: his father an agent and his mother a screenwriter. Famous people wandered through Fred's life, and Michael's life too: Jack Nicholson, Bob Rafelson, David Lynch, Bruce Dern, Shirley Knight, Dustin Hoffman, and the list goes on. Matthew's memoir is arrestingly well written ("My parents are somewhere, afloat on the room's tide of wine and dope"). It's a deeply personal story, spanning fifty-odd years of Hollywood history, but it's as much a story about a family as it is about the movie business. Being the son of Fred Specktor wasn't the easiest thing in the world. It was a challenge for the author to carve out his own identity--to be not just Fred Specktor's kid but his own man. As a portrait of an era in Hollywood, the book is invaluable; as a memoir, it is utterly captivating. Highly recommendable.

In this affecting memoir, novelist and screenwriter Specktor (Always Crashing in the Same Car) reflects on the glamour and grit of growing up in the film industry, and offers a tender elegy for mid-century Hollywood. The son of CAA talent agent Fred Specktor, the author describes an L.A. childhood straight out of the movies: he bumped into Jack Nicholson at the deli, was playfully mooned by Bruce Dern, and played back melodramatic, rehearsed messages from Marlon Brando on the family answering machine. From the beginning, though, there was a seedy side: Specktor started doing drugs when he was 10, he regularly witnessed professional backstabbing, and he was often left in the care of his bitter alcoholic mother. Meanwhile, his father's priorities always returned to "what all capitalists want: more." 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. The movies, he observes, were once "America's dream of itself," but the increased focus on profits and global dominance have sent that dream "winding toward its unfortunate conclusion." Film buffs will relish this potent blend of personal history and cultural critique. Agent: Allison Devereux, Cheney Agency. (Apr.)

A tale of growing up in Hollywood not just in a golden hour, but at the end of a golden age. As a youngster, writes Specktor, actors and filmmakers were a common happy-hour sight around his home, thanks to a father who worked as an agent for "an insurgent company called Creative Arts Agency." One memorable visitor was David Lynch, then at the beginning of his career, who sized young Specktor up and pronounced him an artist. Specktor may not have made his mark in the art world, but he 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. It's a place of glittering wealth and beautiful people, but also a place where beastly behavior is the norm and the ideal. "What is it about the culture that creates such furious and pointlessly cruel people? Is it…the fact that trafficking in illusion makes you begin to expect the impossible even in real life?" Good questions. In the case of Specktor senior, celebrated at the time of this book's appearance as the oldest agent still working in the business, the education was at the hands of the irascible, deeply nasty Lew Wasserman, brilliant at structuring business-enriching deals and "not just the star but the stage itself, invisible to the inattentive eye"--and a terrifying boss. Jack Warner was just as scary, but his old-fashioned empire was toppled by younger upstarts like Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty--to say nothing of aggressive new-school agents like Michael Ovitz, who himself would be toppled by "a businessman even colder and more ruthless than he is, Michael Eisner." Literate and liberal with huge scoops of dish, Specktor's memoir is a sometimes shocking pleasure from start to finish. A memoir that joins Peter Biskind, Joan Didion, William Goldman, and other top-shelf chroniclers of the L.A. film scene. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.