THE GOLDEN HOUR: A Story of Household and Energy in Hollywood, by Matthew Specktor
The French have l’heure bleue, that introspective, melancholy interval of twilight invoked throughout a number of genres of literature. Hollywood prefers the golden hour, after which Matthew Specktor has titled his wealthy, atmospheric second memoir. gold as in cash; gold as in sunshine — and, more and more, gold as in previous.
Specktor’s father, Fred, has been dubbed “Hollywood’s oldest super agent.” Now in his early 90s, he represents Morgan Freeman and Danny DeVito at Inventive Artists Company. And now — in a present higher than a gold watch — he has been solid by his son as a serious character: a Willy Loman with a cheerful ending, survivor of a punishing and quintessentially American enterprise whose glory days are demonstrably on the wane.
In his first memoir, “At all times Crashing within the Similar Automobile” (2021), Specktor, who can be a novelist and considerably ambivalent screenwriter, interspersed tales of his divorce and profession angst with these of others, like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Tuesday Weld, who’d struggled in La La Land.
Right here, too, he departs from the usual confessional format, slipping into the P.O.V. of not solely his delicate, persistent dad however, amongst others, Lew Wasserman, the fearsome mogul for whom Fred began as a gofer; Michael Ovitz, the co-founder of C.A.A. who so dramatically departed for a short-lived stint at Disney; the writer James Baldwin (Matthew’s instructor at Hampshire Faculty); and — just a little extra iffily — Mohamed Atta, the 9/11 terrorist who, in a fictional reimagining that borrows from Jarret Kobek’s novel “Atta,” recoils at a screening of Disney’s “The Jungle E book” when he’s a pupil in Hamburg, deeming it “chaos, chaos, chaos.”
