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A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood
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, Specktorshows 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.
"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)
"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
"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
This information about The Golden Hour was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Matthew Specktor was born in 1961 in Los Angeles. He received his Bachelor's Degree in creative writing and literature from Hampshire College in 1984, and holds an MFA in fiction writing from Warren Wilson College.
Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound, as well as a nonfiction book of film criticism. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, The Believer, Tin House, Black Clock, and other publications. He is a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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