Matthew Specktor says that Hollywood's decline hurts the

Matthew Specktor is aware that his third book on Los Angeles landed during a heaviness. “The pleasure of doing beautiful things and reveling in beautiful things and doing art is a bizarre thing in America,” said Specktor during a video call at the end of March. “There is a Calvinist sequence in American mind and nature which is so deeply suspicious of pleasure. And at the moment, it is raised with fascism, where there should not be pleasure for itself.”

The new book, “The Golden Hour: A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood”, is a history of the film industry from the 1950s. This is the completion of a book trilogy – what Specktor calls a “triptych” – two memoirs and a novel about Los Angeles and the people who have traveled there in search of the American dream.

The Specktor's touchstone in its second book, “Always crash into the same car“Was F. Scott Fitzgerald. In his last one, it is his parents: daddy Fred SpecktorA legendary talent agent who recently celebrated her 90th anniversary and still works, and mom Katherine McGaffey Howe, a screenwriter who died in 2009.

His parents were elusive characters when Specktor grew up. His father worked for long hours and did not speak much at home; His “beautiful and funny” mother has never found her creative niche. Some of the most painful scenes in the book are Specktor's memories of his mother: “A wonderful parent and a terrible nightmare of medals.” She has often taken Specktor to the cinema or watched films with him at home, but her alcoholism has led to many nights in which Specktor assumed the role of goalkeeper. Specktor was forced to put his mother, intoxicated and sometimes unconscious, in his room safely.

His father's story begins with an anecdote on a disastrous release to see a film. When he invited his appointment for dinner afterwards, she refused it because he could not afford an expensive restaurant, and in his separation words, told him that he would earn much more money as an agent. In a few weeks, he started working for Music Corporation of America. Parties of the specktor's story have been gleaned in official interviews with his father. His father's customary reluctance meant that Specktor had work to do.

While Fred Specktor has provided an input point, Specktor says that it continues to be fascinated by agents in general. He finds the stereotypical representations of agents like men and women who have hard driver and women who exploit their customers as caricatured. “The agents exist at the specific point where art and trade are allied.”

Part of the false idea on agents comes from the belief that all those who work in the film industry are rich. Far from it. In the post-comfortable film industry, the middle class wages Hollywood workers disappear, while most of the actors are broke.

“(The agents I knew) had real consciences about what they were and what they were defending. It is my obstinate conviction that art wants to be free. The agent is not only there to allow the artist to succeed financially, and while not being a cheerleader, but the person who encourages artists to continue to express themselves,” said Specktor.

In a second interview, carried out earlier this month, Specktor discussed the decline of the middle class film, the inheritance of his father and his meaning to his troubled relationship with his mother.

You describe the three books as a triptych rather than a trilogy. Can you talk about which you would make the centerpiece and how do you see the other two refer to? As an artist, what do you want readers to withdraw from this project?

“Triptych” would certainly be the word. They are not sequential and each book is complete in itself, but they highlight themselves and on certain mythologies: questions of success and failure, image and reality, and the influence of America both internally (that is to say on the psyche of its citizens) and abroad. I hope that readers would move away from it with the feeling of having touched something much bigger than “Hollywood” because it is commonly understood. This is an American literary project, not just a Los Angeles. As for a centerpiece, it is impossible for me to say it, only because the books are very different. I would say that “the golden hour” looks like a … highlight in a certain sense. He is the one who most fully articulates the project.

As a long-standing resident, do you consider Hollywood as the city's beating heart? If Hollywood continues to undergo the effects of the decline in film attendance, what happens to the largest city?

Metaphorically, perhaps, but in reality, no. Most people who live here have nothing to do with the film industry – it's a huge city, and I think it's less than 5% of the workforce here that is used in entertainment. But the loss of this metaphorical heart – and I think cinema, because we have long understood that it never comes back; It is a subsidiary of the technology industry now, the more significant an industry is significant. I think Hollywood was offering himself as a place where artists and creatives could support each other, perhaps even hitting him, and that has disappeared. The loss of this idea is… incalculable. He erodes the soul of the city in a painful way to consider. It was a city to dream and I don't think it's really that.

You and your family were affected by the fire storms in January. Can you talk about the neighborhood and its history? What don't people know about it?

My sister lost her house. My parents had to evacuate, although their house fortunately survived. This city will never be the same again, insofar as our feeling of security, our illusions of permanence, etc., have disappeared. But I think there was a certain meaning, especially with the fire of the palisades, where many people may have thought: “Oh, it's just a bunch of rich people who lose their houses.” Not the case. Malibu and the Palisades had many middle class residents – when I grew up, the palisades in particular were a firmly middle class community, not rich, and not where the showbiz people were concentrated – and it was the people who were moved. Rick Caruso may have been able to protect his property with private firefighters, but people in the middle class and workers have received no advantage of this. These are the people who suffered.

You talked about the decline in the film in the “middle class”. Can you talk about what it means and what it means for the film industry?

I think the tour towards the blockbuster, which we have seen in the past 50 years, East A kind of fascist tower. When you stop making middle -class films – films with a moderate budget, as opposed to those made on a busisting or those costing $ 200 million – you dig a middle class of people who make them. These extreme budgets say mainly: “We will pay a few people to a few people and most people much less.” It is a recipe for disaster. This is how you arrive at people like David Zaslav, whose only readable passion seems to be the reduction in costs – take the money from others and reassign it to itself and its shareholders – in a position of power in what is nominally still a creative industry. As for the fact that so many of these blockbusters, especially in the past 20 years, seem to turn around superheroes and vigilantes – people who alone can repair things, types of strong men – well, I will let it talk about itself.

What do you think, depending on your long interviews with your father, is the heritage he hopes to remember?

I think he would like us to remember him as an ethical person, rather than a simple success. It has always been important for him to be decent, in a company that is not particularly particularly. I am not mistaken that my father is a saint, but I think that if you ask someone in Hollywood, they will say that he is a good guy, in a rare way for a talented agent (or for anyone these days). And it is! He recently told me that he wanted us to remember him as the father of a great writer and (laughs) I hope he is, but I will remember him as a really good person.

You talk about the very painful cases where you were forced to take care of your mother when she was drunk. Can you talk about how it affected you when I was a child, but also your relationship with her? Did you feel that you had resolved things with her at the time of her death? Or do you think that by writing this book and “always overwhelming”, whether you have made a new understanding or a new resolution about it?

I certainly had not resolved things when it passed in 2009. The scars, the emotional scars, are still there. But I loved it and I admire it more as they get older. She was trapped in a world that was not going to give her many opportunities to become the best iteration of herself – Hollywood misogyny in the 1960s and 70s (and later) cannot really be underestimated – and she fought valiantly. And even at his worst, his cruelty was offset by a love of cinema and literature. We have seen so many films together and read so many novels. Since these things are such a huge part of my life … It was a huge gift that she made me, really.

Specktor and Griffin Dunne will be interviewed by David Ulin at 12 noon on April 26 at Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.