“ The Golden Hour '': an initiate returns to a changing Hollywood

The line of Matthew Specktor's memories, “The Golden Hour” could easily involve a Hollywood revealer. Specktor is the son of a well -connected cinema agent, Fred Specktor, which meant that he had entries with the biggest celebrities of the 1970s and 80s.

Thanks to his father, he was shaped by the ladle New Hollywood World, which meant to take fouruds at 10 and cocaine shortly after. Former executive Fox 2000, he seized the way in which conglomerate has rendered risky studios in recent years. “Does” Alvin and The Chipmunks “and” Aliens against Predator: Requiem “whispered to people in their dreams?” He deplores towards the end of the book. “Or do you do the only thing necessary for an art, that is to say to inspire people to imitate them?”

But Specktor tries to do something more subtle and more slippery than to catalog daring names and the belly of the way the trade strangled art. “The Golden Hour” is a determined and romantic memory, recalling the flow and the flow of millions in Hollywood during the last half century, not to account for the winners and the losers, but to better understand the psychiations of his parents, and his. His life, he observes, had a certain meaning when the values ​​of his parents and the films were aligned; When the films diverged, the family broke. It's funny what a little celluloid can do.

Specktor opens history on the tip of the 60s, representing his father, Fred, as a rising star at the MCA, the talent agency, then led by Lew Wasserman. The Specktor's atmosphere evokes is a cool “Mad Men”, a full of cars with “Radios ranging nelson riddle and patti page of their blood interiors, the hot rumble of their engines fading to a whistling of soft tide.” While Fred disintegrates with clients of higher caliber – Bruce last chef among them – he swims with the current of the most revolutionary films of the decade. He and his wife, Katherine, are good left -handed militants, and the radicalism of films such as “Bonnie and Clyde” adapt them comfortably. “The films, this great repository of the American self -image, began to represent people who resemble and feel my parents more,” writes the young Specktor.

On the surface, everything is fine. In the 1970s, Fred rebounded from McA to William Morris to Michael Ovitz's startup, CAA. Katherine, a passionate reader who loves James Joyce and modern poetry, tries her hand during the script, with Fred's encouragement. Like most children, Matthew considers himself a function of the work and the ambitions of his parents: “I am a specimen ready to be deposited in his Petri boxes. Let's see what is happening when we dose this specimen with Robert Frost and “the Communist Manifesto”. Katherine descends into alcoholism. Fred seems to suffocate his ambition, be content to be a cog in the industry machine rather than someone who turns the wheels.

Or was Fred just intelligently extinguished? The 80s and 90s would be an era of massive upheavals for industry, because Ovitz impatiently continued agreements with Japanese investors and films had less to do with the pulse of American life and more to do with satisfactory market quadrants. “What happened to the films, which were filled with ambiguity and intimate strangulation a few years ago, but are now filled with spaceships and sharks?” Specktor requests.

“The Golden Hour” is an attempt to preserve ambiguity and strangeness in the face of a culture that is strangled. Fred Specktor, in the eyes of his son, is not a simple civil servant but a man who tried to keep the elements of the agent who wanted to make art – negotiation, persuasion. Writers like his mother, James Baldwin (one of his teachers while attending the Hampshire College) and Specktor himself pursue a noble struggle. The style of the book reflects this sensitivity: rather than rewrite war stories or to blame and empower, Specktor written Romanistic, trying to put yourself at the head of a multitude of characters, such as Wasserman, Ovitz, Baldwin and …

… Mohamed Atta, one of the terrorists on September 11? Specktor exceeds a little in the last stages of the book, while he tries to show how the 21st century cinema has derived from its inclusive ethics from the 60s. While industry becomes an extreme company – tentols and low -margin Indies – it finds that it is almost impossible to determine what the public wants. To his regret, he transmits the enthusiasm of a colleague for “Fight Club” while working at Jersey Films. (“You think that forty-year-old women in Ohio want to see a film on guys fighting in the basements?”) But his hopes to adapt the brain price like “Underworld” by Don Delillo or “The Transit of Venus” by Shirley Hazzard in the face of complex rights agreements, in disinterest or the two.

It is therefore not surprising that Specktor took novels to write (he published two): “This, my secret life, is the one who feels real,” he wrote about his flight to his fiction. And it is not surprising that he wanted to write a dismissed memory of the scaffolding and the obvious articulations of the form: no declarations of trauma, little effort to ensure that his life illustrates something greater. Making simplistic feelings is something for movies now. But he remembers that it was not always so, and not only for him: the films spent a century as a key repository for Americans to dream through what it means to be a citizen. “They colonized my imagination as a swarm of bees,” he wrote about his adolescent. It was just a matter of time before being stung.

Athitakis is a writer in Phoenix and author of “The New Midwest”.