Since the 1970s, when blockbusters such as Jaws and Star Wars began earning astronomical sums at the box office, the future prospects of the movies have been murky. More recently, accelerated by the global COVID lockdown that began in March 2020, the communal experience of movie-viewing in cineplexes has severely declined. Add to this the rise of streaming platforms such as Netflix and Max, and it isn’t difficult to imagine a future when seeing a new film in your local cinema will be considered as quaint as bowling in an alley with hand-set pins.

In novelist and cultural critic Matthew Specktor’s extraordinary new work of nonfiction, The Golden Hour: A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood (Ecco/HarperCollins; 384 pages), readers are immersed in the dazzling light and spectral shadows cast by the rainmakers who made Hollywood into a global force while also, intentionally or otherwise, sowing the seeds of its hegemonic twilight.

Two of Specktor’s previous books, American Dream Machine (2013) and Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California (2021), are siblings to The Golden Hour, each similarly humanizing and vibrantly mythologizing towering figures and behind-the-scenes players in the film industry. Specktor is a writer of rare gifts, his work at once expansive and confiding. Many days after finishing The Golden Hour, it is still front of mind, its power and pathos acutely resonant.

The following interview was conducted via email. It has been edited for length and clarity.

ZYZZYVA: In The Golden Hour, along with your first-person point of view, you inhabit several other characters’ POVs: your mother and father’s, and Hollywood moguls Lew Wasserman and Michael Ovitz’s. From the outset, were you planning to write from various points of view or did they evolve as you progressed further into the story? 

Matthew Specktor: I always planned to do it that way. This is the novelist in me talking, I suppose, but I’m always most comfortable in the third-person. Or rather, I find the most revelatory experience comes from writing about other people. When it comes to this book in particular, it was planned as a cultural history—a more journalistic endeavor—with a bit of personal narrative threaded throughout. Eventually, after several attempts, I realized I had to invert the ratio and push the personal narrative to the front, because I’m neither really a journalist nor a historian.

But I’m not really a “memoirist” either, at least not by disposition. I’m a novelist. So I started thinking of this like a systems novel, or, rather, a systems memoir: one that wasn’t as much about the characters (although those characters, including myself and my family, are front and center) as it was about the economic and cultural systems that surrounded them. That’s when the book came to life. It took on—as I hoped would happen—the texture and consistency of a novel, and the sprawling cast of one, without precisely being one, and while remaining adherent to the facts. That was exciting. 

Z: The Golden Hour is part-elegy, part-encomium, part-cultural history of Hollywood. Your father has been a talent agent for more than six decades and represents some of the most well-known actors in the world. He started in the mailroom at the legendary Music Corporation of America (founded by Jules Stein, a Midwestern physician, and transformed into a cornerstone of global culture by Lew Wasserman). Early in the book, you describe your father as a man who lives “his life in a kind of eternal present tense.” Would you say more about this, and how it’s helped him in the business?

MS: Ha! Well, that “eternal present tense” was initially just a way of codifying the book to itself, and to the reader. I’d been struggling with writing it in past tense and then shifted into the present tense almost out of desperation, as a way of defamiliarizing a section I’d drafted too many times, and found it was working. Initially I thought I might give this present tense only to the sections about my father, but then . . . well, let’s just say that I realized a book about the movies, which are experienced in the present tense, a kind of present tense we can replay over and over, would be aptly served by sticking to the present.

I think there’s something a little playful in hanging that characteristic on my father, who doesn’t like to talk about himself but who obviously has the same subjectivity, and same degree of interiority, as anybody else. He isn’t really a brooder, though, and I, unfortunately, am. He has the action-oriented personality of most people who are successful in business, where I’m more of a ditherer, a real Hamlet, as writers tend to be. That kind of forward-looking personality is as useful in the movie business as it is in most others.

Z: The tension between commerce and art is perhaps nowhere more noticeable than in Hollywood. Do you think “middle-class movies”—mid-tier budget movies such as Moonstruck, Five Easy Pieces, Shakespeare in Love (as opposed to low-budget indies and tent-pole pictures), which studio executive Bill Mechanic famously scorned in the late ‘90s—might ever make a comeback? And why are they often the films so many of us cherish?

MS: Well, to be fair those movies—personal movies, personal storytelling—still exist if you know where to find them. The bigger question is, What does it mean that the culture (and I don’t mean just Hollywood, by any means) no longer makes room for a middle class anywhere? That in the world of professional sports or, ahem, publishing there are the people who get paid in bags of money and folks who make pennies on the dollar, with nothing in between.

But no, I don’t think those movies will make a “comeback,” insofar as I don’t think The Movies, which were as central to the late 20th century as rock-and-roll, will ever make a comeback, because the cultural and monetary ecosystems that enabled them is finished. People will still make films, and people will go see them—lots of people—but that experience of them as a sort of proliferative common culture in which we all regularly partake is gone.

I think those movies in particular—”middle-class” ones—were so beloved because we saw something of ourselves in them. Obviously not everyone did, or was invited to (and the book addresses this), but the movies used to have a human face that is more or less eroded. You could go to see Five Easy Pieces, or Moonstruck—or Moonlight, for that matter—and see regular human dilemmas, and human experience. I don’t think one has that experience with Barbie, or even Oppenheimer, or even—I dare to say—Anora. I think what we get now, for various reasons, is something else, something that might be a little more diverting, but is a lot less penetrating, less inviting to our most private selves.

Z: I know you have complicated feelings about Los Angeles, your hometown (as many do, native or not). A little over halfway through The Golden Hour, you write, “I think on how Los Angeles defeats me, how trying to gain emotional purchase here is like trying to climb a wall of glass.” I’m not sure I’ve ever seen its quasi-impermeability described so eloquently. I don’t think it’s a cold city, but it’s not waiting for anyone with open arms, either. How have your feelings changed, or maybe more aptly, fluctuated, since you moved back here in the early Aughts after living in New York for the better part of a decade?

MS: It’s funny, I think what I was describing there—what I was hoping to describe—was less an experience of Los Angeles and more an experience of someone struggling with their point of origin, which could be anywhere! I really did feel that way in my college years: I would come home and feel desolated, neutralized, disempowered in a way I just didn’t feel anywhere else. I no longer do, obviously, but I think it’s true this city is strange, spacious in ways that are frustrating, albeit these ways might be increasingly harmonious with the twenty-first century in general.

I used to say, of Los Angeles, that it was possible to make plans with someone—to have lunch, or have dinner—and to realize afterward that you’d had the experience but also had never quite made it out of your car. People are so en-bubbled here. It’s not like New York, or London, or any number of other cities where there’s enough urban density that you sort of emerge out of a common experience—the street, the block, the neighborhood—to meet a friend and then you walk back into it together and sort of . . . you know, there’s an ongoing social context, physical bodies in space, that’s missing here, and that makes it isolating. It’s more a suburban feeling. But then, that isolation is now everywhere!

We’re so atomized, so used to living through the internet, that I suspect everyone is more or less an Angeleno now. The fact that this city, like everywhere else (but perhaps even a little more so), has become so economically stratified, and has such a brutal housing crisis, only enhances this feeling. It prods us not to see the world as it is.

 Z: I was struck again and again by the friends and family members you’ve lost over the last few decades—some who were very young, some by their own hand. Implicit is that a few died due to the unbearable pressures of success. So much heartbreak. Do you see the title in conversation with the ghosts haunting your book? 

MS: Oh, well, yes. Good. I don’t mean that losing all of these people was good, I mean that the book feels haunted by them is. The Golden Hour—the title—refers to the fabled last shot of the day on a movie set, obviously (and hence the twilight of the movies themselves). But I became aware as I was writing that the book’s real subject was not the movies at all, but rather time.

The movies are—again, this is obvious—a way we have of managing our experience of time, of manipulating it, slowing it down or speeding it up. We can experience a lifetime, or a chunk of one, in a single afternoon. And I wanted the book to have this feeling of all these islands of intimate experience, these events that seem to be happening almost in real time, hundreds of them, but they just whip past, as they do in both the movies and in real life (or, rather, in our experience of real life), so that when you get to the end you might feel like you’ve been in this world forever but also like it’s all gone by (to borrow the title of Walter Murch’s great book about film) In the Blink of an Eye. That sense of loss is baked in, because the book covers decades, almost seventy-five years, and so of course people are going to die. But in the end, I think this—time—is the real subject of all good art, and almost all great books.

One book that I had in mind while I was writing this was William Finnegan’s wonderful Barbarian Days, which is very different from this one—it’s a more straightforward memoir—but which is nominally a book about surfing. In fact, it is a book about surfing, as a pastime and a way of life, and yet you get to the end of it and you’re just wrecked. You wouldn’t think a book about surfing would have that kind of tragic force, but the losses keep piling up and you wind up in tears. As my late friend Shirley Hazzard (who’s in this book, too) put it, “this sense of past, past, past, which can turn even the happiest memories to griefs.” What else is there to write about, really?

Z: To some extent, writing The Golden Hour must have been a collaborative process. Along with the many books you read, my hunch is your father helped you shape the narrative in the events you didn’t witness first-hand. You also mention your mother’s journals. What other research did you do?

MS: It was, but—oddly—no more than other books. I mean, I interviewed my dad, who was characteristically reticent. He’s a great storyteller, but you kind of have to catch him at a dinner party with a glass of wine in his hand to really get the goods. I interviewed a bunch of people who were close to my parents, and to my family in general. I read my mother’s writings, I read a fair bit of Hollywood history and film history and Los Angeles history (shout out to Mike Davis and Carey McWilliams and all the usual suspects there). I read a ton of biographies and autobiographies (everyone from Lew Wasserman to Jack Nicholson to Huey P. Newton) to confirm facts, but in the end I had to invent a fair bit and my real “collaborators,” my inspirators, were other writers, as is usually the way.

Besides the many living ones, friends, who rendered necessary assistance (you were one of them!), in this case that meant James Joyce, who was my mother’s favorite writer, Joseph Conrad, Henry James (who’s sort of the usual suspect for me: I can never get away from James, it seems), James Baldwin (who was my professor when I was at Hampshire College—he’s in the book, too), and Don DeLillo. These were the primary movers for me here, particularly DeLillo. I reread everything of his while I was writing, particularly those middle period books (Libra, Mao II, and Underworld) where he was most keenly articulating how we are shaped by the forces of history. Those books were elemental to this one.

Really, though, I was struck a long time ago by something Michael Ondaatje said in the acknowledgments of his memoir, Running in the Family. “A literary work is a communal act.” I was maybe twenty years old when I first came across that sentence, and it completely upended any ideas I had that writing a book was this romantic, heroic, individual achievement. A literary work really is a communal act—you become a writer by sustained engagement with other texts, and other writers, and if you’re doing it right your work and your life are endlessly, legibly, and meaningfully entwined with others. 

This one, I hope, shows its seams. It really is a book about that: about how our selves are stitched together out of our encounters with other human beings, both in reality and through art. It owes debts to countless texts and countless people, living and dead. But of course, so do we all.

Christine Sneed’s most recent books are Direct Sunlight and Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos. She’s also the editor of the short fiction anthology Love in the Time of Time’s Up. She has received the Grace Paley Prize, an O. Henry Prize, the Chicago Public Library Foundation’s 21st Century Award, among other honors. She teaches for Northwestern University and Stanford University Continuing Studies.