Matthew Specktor

In 2006, Matthew Specktor moved into a crumbling Los Angeles apartment opposite the one in which F. Scott Fitzgerald spent the last moments of his life. Fitz had been Specktor's first literary idol, someone whose own passage through Hollywood had, allegedly, broken him. Freshly divorced, professionally flailing, and reeling from his mother's cancer diagnosis, Specktor was feeling unmoored. But rather than giving in or "cracking up," he embarked on an obsessive journey to make sense of the mythologies of "success" and "failure" that haunt the artist's life and the American imagination. Part memoir, part cultural history, part portrait of place, Always Crashing in the Same Car explores Hollywood through a certain kind of collapse. It's a vibrant and intimate inspection of failure told through the lives of iconic, if under-sung, artists--Carole Eastman, Eleanor Perry, Warren Zevon, Tuesday Weld, and Hal Ashby, among others--and the author's own family history. Through this constellation of Hollywood figures, he unearths a fascinating alternate history of the city that raised him and explores the ways in which curtailed ambition, insufficiency, and loss shape all our lives. At once deeply personal and broadly erudite, it is a story of an art form (the movies), a city (Los Angeles), and one person's attempt to create meaning out of both. Above all, Specktor creates a moving search for optimism alongside the inevitability of failure and reveals the still-resonant power of art to help us navigate the beautiful ruins that await us all.

On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

Always Crashing in the Same Car

The sting

This sweeping novel about fathers and sons, the movie business and the changes that have shaped American culture follows Beau Rosenwald as he and his partner Williams Farquarsen, helming the most successful agency in Hollywood, fumble and thrive across the LA landscape.

A Novel

American Dream Machine

Quand Beau Rosenwald débarque à Los Angeles, en 1962, il n'a qu'un costume dépareillé et une paire de chaussures de luxe. À la fin des années 1970, il a cofondé et dirige la plus prestigieuse agence de stars d'Hollywood.Par les yeux de son fils illégitime – Nate, le narrateur –, on suit Beau et son partenaire se lancer dans une bataille dont les répercussions modifieront en profondeur l'industrie du cinéma.Se croisent alors deux générations d'hommes. Les pères ont réussi malgré d'innombrables revers, mais le déclin les guette. Au début des années 1990, leurs fils – Nate, Severin et Williams – pas encore âgés de 25 ans, avancent à tâtons, cherchent leurs marques, aspirent sinon à la gloire, du moins à se faire une place au soleil. Et font la fête.Une plongée dans les coulisses d'Hollywood, qui dénonce le rôle que joue l'illusion dans nos vies... " L'un des meilleurs, sinon le meilleur roman jamais écrit sur L.A. "Bret Easton Ellis

Hollywood dream machine

Beau Rosenwald - overweight, far from handsome, and improbably charismatic - arrives in Los Angles in 1962 with nothing but an ill-fitting suit and a pair of expensive brogues. By the late 1970s he has helped found the most successful agency in Hollywood. Through the eyes of his son, we watch Beau and his partner go to war, waging a battle that will reshape an entire industry. We watch Beau rise and fall and rise again, forging and damaging remarkable relationships. We watch Beau's partner, the enigmatic Williams Farquarsen, struggle to control himself and this oh-so-fickle world of movies. We watch two generations of men fumble and thrive across the LA landscape, revelling in their successes and learning the costs of their mistakes.

"[An] absorbing and revealing book. . . nestling in the fruitful terrain between memoir and criticism." —Geoff Dyer, author of Out of Sheer Rage Blending memoir and cultural criticism, Matthew Specktor explores family legacy, the lives of artists, and a city that embodies both dreams and disillusionment. In 2006, Matthew Specktor moved into a crumbling Los Angeles apartment opposite the one in which F. Scott Fitzgerald spent the last moments of his life. Fitz had been Specktor’s first literary idol, someone whose own passage through Hollywood had, allegedly, broken him. Freshly divorced, professionally flailing, and reeling from his mother’s cancer diagnosis, Specktor was feeling unmoored. But rather than giving in or “cracking up,” he embarked on an obsessive journey to make sense of the mythologies of “success” and “failure” that haunt the artist’s life and the American imagination. Part memoir, part cultural history, part portrait of place, Always Crashing in the Same Car explores Hollywood through a certain kind of collapse. It’s a vibrant and intimate inspection of failure told through the lives of iconic, if under-sung, artists—Carole Eastman, Eleanor Perry, Warren Zevon, Tuesday Weld, and Hal Ashby, among others—and the author’s own family history. Through this constellation of Hollywood figures, he unearths a fascinating alternate history of the city that raised him and explores the ways in which curtailed ambition, insufficiency, and loss shape all our lives. At once deeply personal and broadly erudite, it is a story of an art form (the movies), a city (Los Angeles), and one person’s attempt to create meaning out of both. Above all, Specktor creates a moving search for optimism alongside the inevitability of failure and reveals the still-resonant power of art to help us navigate the beautiful ruins that await us all.

Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

The story of two talent agents and their three troubled boys, heirs to Hollywood royalty; a sweeping narrative about fathers and sons, the movie business, and the sundry sea changes that have shaped Hollywood and, by extension, American life. American Dream Machine is the story of an iconic striver, a classic self-made man in the vein of Jay Gatsby or Augie March. It's the story of a talent agent and his troubled sons, two generations of Hollywood royalty. It's a sweeping narrative about parents and children, the movie business, and the sundry sea changes that have shaped Hollywood, and by extension, American life. Beau Rosenwald—overweight, not particularly handsome, and improbably charismatic—arrives in Los Angeles in 1962 with nothing but an ill-fitting suit and a pair of expensive brogues. By the late 1970s he has helped found the most successful agency in Hollywood. Through the eyes of his son, we watch Beau and his partner go to war, waging a seismic battle that redraws the lines of an entire industry. We watch Beau rise and fall and rise again, in accordance with the cultural transformations that dictate the fickle world of movies. We watch Beau's partner, the enigmatic and cerebral Williams Farquarsen, struggle to contain himself, to control his impulses and consolidate his power. And we watch two generations of men fumble and thrive across the LA landscape, learning for themselves the shadows and costs exacted by success and failure. Mammalian, funny, and filled with characters both vital and profound, American Dream Machine is a piercing interrogation of the role—nourishing, as well as destructive—that illusion plays in all our lives.

"I'm so antisocial, I got a disastrous attitude (Something something someone--I could never work this part out) was my kinda dude! I'm proper primitive, true caveman, Neanderthal! I'll scramble your brains for breakfast, leave paintings on your walls! I doubted I could've said it any better myself, what it was like to be alive and confused, so happy I could kill someone and so angry I could laugh." Freshman summer, 1986: You think you're looking for happiness and you're in love with the world's best and most obscure band. Your roommate tells you both reside in Columbus, Ohio. These aren't the first fantasies you've indulged. Blind faith, after all, may be your one true religion. In the thrall of dead philosophers and mad prophets on the radio, you charge off on a group pilgrimage to Anywhere, Everywhere, Nowhere, USA. You still believe in sex, drugs, and rock and roll--but you're not sure in what order. You're digging in the crates for that one true thing. You know something is happening, but you don't know what it is.... That Summertime Sound is the liner note to that perfect summer single and all its aching echoes, written with the gimlet eye of Jim Thompson, Kazuo Ishiguro's sense of wonder, and a true believer's ear for music. "Matthew Specktor's That Summertime Sound isn't so much a book as it is a door, hinged in memory, and swinging wide to every tenderhearted throb of lust and longing and precocious regret still there where you left it, at the periphery of adulthood. How does the novel perform this trick? By prose as lucid and classical as Graham Greene's in The End of the Affair, yet saturated in detail such that if you'd never had the luck to outgrow an 80s' teenage dream in Columbus, Ohio, you'll feel you had after reading it." ⎯ --Jonathan Lethem

That Summertime Sound

From Melville to Madoff, the Confidence Man is an essential American archetype. George Roy Hill’s 1973 film The Sting treats this theme with a characteristic dexterity. The movie was warmly received in its time, winning seven Academy Awards, but there were some who thought the movie was nothing more than a slight throwback. Pauline Kael, among others, felt Hill’s film was mechanical and contrived: a callow and manipulative attempt to recapture the box-office success of Robert Redford and Paul Newman’s prior pairing, Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid. Matthew Specktor’s passionate, lyric meditation turns The Sting on its head, on its side, and right-side-up in an effort to unpack the film’s giddy complexity and secret, melancholic heart. Working off interviews with screenwriter David S. Ward and producer Tony Bill, and tacking from nuanced interpretation of its arching moods and themes to gimlet-eyed observation of its dizzying sleights-of-hand, Specktor opens The Sting up to disclose the subtle and stunning dimensions—sexual, political, and aesthetic—of Hill’s best film. Through Specktor’s lens, The Sting reveals itself as both an enduring human drama and a meditation on art-making itself, an ode to the necessary pleasure of being fooled at the movies.

Matthew Specktor

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