THE GOLDEN HOUR

A tale of growing up in Hollywood not just in a golden hour, but at the end of a golden age.

As a youngster, writes Specktor, actors and filmmakers were a common happy-hour sight around his home, thanks to a father who worked as an agent for “an insurgent company called Creative Arts Agency.” One memorable visitor was David Lynch, then at the beginning of his career, who sized young Specktor up and pronounced him an artist. Specktor may not have made his mark in the art world, but he certainly can write: This memoir is a sterling account of how Hollywood, the company town, works and of the strange people who inhabit a world very different from ordinary reality. It’s a place of glittering wealth and beautiful people, but also a place where beastly behavior is the norm and the ideal. “What is it about the culture that creates such furious and pointlessly cruel people? Is it…the fact that trafficking in illusion makes you begin to expect the impossible even in real life?” Good questions. In the case of Specktor senior, celebrated at the time of this book’s appearance as the oldest agent still working in the business, the education was at the hands of the irascible, deeply nasty Lew Wasserman, brilliant at structuring business-enriching deals and “not just the star but the stage itself, invisible to the inattentive eye”—and a terrifying boss. Jack Warner was just as scary, but his old-fashioned empire was toppled by younger upstarts like Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty—to say nothing of aggressive new-school agents like Michael Ovitz, who himself would be toppled by “a businessman even colder and more ruthless than he is, Michael Eisner.” Literate and liberal with huge scoops of dish, Specktor’s memoir is a sometimes shocking pleasure from start to finish.

A memoir that joins Peter Biskind, Joan Didion, William Goldman, and other top-shelf chroniclers of the L.A. film scene.