She also has a serious drinking problem. “My mother is a wonderful parent,” Specktor writes, “adept at every part of it except actual parenting.”
At 10, he’s portioning and popping quaaludes sold to him by a neighborhood kid in a Pendleton shirt. At 13, when his parents are fighting, he pulls out the bong hidden under his bed. When news of their split arrives, he snorts a few lines of cocaine chopped with an expired Visa card. At 15, he’s watching “Apocalypse Now” on LSD. Later, his friend Jay Moloney, one of the Young Turks at CAA, will descend into full-blown addiction and hang himself.
But druggie excess is not the main theme of “The Golden Hour. ”Movies, “that great repository of the American self-image,” are the ultimate opiate. The book is about the quiet grind of deal-making, the false starts and phone calls, the hope and disillusionment, the nepo babies and naifs, the fragile egos and executive feints. “Are you stupid? Are you a moron? Have I hired an imbecile?” Wasserman yells at the neophyte Fred Specktor after he leaves a script on Gregory Peck’s stoop rather than in the actor’s hands.
Decades later, almost identical invective pours from the mouth of Scott Rudin, infuriated after a manuscript goes to a competitor. “Are you stupid? How did you miss this?” he lambastes another friend of Matthew’s. “You total moron. You idiot. You imbecile.”
Specktor senior, meanwhile, holds back: “This man who is at once all surface and all depth,” his son writes, “whose hidden interiors I will never know, whose history I have quarried meticulously until I can almost understand him but fall short.”
“The Golden Hour” has an appropriately retro, hard-boiled texture, as if John Lahr’s biography of his own father, Bert, “Notes on a Cowardly Lion,” were sprinkled into one of Norman Mailer’s nonfiction novels. It assumes that life and the movies are in a state of permanent overlap. In this it may already be outdated, and yet, like a long rattling drive down Sunset Boulevard, it both lulls and arouses.
THE GOLDEN HOUR: A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood | By Matthew Specktor | Ecco | 384 pp. | $32