Authors on Tap: Matthew Specktor and Deborah Shapiro

Please join us in person on Thursday, May 15th at 7:00pm central to help celebrate Matthew Specktor's new memoir, The Golden Hour: A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood. Matthew will be in conversation with Deborah Shapiro!

About The Golden Hour:

Matthew Specktor grew up in the film industry: the son of legendary CAA superagent Fred Specktor, his childhood was one where Beau Bridges came over for dinner, Martin Sheen’s daughter was his close friend, and Marlon Brando left long messages on the family answering machine. He would eventually spend time working in Hollywood himself, first as a reluctant studio executive and later as a screenwriter.

Now, with The Golden Hour, Specktor blends memoir, cultural criticism, and narrative history to tell the story of the modern motion picture industry—illuminating the conflict between art and business that has played out over the last seventy-five years in Hollywood. Braiding his own story with that of his father, mother (a talented screenwriter whose career was cut short), and figures ranging from Jack Nicholson to CAA’s Michael Ovitz, Specktor reveals how Hollywood became a laboratory for the eternal struggle between art, labor, and capital.

Beginning with the rise of Music Corporation of America in the 1950s, The Golden Hour lays out a series of clashes between fathers and sons, talent agents and studio heads, artists, activists, unions, and corporations. With vivid prose and immersive scenes, Specktor shows how Hollywood grew from the epicenter of American cultural life to a full-fledged multinational concern—and what this shift has meant for the nation’s place in the world. At once a book about the movie business and an intimate family drama, The Golden Hour is a sweeping portrait of the American Century.

About the authors:
Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound, and the nonfiction books The Sting and Always Crashing in the Same Car. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review, The Believer, Tin House, Vogue, GQ, Black Clock, and Open City. He has been a MacDowell Fellow and is a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He resides in Los Angeles.
Deborah Shapiro is the author of the novels The Sun in Your Eyes (2016, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice), The Summer Demands (2019), and Consolation (2022). She's an editor-at-large for Sight Unseen and her writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Chicago Magazine, Literary Hub, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. She's also the founder of the occasional press, B-Side Editions, and lives with her family in Chicago.

About this event:
This is a free, in person event and registration is required. Please click on the registration link below. Matthew and Deborah will be happy to sign and personalize copies of their books after the event! Can't make it to the event? Signed copies will be available after the event and we ship nationally.