Enter the Dream Factory: Christine Sneed in Conversation with Matthew Specktor
Many readers know Matthew Specktor as the author of the propulsive 2013 novel American Dream Machine, which, like his virtuosic new work of nonfiction, Always Crashing in the Same Car, explores Hollywood both as metaphor and as geographic location from an insider’s point of view.
The son of a screenwriter and one of the founding partners of the powerhouse talent agency Creative Arts Agency, Specktor was born and raised in Los Angeles and grew up observing the successes and near misses of many actors and screenwriters. His lifelong proximity to and nuanced understanding of the traps and rewards of a career in Hollywood imbue his new book with authority and pathos, as do his own experiences as a screenwriter.
Part memoir, part cultural criticism, the book’s chapters each focus on a well known writer, musician, or filmmaker with ties to Hollywood—among them, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tuesday Weld, Hal Ashby, Michael Cimino, Renata Adler, and Warren Zevon—whose life and work Specktor has researched extensively and admired as a fan and close observer for many years. Most of his subjects were—famously or not—beset by professional frustrations and disappointment, self-sabotage, turbulent intimate relationships, and by some measures, failure to reach a higher plane of notoriety, prosperity, and sustained personal contentment.
What’s perhaps most remarkable about this extraordinary book is how eloquently and compassionately Specktor writes about loneliness and disappointment—his own as a writer, as a friend, as a son and a husband— as well as that of his subjects. He sees with a clear, unwavering eye the perils of believing the glittering promises fame makes and acknowledges how difficult it is to ignore them.
I had the opportunity to correspond with Specktor about Always Crashing in the Same Car.
: I’m curious about how you chose the writers, filmmakers, and musicians who serve as focal points for the eight chapters in this book. Had you been thinking of
