by Heidi Simmons
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American Dream Machine
By Matthew Specktor
Fiction
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Hollywood has been known to make dreams come true, whether it is in real life or on the big screen. It’s not only a place; it’s an idea, and a business. It is a major industry that makes Los Angeles stronger and edgier, maybe meaner. In Matthew Specktor’s American Dream Machine (Tin House Books, 464 pages), the business that is “Hollywood” not only brings about dreams but also nightmares.
In 1962, with a recommendation from a New York, vaudeville era agency, Beau Rosenwald goes to Hollywood to become a talent agent. He is fat, loud and profane. His personal motto is simple: A man is judged by his persistence, his substance and his shoes.
With sheer tenacity, Beau somehow charms his way into a career as an effective agent, and eventually, with a partner, builds a successful and innovative Hollywood agency called American Dream Machine (Think Creative Artists Agency). A self-made man, he is often out-of-control and his own worst enemy. In typical Hollywood fashion, he finds himself on top one day and on the bottom the next. Not only is his job a challenge, but so is his personal life.
The story is narrated by Beau’s illegitimate son, Nate Myer. A few months younger and best friends with Beau’s “real” boy Severin, Nate observes and reflects on the changing Hollywood culture and business over four decades.
A work of fiction, American Dream Machine is an intimate inside look at the lives of those who work hard at a business that is often the antithesis of glamorous. It is equally about the children raised in an environment that is often selfish, exploitive and indulgent. Specktor shows the reader what happens to the kids of the powerbrokers who grow up in the shadow of their parent’s successes and failures as they themselves struggle to create their own identity.
The author, Matthew Specktor, is himself the son of a well-known and well-respected Hollywood agent. Besides being a novelist, he is a screenwriter and has worked in the film industry. Raised in Los Angeles, he knows the “Hollywood” community well. Specktor writes with a fondness, humor and irony about his home and “the business.”
This is a Los Angeles story and setting: Sunset Boulevard, Santa Monica, Malibu, Beverly Hills, downtown LA, Hamburger Hamlet, Tower Records, The Beverly Center, Cedar Sinai and so on. Just like he uses real places, Specktor uses real names: George Clooney, Jack Nicholson, Danny DeVito, Sandra Bullock and Barbara Streisand to name only a few. Along with real studios and agencies, he uses fictional names. Over the decades in the story, Specktor carefully weaves in the real names of people and places as they ebb and wane in popularity or finally go out of style or business.
He reflects on the movies of the 70s and 80s, which were Beau’s most productive years in the film industry. He mixes real film titles and filmmakers of the time, with fictional ones. If you are a movie buff, this is fun and a little bit frustrating.
And if you spent time in LA during these decades (like I did), and were in the entertainment business (like I was), these nonfiction elements mixed in with the fictional can be somewhat distracting. Although Specktor does a good job describing southern California streets, lifestyle and attitude of the era, I kept thinking back when I drove those side streets, went to those place and sat in those booths. I also found myself trying to figure out if some of the fictional characters were in fact caricatures of real people in the biz. Rather than suspend disbelief, I kept questioning it and suspecting who that might actually be in real life. Is this in fact a roman à clef?
During a recent visit to the CV, I spoke with Matthew Specktor. Tall, gentle, modest and a little awkward, he has always been a reader and is enthusiastic about the craft of writing. He insists the only thing he has in common with his novel, is that indeed his father is a talent agent.
Specktor is a sophisticated and intelligent writer. He has combined his personal experience and intimate knowledge of Hollywood into an American portrait of a self-made man oblivious to his own self-destruction. Beau Rosenwald is a classic tragic figure. Being rich and powerful does not make someone immune to sorrow, loss and self-loathing.
For his boys, Nate and Severin, the first generation of new Hollywood sons, they eventually find their place in the “American dream machine.” Specktor’s novel, just as in real life, shows us that “Hollywood” is an illusion. It can manufacture the beautiful with the ugly, and turn a dream into a nightmare.
