THE GOLDEN HOUR: A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood, by Matthew Specktor

The French have l’heure bleue, that introspective, melancholy period of twilight invoked across multiple genres of literature. Hollywood prefers the golden hour, after which Matthew Specktor has titled his rich, atmospheric second memoir. Gold as in money; gold as in sunshine — and, increasingly, gold as in old.

Specktor’s father, Fred, has been dubbed “Hollywood’s oldest super agent.” Now in his early 90s, he represents Morgan Freeman and Danny DeVito at Creative Artists Agency. And now — in a gift better than a gold watch — he has been cast by his son as a major character: a Willy Loman with a happy ending, survivor of a punishing and quintessentially American business whose glory days are demonstrably on the wane.

In his first memoir, “Always Crashing in the Same Car” (2021), Specktor, who is also a novelist and somewhat ambivalent screenwriter, interspersed stories of his divorce and career angst with those of others, like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Tuesday Weld, who’d struggled in La La Land.

Here, too, he departs from the standard confessional format, slipping into the POV of not only his sensitive, persistent dad but, among others, Lew Wasserman, the fearsome mogul for whom Fred started as a gofer; Michael Ovitz, the co-founder of CAA who so dramatically departed for a short-lived stint at Disney; the author James Baldwin (Matthew’s teacher at Hampshire College); and — a little more iffily — Mohamed Atta, the 9/11 terrorist who, in a fictional reimagining that borrows from Jarret Kobek’s novel “Atta,” recoils at a screening of Disney’s “The Jungle Book” when he is a student in Hamburg, deeming it “chaos, chaos, chaos.”

The American dream, assumed to be universal like the name of its oldest studio, was not always a welcome export, we’re meant to understand. “Young people and young industries, and, let’s face it, young nations, too,” Specktor writes with palpable middle-aged rue. “All of them think the world they have conquered is going to stay conquered, that what’s theirs will remain theirs forever.”

Raised in Santa Monica when it was “nowhere, a sleepy backwater filled with nursing homes and dingbat apartments,” he recalls being told by David Lynch that he was “born lucky,” getting inadvertently mooned by a tattooed Bruce Dern and listening over and over to a late-career Marlon Brando’s phone message about “peckin’ at tranquilizers like a goose at corn.”