Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California by Matthew Specktor

Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California Reviews

• 
  Book Clubbed

  An excellent read for those enamored with Hollywood, the deification of artists, and the unraveling promised after a mortal deification. Personally, although no Hollywood lore expert, I love reading about the lives of tortured and brilliant artists. Give me all the tropes--abusive parents, drug and alcohol abuse, muses they discard, artistic rebirths, and poetic insights into the artistic soul that border on nauseating vanity. I love it, although my interest in each chapter did vary depending on my familiarity with the artist and their milieu.
  
  If that doesn't interest, I can't blame you. Specktor, however, does a valiant job interspersing his own travails in entertainment, adding an element of "struggling artist that is also sorta making it" that I enjoyed. In truth, there is a vast territory between "star" and "failure," and each artist between those poles must grapple with their ambitions and egos all the same.
  
  Specktor is a vibrant writer, although not every simile lands, nor does every parallel between art and his personal life stay congruent. This is a small detraction, but I found his self-deprecation to be tiresome by the end, a bit like a teenager loudly lamenting to the class that they shouldn't have stayed up so late last night, a strange brag wrapped up like a self-laceration.
• 
  Janet

  A haunting, haunted memoir-in-criticism exploring a very certain kind of failure—the Hollywood variety. Screenwriter, novelist, critic Matthew Specktor intricately knits his own losses and nostalgias into a larger cultural narrative of writers and filmmakers whose failures left behind a ghostly glamour. I can’t get it out of my mind.
  
  It begins with Specktor, dissatisfied with his marginal Hollywood screenwriting career, recently divorced from his wife--and theres' a great scene where the two couples went to dinner, and he's dumping on the other guy on the way home, only to learn later that that was the guy, the wife's lover--his inability to even house his 3 year old daughter in his new apartment, which is just across the way from Sheila Graham's--the woman who was F. Scott Fitzgerald's last lover, and the apartment where he died.
  
  The tone is set--noir, alcohol basted, vintage Hollywood, the corrosion of bright promises--for a book examining the careers of a very exclusive group of writers and directors, plus a few others who echo in his psyche as part of the same crew, people who could have been contenders, or were, for a while, before they somehow scuttled their own careers, or had them scuttled for them--people like the screenwriters Eleanor Perry and Carole Eastman, directors Hal Ashby and Michael Cimino, authors Thomas McGuane and Renata Adler, actress Tuesday Weld and singer Warren Zevon.
  
  Parallelling these stories from mostly Hollywood history is his own story of self-perceived failure, and that of his mother, a rather tragic figure. Specktor's father is a legendary movie agent, and the author was raised in a milieu of success which lead him to certain expectations about achievement, and also gave birth to a certain fondness or sympathy for a type of visible fall. His father-son novel, American Dream Machine told about that world of success. But Specktor is also haunted by his screenwriter mother's story of dreams run aground--her success and her failure, her alcoholism, and their complex and tragic relationship.
  
  My favorite part of the book was in the section on the screenwriter Carole Eastman and especially on Specktor's analysis of her classic film Five Easy Pieces, which is the story of a man purposely trying to rid himself of the expectation of success he was cut out for from a very early age--a stellar musician in a long lineage of musicians.
  
  This book continues to haunt me. The love affair with tragedy is a strangely addictive thing, and the romance of failure is so much a part of the Hollywood story, such a questionable thing to embrace, I keep going back and seeing what these stories have in common, what framework Specktor chooses in which to explore his own sense of failure, the allure of that shipwreck. A fascinating read.
• 
  Courtney Maum

  Matthew Specktor's forthcoming hybrid memoir from Tin House was the perfect travel companion for me during my first pandemic vacation-- it investigates success and failure through the lens of both Matthew's personal life and the trajectories of some of our nation's most beloved writers and other creatives. (Renata Adler, Thomas McGuane, Tuesday Weld.) Pre-order it, trust me! My entire ARC is underlined and dog-eared PLUS I now have solid movie and book recommendations to last me at least two more years thanks to the amazing reference section in the back. Highly highly highly recommend.
• 
  Kasa Cotugno

  I came to this book in an unusual way -- Matthew Specktor reviewed my favorite book this year in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, and, intrigued, I listened to him narrate his own biography. NYT's choice of him to review Anthony Marra's Mercury Pictures Presents shows that they choose reviewers who share a commonality with the subject matter of the books they are presenting. This memoir by a Hollywood native, a person who grew up in the industry and counts among his friends many of Tinseltown's famous, contains insights into people who had blazing careers that crashed and burned, sometimes intentionally. I loved Specktor's style and honesty, his generous sharing of motivations. I plan on going back and reading more of his work.
• 
  Sketchbook

  A not-quite interesting memoir wrapped around "Hollywood stories" of people who peaked and then vaporized (as do most in that Biblical Biz). Author Specktor is a passionate writer; he kept me engaged despite familiar/stale Hollyla woesome bios, including his own with an abusive, alcoholic mum, that wash up again and again on the Malibu sands. His dad is a power talent agent, so dont expect any sarcasm, irony or jabs beyond fact that few in the "biz" read anything.
  
  After a retro opening of Scott Fitzgerald and his last days ("a flawed man...he was alone when he died") because Scott once lived on the same block as Specktor - his ensemble includes, for no special reason, Tuesday Weld, screenwriter Eleanor Perry, critic Renata Adler, directors Hal Ashby and Michael Cimino. The fresh name is scripter Carole Eastman, who won praise w "Five Easy Pieces," but she was a private person and he has no material on her at all. Though he mostly uses 2dary sources, his Eastman chapter is really about his mum who is dying of cancer. "Shut the fuck up! Get out of here!" mummie dearest rages at son Matthew. (Their relationship mended, but never healed, he says).
  
  His parallel "interweaving," always ambitious, never really works. When he focuses on names we know, he never comes up, at chapter's end, with an apercu -- so we're left, as the artist Ray Johnson oft said, with a Nothing.
  
  His consideration of Tuesday Weld, now near 80, repeats the cliche started by 2 dimwitted NYT writers c 1970 that this good little actress, who always played a minx, was a cult figure. Really? Cult for....? ~~ She was saucy and perverse. Allegedly she turned down starring roles in "Bonnie & Clyde" and "Rosemary's Baby." If true, she was also very stupid and needed an agent with some basic sense to say, "No, dear, you must do this film...etc." If Tuesday vanished by the time she was a pinch over 30, I blame her agent. (Probably her agency preferred pushing new faces Dunaway, Farrow, and so on...) Instead, Missy made a rubbishy film, "A Safe Place," for the rich amateur Henry Jaglom that 10 unfortunate viewers may have seen. She liked to prove she could do precisely what she wanted. Missy is not missed, she never was. Watching her on a tv clip, Specktor muses: 'Her presence is transfixing." As I said, Specktor lacks irony.
  
  For unknown reasons he drags in poor Renata Adler (a rare face-to-face interview that yields Nothing) whose career as a savvy thinker ended, I suggest, when she unwisely accepted an absurd offer by feeble-minded NYT execs (they're always feeble at NYT) to be a film critic. This lasted about a year. Later, back at her home base, The NYer, she wrote an 8,000 word attack on Pauline Kael for the NYRB, calling Kael "worthless" -- and lots of other stuff. Pauline gasped! So did her dreary editor William Shawn. In 1980, Kael was the only draw The NYer had !.... In media city, Kael, though a bully and wildly neurotic, had amassed noisy pals, fans, assorted acolytes, and even hefties among the Upper West Side deli clique who were amused, but very Pissed Off at Renata. The last one standing ? Pauline Kael.
  
  Author Specktor stirs up movie history. He does the stirring exceedingly well. But his dark, well-writ observations lack enlightenment.
• 
  Kevidently

  I have an unexplainable, bafflingly intense love of Los Angeles. When asked to describe why, of all places, LA, my stock answer is that it's because it's so sincere about its insincerity. (That's the whole tiki thing, too: authentically inauthentic. I apparently love places and themes whose oxymoronic natures make them both appealing and unknowable.)
  
  Author Matthew Specktor has his own strange romance with LA - and, perhaps necessarily, with the Hollywood of it. At times he insists he's a novelist and doesn't want to be dragged into the role of screenwriter, which seems almost beneath his contempt until he's lauding screenwriters. He hates the city unless he's in love with it. And he can't stand Hollywood, except this whole book is about Hollywood, and the love of it, and its almost inevitable heartbreaks.
  
  It's a book about failures, either eventual or baked-in. We get probing looks into the successes and downfalls, or the unsung and under-sung careers, of figures like Carole Eastman, Eleanor Perry, Warren Zevon, Tuesday Weld, Hal Ashby, Michael Cimino, more. Specktor likes the real stories but he has no problem talking about the myths either, the way Hollywood lionizes or buries talent, seemingly on a whim.
  
  Throughout this look into the intermittent renown of talented Angelinos threads a narrative of Specktor's own life: his excruciating relationship with his alcoholic mother (and boy, did that slice cut deep); his romantic failings; his literary failings; his obsession with a break-up that meant more to him than it should have. Bizarrely, none of this feels self-indulgent. In relating the tale of Hollywood's forgotten, Specktor finds communion - if not comfort - in his own stories of wasted talent, dark turns, forgotten names.
  
  It's not a love letter to Los Angeles, nor is it a condemnation. It's somewhere in between, and the title underscores that: for every success in Hollywood, there is a failure. Sometimes those things happen to the same people. And it doesn't end, it just perpetuates. Hollywood is the car.
• 
  Mark

  A memoir hidden inside a journalistic look at Hollywood and writers, a literary love letter to the power of the written word stashed inside a movie fan's mixtape, a map of the star's homes woven into a philosophical look at a life lived in the arts. It's all of those things and it's beautiful too.
• 
  Aimee Truchan

  Tried to love it. Meandered aimlessly though what promised to be a love letter to LA. Some great writing peppered throughout. But went into far too much detail about random LA folk without real intent or purpose.
• 
  Ellie

  The first third of this book was highly interesting to me--the relationship between American culture and failure, celebrity culture. The figures Specktor discusses are all figures of interest to me: Tuesday Weld, Michael Cimino, Hal Ashby, Renata Adler, Carole Eastman, and others.
  
  Specktor has many points to make about the relationship of these people to their success/failure as well as his own. His use of his own story drew me in at first. But after about the first third of the book, I started to feel a little bored by the repetition of the theme, as well as I perceived as the romanticizing of addiction and failure, as well as his own drinking and what felt to me like celebration of himself as a failed hero.
  
  Despite this, there were many moments of interest and Specktor certainly writes fluently and beautifully.
• 
  Mrs. Danvers

  I really, really liked this. I found it entertaining and thoughtful, and feel that it presented a picture of what I loved about LA, the Jacaranda trees, the dirty streets, Book Soup, the views from Mulholland, the horrible people as well as the delightful people. I'm glad I read it even though it may take me away from reading for a while to watch some of the movies he talks about.
• 
  Jane

  Great take on LA and “Hollywood” by someone who grew up inside of it all. Certainly in the vein of Joan Didion, and fun when you know all of the places he talks about, lived, eats at… and so much I never knew about “famous” people.
• 
  Mark

  Compelling and interesting approach/structure, but a few sections too many or something; started to feel like I was being held hostage by this book for the last third or quarter of it.
• 
  Dan

  This book was right up my alley.
• 
  Leslie

  Linked essays focussed on Hollywood figures, most of them somewhat marginal, that work together to create a portrait of a place--LA/Hollywood--both as a real space with streets and houses and landmarks and as a dreamspace, a place of myth and aspiration. In the process we get some memoir, a lot of intelligent cultural criticism, some biographical portraits of some interesting people (Warren Zevon, Tuesday, Weld, Carole Eastman, Michael Cimino, Eleanor Perry...), and a meditation on the nature of success and failure and what they mean in America more generally and in the dream factory of LA/Hollywood in particular. The prose slips down easily.
• 
  Kerri Schlottman

  I absolutely loved this book. That's all I have to say.
• 
  Garrett Rowlan

  I really liked this book and its portrait of seven moviemakers, one writer, and one musician, Warren Zevon, whose careers, as the book says, "have been aborted or abridged by one thing and the next." Whether through bad decisions, or an Icarus-like flying too high into the stratosphere of celebrity and fame, or a Bartelby-like preference not to continue, the nine individuals discussed here--all of whom either came up, peaked, or even started to decline in the 1970's--are mentioned either as cautionary tales or simply examples of how character and fate cannot be disentangled. The ghost of F. Scott Fitzgerald looms over them. For a moviegoer like me, one who remembers well the 1970's, those mini-bios were like catnip. As for the author's relationship to his mother, a minor scriptwriter who was blacklisted, I found the discussion of her moving but ultimately a little too repetitive. And though I know this is a book about "Hollywood" I find myself wryly amused in the way many Angelino's see LA as existing between Silver Lake and the ocean, with little or no attention to its downtown or eastside.
• 
  Glenn

  I don't know why I took this long to read this mesmerizing, shudder-inducing, evocative, acute, compassionate book but I have finished it wishing it were three times as long. Recommended.
• 
  Craigtator

  Navel gazing in the City of Angels.
• 
  Madeline S

  I think this book was much more cathartic for Matthew Specktor than it was for me. I'm glad he found his peace with all the turmoil that had been going on with his life at that moment, but I had a hard time relating to any of it. I think if I was a few decades older and had a few more monumental life experiences, I would have found more merit in the story. On top of that, aside from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Joan Didion, I had no clue who he was talking about 95% of the book. I get that I'm younger than he is, but I was lost a majority of the time. I've never heard of or seen more than half the things he was referencing to, and that made me feel like I was missing out on a lot of important background information, like I was the odd-one-out who was missing all the inside jokes. If you're gonna jump into this, just make sure you're very knowledgeable about 60's and 70's films and music, or you're just gonna drown in titles and references you don't know. In the end, unfortunately, I ended up retaining none of the information (and not for lack of trying).
  
  I will say, I have never read something like this before though. Using other artists' stories to process his own grief and lamentations over his failures (as a father, son, husband, writer, friend, etc.) was an interesting concept. I liked the bizarre coincidences that seemed to keep meandering their way into Specktor's life, that he was able to find so many personal connections between a total smörgåsbord of eccentric artists. I don't think I could easily recommend this book to anyone; the content of this memoir just feels so specific to Specktor that it belongs to him and him alone.
• 
  Brendan

  Although mostly pleasant company, Specktor is an atrocious name-dropper, in habit and technique — the flimsy gestures at disguising which A-listers he’s rubbed elbows with, plus the initialisms that stand in for more anonymous intimates make for choppy reading — but given his Hollywood pedigree, he at least seems to come by it honestly. I can forgive a measure of self-aggrandizing and failure to be appropriately embarrassed about all this status given that one’s also appreciative of it, and the archive-digging that beefs up fascinating chapters on Carole Eastman, Eleanor Perry, and later an exegesis of Adler v. Kael, makes up the distance.
• 
  Heather

  This is a very particular book that will only appeal to particular readers, but I love it. An account of a specific person’s intelligence and sensibility as it engages with movies, books, the City of Los Angeles, failure, nostalgia, the shifting past,
• 
  ㋛ ㋡

  3.5/4? The last 1/4th was uneven, but I was hooked for the majority.
• 
  Irene Schneider

  This is a very odd book, indeed. I read it because of a laudatory review in the "London Review of Books" (27 January 2022), which declared it "a fabulous book, beautiful, generous, sombre and wise..." So, if the LRB loved it, and there's no shortage of flap-copy flattery, I can't ask you to go by me. Nevertheless...
  
  It is a clever idea for a Hollywood memoir. Specktor has woven scenes from his own life into sensationalistic and gossipy profiles of actors, writers, etc. But here's the genuinely odd part: he doesn't know them. His father, an agent, knew Michael Cimino and Hal Ashby, but unless I missed it, only one of Specktor's eight subjects, who range from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Tuesday Weld, was someone he met: Renata Adler. Clever, right? Without his second-hand and heavy-handed gossip (long on drugs and sex, of course), I doubt the book would have attracted a publisher. Name-dropping sells, and Specktor's own life is unremarkable (like most of ours), his gonzo-lite observations are clichéd, and his writing provides all the evidence needed to justify his exhaustive use of the word failure.
  
  Specktor can turn a phrase occasionally, e.g., regarding Tom McGuane: "Hollywood passed through him— and he through it— as cleanly as a bullet, leaving a small but permanent alteration." But more often than not, he tries too hard, e.g., "That failure is, too, a performance, unfolding before a convex mirror in the narcissistic theater of the self." Seriously! When he praises Ross Macdonald for "bare, unadorned prose," I was amazed that he could appreciate succinct writing— amazement that doubled when he went on to call Macdonald the Henry James of crime novels.
  
  The book's terrific title has a pompous subtitle, which I presume means we should approach the text as cultural commentary as much as midlife memoir. As such, it's second-rate and anything but fresh. Tuesday, F. Scott, McGuane, Warren Zevon, &c., are exploited in these pages, described in hackneyed Hollywood terms, the details of their privileged white lives used to add glitter to and glorify the struggles of his own.
• 
  Guillermo Perez

  Always Crashing in the Same Car weaves a portrait of stories together pieced by the authors experience and the ever elusive city of Los Angeles. Having lived in the neighboring cities my entire life a trip to LA was always filled with promise'; the promise of a good time, the promise of a one night stand and sometimes the promise of being disappointed and left standing outside the club in a line for hours. In Always Crashing Matthew Specktor shares intimate family stories with Los Angeles always looming in the background waiting to share the stage with heartbreak, with divorce and with complicated family relationships. Reading this book reminded me of sitting in echo park on a lazy sunday afternoon watching people in floating swans in the lake and runners going through the path surrounding it, an experience of mild amusement and boredom all in one. Specktor manages to write about LA in a way that any one who has lived in it or dreamed of moving here uniquely relatable and recognizable and in the process; giving LA a little more heart and a newfound breath of fresh air.
• 
  Briggs

  ... as you might guess, lands very squarely in my wheelhouse. Part memoir, part film & lit criticism, Matthew Specktor's beautiful, freewheeling book muses on several underrated under-sung artists, secret histories, fandom, friendship, family trauma, art’s immutable power to console - and arrives at unexpected notions of success and failure in our particularly elusive, sun-dappled city.
  
  Also, makes the 1970s sound really fuckin cool.
• 
  Richard

  Beautiful compelling book. The formal structure is given a poetic urgency by how the stories mesh with the author's own search for LA, failure, mortality and stardom. The individuals stories will haunt me for a long time to come - lives I knew very little about and am now dying to know more of.
  
  Instantly belongs in the pantheons of LA books and Hollywood books.
• 
  Duncan Birmingham

  This book felt tailor-made for me. If you have any interest in 70’s Hollywood and the motley crew of artists and writers chronicled, you’ll love it too. The author dovetails his own failure-laden history with that of various idiosyncratic artists he’s been inspired by. It’s a hard narrative feat to pull off but it works.
• 
  Paul Wilner

  Great stuff. My notice, for ZYZZYVA magazine, is linked below:
  
  
  https://www.zyzzyva.org/2021/07/27/al...
  
  
• 
  Matthew Wilder

  As for this kaleidoscopic look at failure in Los Angeles art...I am not sure my definition of “failure” is the same as Mr. Specktor’s. (Nor, certainly, my definition of “Los Angeles.”)