Mothers of America

            let your kids go to the movies!

get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to

it’s true that fresh air is good for the body

                              but what about the soul

that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery

            images…

So wrote Frank O’Hara in ‘Ave Maria’, in 1964.

Matthew Specktor is the son of the talent agent Fred Specktor and the writer Katherine McGaffey, whose crushing misadventures in screenwriting seem to him a detour in what could have been a far happier life. His father’s specialism was originally ‘oddballs and misfits’, carting around actors like Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern to no-hope castings where even Nicholson’s wolfish smile seemed wrong. But film-making was changing fast, away from conventional matinée idols into its golden age of humanist complexity on screen: men and women whose unusual faces, films and personal myths still fascinate us today.  

As a teenager in the shabby Santa Monica of the late 1970s, Specktor stays out all night watching Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. When he rolls in with the dawn, his mother asks if he’s revised for his test, but also joins in with quoting the script........

© The Spectator