It's hard enough to make a novel a novel. I wouldn't know how to make it something else at the same time Matthew Specktor More Quotes by Matthew Specktor More Quotes From Matthew Specktor When I moved to SF in my early 20s, I loved it, but I was absolutely astonished to discover that people there hated L.A. I was just like why? Really? I had no idea. Matthew Specktor hated people ideas One of the weird things about L.A. is that there's always a set of negative perceptions that attaches itself to this city. Matthew Specktor perception cities negative Every snotty egotistical teenager thinks they're smarter than the world they crawled out of. It didn't take me so long to grow out of that. I think I was only in my early twenties when I realized I was just relying on received ideas. Matthew Specktor teenager ideas thinking I was so very interested in literature and so relatively uninterested in the movies when I was a teenager. Matthew Specktor uninterested teenager literature My mom was a screenwriter. I saw a lot of people who didn't seem very fulfilled creatively or otherwise by their roles in the motion picture industry. Matthew Specktor saws mom people I worked in the mail room at CAA when I was in high school. I worked in the literary department, too. That was my after school job, believe it or not: I would read manuscripts and then evaluations on whether or not I thought they'd make good movies. Which was fascinating and kind of hilarious to me at the time. Matthew Specktor jobs believe school I do have complicated feelings about Hollywood, but I also have tremendously affectionate ones. Matthew Specktor hollywood complicated feelings Usually when people say they have mixed feelings about something, it's a sort of euphemistic way of saying they hate it. Matthew Specktor hate feelings people I have very mixed feelings about the movie business, and about Los Angeles in general. Matthew Specktor mixed-feelings los-angeles feelings You look at the absolute scorn that gets poured on a fallen celebrity, whether it's Tom Cruise or Lindsay Lohan or Marlon Brando, or Elvis when he got fat. They're not allowed the dignity of ordinary failure. And I think that plays into people's notions about Los Angeles, too. It's not allowed to be a regular city with problems. Matthew Specktor cities play thinking My own sense is that fiction is inching its way over to join poetry on the cultural margin. It's an area of passionate concern for me, as for many people, but it's nowhere near as central to the culture as it used to be. Matthew Specktor culture people fiction Our need to identify with representative figures is something that never goes away. We still find those in novels. We find those in television. We find them in movies. We find them all over the place. Matthew Specktor figures television needs A lot of talent, a lot of the currency that movies used to have, has spilled over into TV. People talk about TV the way they used to talk about movies and, as much as I hate to say it, the way they used to talk about books. Matthew Specktor hate book people 100 million dollars used to be the limit of what a movie might cost; now they routinely cost 300 million. Sooner or later, spectacle is just going to have to find a new way to exist. Matthew Specktor dollars cost might People will continue to make movies. But I do think the economic model of the studio movie is closing in on a kind of systemic collapse. Matthew Specktor economic-models people thinking The feature film business, the studio film business, feels to me like there's just nowhere else to go. It's like a record that's just skipping at the end, with the needle stuck in the run-out groove. Matthew Specktor records film running The 90s were the decade in which studio filmmaking became a much more purely corporatized process, when their crassness ceased to operate on such a relatively individual scale. Matthew Specktor scales individual process Sometimes it seems to me that the celebration of a person is really just a prelude to ridicule. Matthew Specktor prelude celebration sometimes The novelist is frequently considered to be an impediment. Matthew Specktor impediments novelists I've always found too that somewhere in whatever you've just written lies the seed of what you're going to write next. Matthew Specktor next writing lying
