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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

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Matthew Specktor
Age: 57
Born: 1966
Born: December 21
Novelist
Screenwriter
LA
California
Process
Purely
Much
Scale
Studio
Scales
Studios
Ceased
Decades
Operate
Became
Relatively
Individual
Decade

More quotes by Matthew Specktor

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It's hard enough to make a novel a novel. I wouldn't know how to make it something else at the same time
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The novelist is frequently considered to be an impediment.
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I think having power ingrains people with a conservatism. There's a tendency to hedge one's bets. (Which explains a lot, actually, about why the movie business is the way it is, and why the publishing industry is too.)
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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.
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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.
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I think the publishing industry is dismayingly like the movie business. It grows more corporate by the day.
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Great books are written from a sense that there is nothing to lose.
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I don't want to say that having power is overrated, but powerlessness can give rise to a different kind of authority, and that's the kind of authority that writes books.
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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.
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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.
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We're a culture that's obsessed with people who make and who squander ridiculous amounts of wealth, which seemed an obsession well worth interrogating in a novel. That probably accounts for what some have called the book's sweeping feel, but I don't know that I set out to be cinematic. I wouldn't know how to do that in a novel, specifically.
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Good fiction necessarily encompasses our limited understandings of one another, and of ourselves.
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One of the weird things about L.A. is that there's always a set of negative perceptions that attaches itself to this city.
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I've always found too that somewhere in whatever you've just written lies the seed of what you're going to write next.
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I think writers can gain a lot of vitality from being misread.
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I'm going to write what I feel like writing, which is a great place to be. But it can be hard to get there. It's so easy to get stricken with one kind of self-consciousness or another.
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I like writing sentences. It's tactile and exciting. Whereas working at the level of the scene is a more cerebral pleasure.
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I do have complicated feelings about Hollywood, but I also have tremendously affectionate ones.
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Much to my surprise, there's a sense for people in the cable industry that fiction writers might actually be good at script writing. You can write dialogue!
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A Good Soldier is one of my favorite novels, for various reasons. But the class question is a good one, because it's not always easy to empathize with privileged people.
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