American Dream Machine
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The story of two talent agents and their three troubled boys, heirs to Hollywood royalty; a sweeping narrative about fathers and sons, the movie business, and the sundry sea changes that have shaped Hollywood and, by extension, American life.
American Dream Machine is the story of an iconic striver, a classic self-made man in the vein of Jay Gatsby or Augie March. It's the story of a talent agent and his troubled sons, two generations of Hollywood royalty. It's a sweeping narrative about parents and children, the movie business, and the sundry sea changes that have shaped Hollywood, and by extension, American life. Beau Rosenwald—overweight, not particularly handsome, and improbably charismatic—arrives in Los Angeles in 1962 with nothing but an ill-fitting suit and a pair of expensive brogues. By the late 1970s he has helped found the most successful agency in Hollywood. Through the eyes of his son, we watch Beau and his partner go to war, waging a seismic battle that redraws the lines of an entire industry. We watch Beau rise and fall and rise again, in accordance with the cultural transformations that dictate the fickle world of movies. We watch Beau's partner, the enigmatic and cerebral Williams Farquarsen, struggle to contain himself, to control his impulses and consolidate his power. And we watch two generations of men fumble and thrive across the LA landscape, learning for themselves the shadows and costs exacted by success and failure. Mammalian, funny, and filled with characters both vital and profound, American Dream Machine is a piercing interrogation of the role—nourishing, as well as destructive—that illusion plays in all our lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the center of Specktor's conventional second novel (after That Summertime Sound) is Beau Rosenwald, a Jewish boy from New York who lands in Los Angeles in the 1960s with nothing and uses his improbable charisma to become a powerful Hollywood agent. Narrated by his son Nate, the novel alternates between Beau's successes and failures with his talent agency, American Dream Machine, and his son's attempts during the 1990s and 2000s to find purpose. Nate and his half-brother Severin grow up in the Hollywood miasma and struggle to escape from their father's shadow, in the process falling into drugs and hedonism. Meanwhile, Beau's blusterous personality leads to a feud with his conflicted business partner, Williams Farquarsen III, who nurses a destructive secret, and as time goes on, Beau becomes increasingly isolated from the Hollywood of a new generation. The mostly familiar plot meanders with few surprises, but the book is nonetheless filled with aper us of the cynical and vulgar world of Hollywood executives. While Specktor (That Summertime Sound), a film executive and the founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, does not quite achieve an epic tone, his novel of the seedy guardians of the mythic American dream succeeds in showing just how unpleasant the film industry can be.
