Good fiction necessarily encompasses our limited understandings of one another, and of ourselves.
Matthew SpecktorI've always felt that the basic unit of writing fiction is the sentence, and the basic unit of the screenplay is the scene.
Matthew SpecktorMy parents were very patient with my pretentious little adolescent snobberies. It took me awhile to accept them.
Matthew SpecktorA 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 SpecktorThe '90s were a time when not just the movie business, but every aspect of American life, became a lot more corporate. There's a line in Jonathan Franzen's essay "Perchance to Dream" about how "the rich lateral dramas of local manners have been replaced by a single vertical drama, that of commercial generality." I wanted to examine that great homogenizing force that came in during the '90s, since Hollywood seemed a place where it was particularly active.
Matthew Specktor