Slow Fade is a profound and utterly convincing portrait of a man whose career, whose life, has been devoted to the manipulation of images—on the screen and at the conference table, with actors and technicians, even (and especially) with those closest to him—and the story of how, in his 71st year, he tries to divest himself of illusions, to make peace with his demons and his past. With a geography as diverse as the streets of Beverly Hills and the charnal grounds of India, a Mexican beach resort and the Russian Tea Room in New York City, it is also a spare, eloquent, and deeply informed novel about the world of the movies.

To bring voice to this story, Will Oldham talkes on the main narrative, the story of Wesley Hardin and his doomed film. Oldham felt another voice was needed to read the text in italics, to give the listener a true sense of the inter-relatedness of the stories. He brought in his close friend D.V. deVincentis, a Hollywood lifer and veteran screenwriter himself, to read Walker Hardin’s script. The combination of these two voices, the ways they embody the ebb and flow of the narrative, give the reading of the book a fitting, cinematic quality.

Slow Fade comes out of the space between real life and the movies and closes it up for good. A great book: beautiful, funny, and dangerous.”
— Michael Herr

The difference between the art novel and the Hollywood novel can be as vast as the reaches between the East Coast and the West Coast, and any effort to wed the two in a shotgun marriage is liable to blow up in one’s face. Slow Fade…is far from being an easy book—which is one of the best things about it. That’s probably what Michael Herr means by “dangerous” in his jacket-blurb patter.

— Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Los Angeles Reader

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