His father, Fred Specktor, is a talent agent at Creative Artists Agency.

[3] In 2001, he adapted Shirley Hazzard's novel The Transit of Venus in partnership with Radical Media.

A nonfiction book of film criticism, about the motion picture The Sting, was published in 2011.

[6] In 2021, Specktor published Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California, which alternates between the story of Specktor's own life (including his divorce and the death of his mother) and the lives of the artists Eleanor Perry, Carole Eastman, Thomas McGuane, Tuesday Weld, Warren Zevon, Renata Adler, Hal Ashby, and Michael Cimino.

Specktor told the Orange County Register that he had been struggling with writing a TV pilot, and “realized that the idea of writing a book that was both a memoir and an investigation of the artists who had experienced silences or crises in their careers was attractive to me.”[7] Publishers Weekly called the book "fascinating" and "illuminating," and concluded that "this enthralling work deserves a central spot on the ever-growing shelf of books about Tinseltown.