Culture Shock 01.29.15: Amazon confronts 'The Man in the High Castle'

The camera pulls back to reveal a theater marquee advertising "The Punch Party" starring Rock Hudson and June Allyson. It could be one of those romantic comedies in which Hudson so often appeared in the 1960s, often with Doris Day. But it isn't.

This movie is playing only in Nazi-occupied America.

Welcome to the world of "The Man in the High Castle," based on Philip K. Dick's 1962 Hugo Award-winning science fiction novel of the same name, set in an America that lost World War II.

From that shot of the marquee on, "The Man in the High Castle" plays with our expectations. Nothing is entirely as it seems. There's the small irony, for instance, that one of the actors still able to work under America's Nazi regime is a closeted gay man. His movies are no threat.

"The Man in the High Castle" is part of Amazon.com's latest slate of pilots, and of the retailer-turned-studio's hour-long drama prospects, it's the one most deserving of a full-season order.

Few artists teeter between genius and madness in quite the literal way PKD did.

Dick's struggle with mental illness translated into stories about people who are never quite sure what is real or what is fantasy. A man could come to find out the world he thought he inhabited was all a dream. Or he could learn that what he thought were paranoid delusions about a vast conspiracy controlling everything were real.

A lowly resident of the science fiction ghetto during his lifetime, Dick has, since his death in 1982, been welcomed into America's literary pantheon. Through his novels and short stories, and through osmosis, Dick has become the SF writer with probably the greatest influence on popular culture. He certainly is one of the most frequently adapted, for better or worse. The movies "Blade Runner," "Total Recall" and "Minority Report" all spring from his sometimes fevered imagination.

At the helm of "The Man in the High Castle" is executive producer Frank Spotnitz ("The X-Files"), who also wrote the teleplay. The setting is roughly the same as in Dick's novel: an America where World War II dragged on past 1945 and Germany developed the atom bomb first, allowing the Nazis to vaporize Washington, D.C., and successfully invade the continental U.S. The story picks up in 1962, with the United States divided into two regions: Nazi-controlled territory east of the Rockies and Japanese-occupied territory along the West Coast, with an impoverished neutral zone in between.

The pilot opens in New York, where Joe Blake (Luke Kleintank), trying to live up to the example of his war veteran father, joins up with a resistance cell. No sooner does he receive his mission — to transport a secret cargo to resistance contacts in the neutral zone — than the secret police strike. Joe is on the run from the outset.

On the West Coast, Juliana Crain (Alexa Davalos) becomes involved with the resistance inadvertently when her sister, who is on the run from Japanese authorities, hands her a package containing movie reels labeled "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy." The film, made by a mysterious figure known as the Man in the High Castle, depicts a world were the Allies defeated the Nazis and Imperial Japan. It's a typical PKD conceit: Inside a work of alternate history, history itself becomes fiction.

So, film canisters in hand, Juliana takes up her sister's assignment and heads toward the neutral zone and an eventual meeting with Joe, which is where the pilot leaves off. But the episode is at its most  compelling when concerned with the deteriorating relations between Japan and Germany. The only thing worse than occupation is becoming the battleground for rival occupiers, which significantly raises the story's already high stakes.

Spotnitz squeezes a lot of potential plot threads into just an hour, while cinematographer James Hawkinson (NBC's "Hannibal," aka the best-looking show on television) gives everything an appropriately cinematic gloss, despite some obvious budget constraints.

"The Man in the High Castle" looks like it could be one the better PKD adaptations. The best of all worlds is where it makes Amazon's cut.

Culture Shock 01.01.15: Mozart on your television

Gael García Bernal as Rodrigo in Amazon's "Mozart in the Jungle."

I blame public radio.

For most of us, our only exposure to classical music on the radio dial comes from public radio, where the hosts — no one calls them "disc jockeys" — speak of the music they serve up in the hushed, reverential tones that have become public radio's most identifiable and risible trait.

If classical music has a reputation in the English-speaking world for being stodgy and largely irrelevant to the culture at large, and believe me it does, then those whose job it is to promote the art haven't helped matters.

The name is a bad enough handicap to overcome: "classical music." That alone says, "old, moldy and not relevant to my interests."

Performers, composers and conductors feel the passion in what they do, but most of their potential audience does not. We're a long way from the 1913 Paris debut of Igor Stravinsky's sensuously scandalous "The Rite of Spring," which so inflamed its audience that the performance ended in a riot.

Imagine that: a ballet riot. Today, we reserve that sort of passion for sporting events.

All that is why it's such a pleasant surprise Amazon.com took a chance on "Mozart in the Jungle." The first, 10-episode season of the half-hour comedy series, set amid New York City's classical music scene, dropped on the Amazon Prime streaming service just before Christmas.

The series is produced by Roman Coppola ("Moonrise Kingdom"), Jason Schwartzman ("Rushmore") and Alex Timbers, and inspired by Blair Tindall's memoir "Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs and Classical Music." As the book's subtitle so desperately conveys, this isn't your typical, stuffy classical music. Tindall's memoir is about young prodigies living away from home for the first time and taking full advantage of their newfound freedom.

The Amazon series is more circumspect. It begins with our Tindallesque heroine, Hailey (Lola Kirke), pursuing an open tryout with the fictional New York Symphony and ending up instead as assistant to the symphony's young, brash and charismatic new conductor, Rodrigo (Gael García Bernal of "Y Tu Mamá También").

While "Mozart in the Jungle" is structured around Hailey's attempts to balance working for Rodrigo, mastering the oboe and having a boyfriend (Peter Vack), it's the other members of the orchestra family who most command our interest. Over the course of 10 episodes, what could be just a one-note collection of sitcom supporting players grows on us, both as characters and people. Well, except for Dee Dee (John Miller), who starts out as the old hippie percussionist and pretty much stays the old hippie percussionist. But that's old hippies for you.

Saffron Burrows is Cynthia, a star cellist who is having an affair with Malcolm McDowell's Thomas, the outgoing conductor who has been relegated to a ceremonial "emeritus" position. And Broadway mainstay Bernadette Peters plays the symphony's president, whose main job is to keep the financially beleaguered institution's donations flowing in.

In trying to bring life back to the New York Symphony, Rodrigo faces the same problems that face the real world of classical music. When he gives Hailey a shot at trying out, it's because he values passion ("the blood," he calls it) over technical proficiency. Rodrigo's struggle to revive classical music, which Bernal makes our struggle, too, propels the series. The backstage shenanigans are secondary. Rodrigo sexes up classical music more than the sex does, as he confronts the ridiculous union rules and donor galas that become the comedic obstacles in the way of his creating something special, something that might connect with a larger audience.

Funny, sometimes quirky and glamorously shot, especially when Coppola is in the director's chair, "Mozart in the Jungle" is more than an entertaining comedy, although it is that. It's the best publicity classical music has had possibly since the Parisians rioted over Stravinsky.

Book publishers risk repeating the music industry’s mistakes

At the risk of slipping into “grumpy old man” mode, life used to be so much simpler.

You bought a book, and it was yours to do with as you pleased. You could read it silently to yourself. You could read it aloud to someone else. You could dog-ear the corners, underline passages and make notes in the margin. And when you were finished, you could sell the book or give it away.

If someone wanted to borrow it, your only problem was getting it back in good condition. I’m still upset about the book I lent out that ended up covered in vegan mayonnaise.

Nowadays, you can purchase and download digital books, which seems like a great idea — until you learn that publishers want to control how you use them.

You young people and your Kindles! You don’t know what it used to be like. When I was your age, books had pages! Now get off my lawn!

Sorry. That was Old Man Grumpy talking.

Actually, I really do think electronic books are a great idea. Who wouldn’t like to keep hundreds of books stored on one convenient, easy-to-read digital device? For me, that is the main attraction of electronic readers like Amazon.com’s Kindle. You start to worry when you have so many books that they threaten to bury you beneath an avalanche.

Unfortunately, owning a book downloaded from Amazon isn’t the same as owning a book. You can’t resell it, and you can’t let someone borrow it without also letting them borrow your Kindle. And I wouldn’t take the chance of a friend accidentally dropping my $360 reader into a jar of Vegenaise(cq).

Making matters worse, some publishers seem bent on limiting Kindle’s features.

Amazon’s new Kindle 2 includes a text-to-speech feature that allows it to read aloud any book loaded onto it. That feature, however, scared publishers and the Authors Guild, which claimed text-to-speech would threaten sales of audio books.

Not everyone was concerned. Bestselling author and recent Newberry Medal recipient Neil Gaiman blogged that when you buy a book, “you’re also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc.”

Kindle’s text-to-speech isn’t a threat to audio books, he concluded, because audio books are, in effect, performance art. A Kindle reading a book to you in a robotic voice isn’t the same as the vocal performance you get with a true audio book.

But rather than fight a protracted copyright battle, Amazon gave in, offering rights holders the option of disabling text-to-speech on selected books.

The publishing industry is repeating the music industry’s mistakes. Music companies lost money while they tried to fight and then restrict music downloads. Only in the past year have the major recording labels learned their lesson: When customers buy digital media, they don’t want restrictions.

Ironically, Amazon helped pioneer music downloads free of the Digital Rights Management software that limits what you can do with a song after you’ve purchased it. After Amazon started selling DRM-free songs, industry leader iTunes followed. Now downloads are the music industry’s one area of sales growth.

By caving to the demands of publishers and the guild, Amazon may be hurting itself. Kindle books already come with use restrictions you don’t find with other electronic books. The Internet is full of DRM-free books you can download — many in the public domain and free of charge. Author and blogger Cory Doctorow gives away entire novels online, which he says helps drive sales of his physical books.

Doctorow’s sales benefit, no doubt, from the fact that a lot of people still like to own real books. But as devices like the Kindle improve, and reading an electronic book becomes more like reading a real one, that may not remain the case.

Book publishers should concentrate on finding business models that don’t risk alienating their customers. Otherwise, they could end up playing catch-up just like the music industry.