A daily chronicle of creativity in film, TV, music, arts, and entertainment, produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from November 2014 – March 2020. Host John Horn leads the conversation, accompanied by the nation's most plugged-in cultural journalists.
Composer and producer Eric Alexandrakis grew up in a highly educated household. "My mother has a Ph.D. in philosophy, my father has a Ph.D. in physics, so growing up I was always around a lot of academic people," Alexandrakis says. "I used to give up my bed to Nobel Prize winners when I was a kid."
The composer was versed in the work of Plato, so he wanted to have musicians create the score to accompany the Greek philosopher's "Allegory of the Cave." The person Alexandrakis thought would be the perfect fit to read the text was actor John Malkovich. "His kind of demeanor is very interesting to me," says Alexandrakis, "because it very much reminds me of the people I grew up around."
The end product is called "Like A Puppet Show." Several musicians, including Yono Ono and Sean Lennon, Placebo and OMD remixed the same track with varying results.
Alexandrakis met Malkovich through a mutual friend — photographer Sandro Miller — and when the composer pitched the idea to the actor, he was all in. The album was released exclusively on limited edition vinyl in November.
The initial incarnation of the project was a short film shot by Miller and scored by Alexandrakis. When the composer was on the set of Miller's photo series, titled "Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich: Homage to Photographic Masters," Alexandrakis was inspired to create the album.
"I love really strange things," Alexandrakis says. "It's funny, I showed it to my wife and she [said], 'What is this? That is so weird and disturbing ... It's so you.'"