Amazon unveils two best-seller-based pilots

Amazon debuts two new pilots Friday, both based on best-selling — though very different — novels.

The pilots are available to watch on Amazon.com and the Amazon Prime Video app, available on connected TVs and mobile devices. As usual, the streaming service will seek customer feedback to help determine if either show is extended as a regular series.

Ready to watch:

• The Interestings , based on Meg Wolitzer’s 2013 novel, introduces a group of self-involved teens who meet at an arts camp in 1974. They dub themselves “The Interestings.” The pilot leaps forward 20 years, when one member of the group succeeds while others flounder, abandon artistic aspirations or just disappear, and relationships change. At the center of the story is Jules Jacobson (Lauren Ambrose, Six Feet Under), an aspiring actress who uses her wit to compensate for what she lacks in glamour and money. 

• The Last Tycoon , based F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished last novel, follows Monroe Stahr (Matt Bomer, White Collar), a 1930s Hollywood golden boy trying to make a film about his dead wife and often battling his domineering boss, Pat Brady, played by Kelsey Grammer. Stahr has high film-making ambitions. Brady, however, is a realist: “You can’t have art without commerce,” he remarks. Brady’s studio is struggling to survive during the Great Depression, and he hopes to steer Stahr away from serious work toward films with a young Shirley Temple-like actress. “For two hours we can make people laugh, sing and forget — that’s our job,” Brady says. There’s romantic and political intrigue as well. Power places ample temptations before Stahr and Brady. The studio’s second-largest market, meanwhile, happens to be Germany, and Brady is all too willing to allow Hitler’s representative to censor films the Fuhrer deems offensive. Directed in a sepia tone by Billy Ray (The Hunger Games), The Last Tycoon's cast also includes Lily Collins and Dominique McElligott. (The novel was also made into a 1976 film starring Robert DeNiro).