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GREAT WORLD OF SOUND
By Sarah Keenlyside
Ever heard of "song sharking"? It's when fly-by-night record companies hire unwitting salespeople as "record producers" to sell dodgy recording contracts to wannabe musicians. First-time writer-director Craig Zobel's film Great World of Sound tackles the subject, which for the filmmaker happens to hit close to home-literally.
"My father was a song shark," he explained. "Back in the '70s. He had worked in radio and answered an ad to work at a record company as an A&R rep, so to speak. Very quickly he realized that, 'Hey wait, this doesn't seem legitimate.' I thought it was interesting 'cause it's like the scam artist is also being scammed."
The comedy follows Martin and Clarence (Pat Healy and Kene Holiday), two down on their luck guys who take producing jobs at a company called Great World of Sound. They audition dozens of artists whose talents generally range from bad to worse, yet the company encourages the duo to sign anyone who will pay the initial fee. Desperate to solve their financial woes they set out to conquer the music world, only to discover that the only thing they are conquering is people's bank accounts.
"It's almost a misnomer to call it a scam," Zobel explained. "Technically these people aren't doing anything wrong. They make you sign a contract that gets them out of anything so you can't sue them. They're just ridiculously unethical by promising they're going to make you famous. They might give you like 25 CDs of some song you made."
While much of the film was shot and scripted like a traditional narrative, Zobel opted to shoot the audition scenes "reality-style" by putting ads in local papers announcing that a record company was holding auditions for "one weekend only". Real people showed up to the production office, which had been dressed to look like cheap motel rooms. Amazingly, nobody questioned the surroundings. "We cut holes in the walls and hung two-way mirrors and hid microphones in the room," Zobel explained. "Obviously there were some written characters to further the plot, but the majority of the people were actually musicians who were talking to the actors thinking they were really record producers."
To pull this off, Zobel needed actors who could think on their feet. But while both Healy and Holiday had experience in improv, it was challenging nonetheless. "At first they were kind of bad at it," Zobel laughed. "They were incredibly nervous, but by the end of the thing I had to tell them to slow down 'cause they would sell everybody. We were like 'Stop! We need some people to say 'no' at this point.'" To give the actors direction, Zobel wrote a cell phone into the script so he could communicate with them mid-audition. But the actors also got some help from another source: Zobel's dad. "He helped the actors with the reality stuff for the first few days. Like, techniques that other people had used, or even he had used," the director said. "He likes the film a lot. And he had a lot of fun doing it."
