8/10
Talent search company looks for budding musicians to be ripped off
29 April 2007
Warning: Spoilers
A musician talent search company, Great World of Sound (GWS), trains salesmen to go out and find talent. Once found, the deal pressed on the budding musicians is that they have to commit to paying 30% of the costs of producing and distributing CDs. Some of that money is extracted before the artist sets foot in a recording studio. Cash or a check payable to GWS, which also happens to be the initials of the owner. Sounds fishy? You bet it is.

The point of this comedy is that the musicians are not the only suckers in this scam; the salesmen are too. The ultimate crooks are the company bosses who close shop and disappear when enough money has been collected. The salesmen are lucky if they get their last paycheck.

The performers you see are actual musicians. Eighty percent of them did not know ahead of time that the auditions given in cheap motel rooms were fake. What you see and hear is the real thing. Twenty percent knew they were filmed but did not know what the filmmaker's project was about. Only two of the performers were scripted.

There are a lot of auditions. The film comes close to having one too many.

Best word play: one of the bosses talks about GWS begin a "conduit for talent". Read "con-duit".
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