[IMG:L]When Martin [Pat Healy] signs on as a music producer for Great World of Sound, he hopes to make dreams come true as he searches for talent in small-town America. With his partner Clarence [Kene Holliday] by his side, they hold auditions in run down motel rooms and convince musicians to “invest” in their future by helping with the costs associated with recording a professional album. Soon the pair realizes they are merely scamming people for money and wonder if they haven’t been scammed themselves.
Hoping for authentic emotion, first-time director Craig Zobel placed real newspaper ads and invited people to audition in mock motel rooms. The up and coming musicians had no idea the tryouts were recorded by hidden camera or the producers were actually actors.
Zobel and Healy sat down with Hollywood.com to get the behind-the-scenes scoop on making The Great World of Sound.
Hollywood.com: How did you come up with this idea?
Craig Zobel: My father in the ’70’s was involved in a kind of record company scam that he didn’t initially know was a scam. He was working as an A&R (Artists and Repertoire) rep and as a record producer and over time realized that, unbeknownst to him, he was convincing people to give their money to a non-legitimate company and I thought that was just a really interesting thing and a really good place to start something.
HW: Can you talk about the hidden cameras and interacting with these people who didn’t realize that they were being filmed?
Pat Healy: So there were basically ads put out in the local papers in Charlotte, North Carolina, where we shot, asking people to come and audition for a record company’s talent scouts to sign a recording contract. People came to audition in rooms that we had built. The production designer, Richard Wright, had built these rooms that looked like motels in various cities with three holes cut in the wall, two-way mirrors and digital video-cameras on dollies with zoom lenses. Then Kene Holliday and I would act like the talent scouts, Martin and Clarence, and people would come in and they would play for us or they would play a song on a tape player for us and then we’d basically have 45-minutes or an hour of talking with these people and trying to sell them. It was an amazing experience as an actor of not having the interference of the camera in the room. It really felt like a very real interaction and they were really not acting. So after a while you kind of forget that you are too and you get lost in that in a very good way. It lends the movie that sort of documentary feel.
[IMG:R]HW: So they walked into a building of some kind and then into a room that was set up like a motel room?
CZ: Yeah, that’s pretty much what happened, which was weird. The other thing that’s strange about it is that because of the two-way mirrors the lighting had to be right. The mirrors were dark and shooting through them was dark and so we’d basically have to put a drop ceiling in those rooms and basically put the whole ceiling as fluorescent fixtures. So they would walk into this really bright hotel room, but the weird thing is that the first one, it’s vague as to whether or not it’s a hotel room. It’s got a kitchenette in it, so when we made it a full on hotel room and had there be a sink with those cups and stuff and one of those hotel room phones there were a lot more people going, “Why is this a hotel room?”
PH: There’s one great one on the cutting room floor somewhere. One of the cameras was behind a microwave oven and the cameraman laughed at something and there were a couple of guys in the room, musicians, and one guy was sitting next to the microwave and he heard it. He looked at it like, “What was that?” Then he kind of laughs and looks away and kind of forgets about it. There were some odd moments like that.
HW: Pat, have you experienced this sort of thing in your acting career, going to a strange sort of audition?
PH: Yeah, many times. Auditions are often frightenin and strange and you never know what you’re going to get out of them…I think that I could really empathize with every person that came in the room because I understood what it’s like to be in that position. I think that’s why the film, to Craig‘s credit as well, is not a mockery of these people and it is empathetic and it’s not some kind of a goon show or look at these people who are foolish. I think it really shows how noble and brave and beautiful these people can be under these kinds of circumstances when we know that they’re being exploited in some way by these salesmen. At the same time I can empathize as the character, not knowing that I’m exploiting people and feeling like I’m doing something good and responsible and the terrible feeling of finding out that you’re not.
CZ: All of us were very sincere in wanting to make sure that it didn’t come off poorly and that the people didn’t leave feeling uncomfortable about it. If they weren’t happy with it we wouldn’t use the footage and we wouldn’t do anything with it and so we spent a long time talking to everyone afterwards about not only what we were doing in making it as a movie, but also explaining that it was a movie and showing them the cameras and explaining how it worked…of the amount of people who came in which was about 70 people, people and bands, that we saw, and out of that about six or seven said no, that they weren’t into it.
HW: Did people act like this was their big break, like American Idol?
CZ: My initial intention in doing this sort of reality stuff was not so much to kind of echo American Idol specifically, but was literally to get this kind of natural performance out of it. We did shoot whole scenes, like I said, that were shot with actors doing the same thing, but they just didn’t have the same spirit to them that I thought was important to have, this very natural vibe.
PH: Yeah. It seems false next to something that is natural and real, putting a scripted and acted scene next to that.
HW: What do you think the reaction of the people around those in the film will be?
CZ: We’ll see. If you feel like there are people who are bad musicians in the movie those were ringers a lot of the time because I didn’t want to kind of mock anyone. The people that it’s like an obviously poor singer or something, that’s actually an actor doing that just so that we didn’t really get into that.
[IMG:L]HW: Pat, have you ever worked in sales in the past or did you have to develop your sales skills for the movie?
PH: I did do some telemarketing a couple of different times…I quit one job. I had a particularly bad experience one night. The job was to sell magazine subscriptions to 10 different magazines, and I can’t remember if it was either 10 different magazines for five years or five different magazines for 10 years, but to one person over the phone and you had to get them to say yes to that. It was just terrible and it was impossible to begin with. Then one night, and I’d only been doing it maybe two or three weeks while I was sophomore in college and an elderly woman said that she would really like to do it, but that she wouldn’t be around long enough to enjoy them. That was it for me. That was my last night. I couldn’t take it anymore.
CZ: I quit my telemarketing job at lunch. The lunch break happened and I just didn’t go back…I was there for way too long. We had to raise our hands to go to the bathroom and one day I raised my hand–it wasn’t lunch–and took my lunch break and just got in my car and left.
HW: Pat, did you get any pointers from Craig’s dad?
PH: There’s good cop/bad cop which is pretty good, I thought. Kene would be like, “Maybe it’s just me. I don’t get it.” And I would sell him on it and be so passionate in my defense of it that they would be endeared to me in some way.
CZ: Yeah, I forgot about that one. There was also that one where it was like, “I just don’t think that we can use you. I just don’t think that you work for us,” which is the worst one ever because then they were like, “No. You can use me.” It was totally pushing the craziest, most insecure button. It’s a terrible thing to do.
PH: Yeah, or there’s one in the movie that’s like, “This song is really good, but I can’t hear it because the recording is so bad. What you need is a professional recording.”
HW: What do you want people to take away from this film?
CZ: I feel like this movie is about how people rationalize things in a large way and how sometimes that’s not a good thing. It’s how they rationalize like, “Well maybe you do pay money to do this thing and maybe this is how it works. I don’t know.” Maybe that, but also in a bigger way people like Pat‘s character who rationalizes that he’s helping people and giving these people a chance he’s not sort of doing that. It’s like, “I’m helping people and it’s making me a better perso won and making me noble.” I think that’s sort of the wheel house it’s in and that it’s about.
PH: In the end I’d like to think it’s helpful in that he ignores and rationalizes so many things for so long that he can no longer do that because now he’s aware of what he’s done and aware of what’s happened to these people and now he’s going to have to change whatever that is. I think of that as a positive thing.
