The Great World of Sound
Plum Pictures 106mins, NR

Written and Directed
by Craig Zobel

They called them “song sharks.” It's a scam, where thieves pretend to be record producers and they bilk unsuspecting suckers out of hundreds or thousands of dollars pretending to help said suckers start up a musical career.

Martin (Pat Healy) is a 30ish white slacker, who's had a number of jobs in the radio industry and is currently unemployed and living off his girlfriend
Pam's (Rebecca Mader), knickknack business, so he sees an ad placed by two sharpsters named Layton (Robert Longstreet) and Shank(John Baker), who hire him to go around the south and audition would-be recording artists and get them to invest a few thousand bucks in production costs for their first albums.

So Martin is partnered with Clarence (Kene Holliday), a middle-aged black man, and he starts his new career as an unwitting conman. It first seems like it's going alright, and Martin even contributes some of his own money for a promising prospect. Then reality begins to set in.

This is about a moral dilemma. What do you do when you realize what you're doing is wrong? Do you immediately quit or keep on doing it and hope that you'll manage to make enough to pay the bills before the boss goes to jail. It's also about the art of selling. Martin and Clarence get better and better at selling recording time and their pitches change constantly. Also, we get to hear a lot of bad to mediocre music, made by people, who presumably, were lured by the same type of ads that are highlighted in the film. [think the first few episodes of American Idol] This is a disturbing work about how low people will go sometimes and how morality sometimes goes out the window when the wolf is at the door. One can see why it was one of the highlights at Sundance last January.

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