2 Actresses Needed

BroadwayAustralia.com wrote:
> BROADWAYAUSTRALIA.COM ADVICE SECTION
> Our kids need to be a little more careful
> By Troy Dodds


Thanks for this - FINALLY!!
There are positive and negative aspects to what you have written, but at least it's a good step toward justifying the controversy you've created.


> Over the last few months, I've been working on a special
> investigative story focused on auditions and the risks our
> children are put at.
> The special investigative story will be online shortly - at
> the moment, we're speaking with industry experts to get their
> view on what could very well be a crisis waiting to happen.

When you - finally - get the details of your story together, we'd love to see it. I'm not sure that you or your industry experts could really add anything
beyond what you've already said, but if you have some genuine case examples, it might quench this industry expert's skepticism.

> Let me give you a scary hypothetical situation.

The hypothetical scenario you mention COULD take place, but it could also take place WITHOUT the internet...apart from giving widespread access to information, the internet on its own is not as evil and scary as we are led to believe.


> Let's hope that hypothetical situation never happens, but
> without regulation or rules surrounding auditions - and with
> most not specifying that adult accompaniment is needed - it's
> a can of worms that could potentially be opened.
> Personally, I don't want such regulation - but I do want our
> kids to be more careful.

Hey- There ARE rules and regulations along those lines governing professional industry auditions of minors. Why don't you want that? That's a dodgy sounding statement by itself!

If you are only talking about individual, mainly amateur, situations involving dodgy operators, then obviously YES, people should be careful. But is that really ground-breaking news? 'When you respond to dodgy operators, be careful'? Um....Thanks.




> You only have to look at theatre message boards right across
> the web to know that young aspiring actors often don't listen
> properly, don't read properly and don't pay attention. We
> created a touch of angst during this special investigation
> when we posted an audition notice, just to see how many
> under-age people actually respond to such notices. Within a
> few hours (and after many responses) we posted a notice
> saying that the particular message was part of a special
> BroadwayAustralia.com investigation. But even weeks later,
> kids were still replying to the original message, on the very
> same forum, without reading the many replies to it or our
> original explanation.

You neglect to mention that EVERYBODY in general has a tendency to respond to individual messages rather than trawl through all of the previous messages in a thread. So it's not such a revelation that no-one noticed your ineffectual disclaimer, and that people continued to respond.
Your experiment was not as conclusive as you make out, although it DID cause angst...for a different reason. I'm not convinced that contributing to the problem gave you access to any better information than you could have researched in a different manner. Maybe this big report will prove otherwise?


Something else along the same lines....your original 'hoax' message specifically asked for females aged between 14-18. You imply that because you got a lot of inquiries, even after posting your 'retraction', that this age group is gullible and vulnerable and doesn't follow instructions. But how do you know that you wouldn't have gotten the same response if you had asked for males aged 35-40? I notice that only today you got a response to your original post written by an adult mother on behalf of her girls. My guess is that the response would be similar no matter what demographic was asked for. Therefore you can't draw your conclusions that young females respond any differently to anyone else. You're trying to pass this experiment off as being scientific research, but you have no control group and your deductions aren't logically conclusive.
All you said was that you 'are casting a feature film, and will be holding private auditions in a few weeks, email me'. I have personally responded to an ad like that on this website, which got me several days' legitimate work. I don't think you have the right to blame anyone for responding via email.

Again, I don't deny that there can be dodgy situations to avoid, but I've seen nothing yet that atones for the fact that you went about this in completely the wrong way. That people are still being sucked in today shows how you didn't solve anything, but added to the problem.


> The internet has created a new dimension of
> "Stranger Danger" and while most, if not all, current
> auditions are certainly above board, the potential is there
> for something to go awfully wrong one day.

I still think you are over-emphasizing the danger of the internet...why is using the internet any more dangerous than responding to any other form of amateur audition notice?
While it seems there are thousands of young hopefuls begging to be auditioned, the fact is the vast majority of those notices are going to be completely ignored (in much the same way your explanation was ignored). This form of trying to get an audition is highly ineffectual. And if the messages aren't being read, the danger of potential incident is lower than it is being made out to be.
I'm not discounting that there is a potential danger...just that there ought to be perspective. Journalistic exaggeration is not helpful.


> If you're young - don't take too many chances. Explain to
> your parents or somebody responsible what you are doing and
> get them to come up with you. At your age, the audition panel
> should respect such a decision.


GOOD advice to end with. Your intentions are in the right place, as far as warning youngsters to be careful. If nothing else, this is a message that bears repeating.


Final criticism - you really ought to have changed the subject heading! Because once again, your post will be lost under a title that doesn't do it justice. Didn't you understand the lesson last time? People ignored your retraction. You concluded that 'people are stupid', but perhaps the real reason is 'your posts are badly signposted and therefore not at all obvious'.



'Our kids need to be a little more careful', you proclaim in your article's title.

So do our journalists.

Cheers,
Craig