And as part of the photo shoot, Bruno needs extras. Specifically, he needs babies. And he's got a vision, so he needs to explain the particulars of what he wants to the parents of the babies that he's looking at for the shoot. That set-up led into the first clip, which was simply a montage of Bruno interviewing parents.
By "simple," of course, I mean "absolutely mind-bogglingly horrifying." I know that show business makes people crazy, and there was a point where my wife and I considered taking our kids to some commercial auditions, but a few meetings with agents changed our minds. It was obvious that we'd be giving up a piece of his childhood, and we weren't willing to do that. We just thought he was damn photogenic. For many parents, there are absolutely no constraints on what they'll allow their children to do in order to work, and the entire sequence made me recoil more than laugh. Bruno asks one woman how much her daughter weighs.
"30 pounds. Approximately," she emphasizes when she sees Bruno react.
"Well, I tell you... we are not looking for the new Scarlett. We are looking for the new Nicole Ritchie. Cheekbones. Do you think your daughter could be persuaded to lose ten pounds or so?"
Without missing a beat, Mom responds, "In seven days? Yeah. Yeah, I think we can do that."
"If she can't drop it, would you consider letting us do a little liposuction to fine-tune things?"
"Sure. I think that would work," she says, as I watch for the lightning bolt to flash out of the sky and hit her.
There's another woman who suggests that her daughter might be "a little scared at first" if dropped from a fourth-story window. One woman is perfectly happy to have her daughter involved in some "amateur science," a phrase which made fellow critic James Rocchi laugh like an asthmatic goose with its leg in a bear trap. For me, though, the winner was the woman who is told that her daughter got the job. Big smile on her face. "Yes, she's going to be dressed as a tiny Nazi soldier, and she'll be pushing another baby, dressed as a tiny Jew, in a wheelbarrow, pushing it right into an oven. How do you feel?"
Again... Mom doesn't even hesitate. "Well, as long as she booked the job."
