Complaint Review: Academy Of Cinema And Television - Phoenix Arizona

My wife and I are the proud parents of a genuinely and exceptionaly bright and gifted child who already has demonstrated her abilities on stage. We booked her into a local talent agency several years ago where she got one gig which paid for her enrollment fee. We took the bait on the commercial for ACT on Nickelodian and went through the process of the initial paperwork and audition. We did this because our girl (who is now all of eight years old) had picked up the phone to book her own audition.

We listened to all the hype and hoopla about how connected these people are, but I couldn't shake the feeling that something was really wrong with this picture. After looking at the brochure and saw the price tags they were hanging on their "workshops", I pretty much just smiled and realized that here was just another exercise in the downside of the free enterprise system.

So I bit my tongue and did everything I could to not spoil it for our daughter and she had a lot of fun with the Pop Tart commercial she read. The pay off for me was seeing her beautiful smile just light up and dazzle on that big screen.

My wife and I quietly realized that there of course was no way we could afford this "offer of a lifetime", so we went out to Burger King and celebrated our little celebrity with something we could afford with coupons.

Before I did the call back I was loaded for bear, because I had already perused all the ripoff reports and had watched both segments of the CBS Atlanta videos.

Unfortunately for us, my wife has severe asthma and was suffering so badly from an inabilty to breathe that I had to call an ambulance and have her taken to the hospital the day of our call-back. After getting her settled in at the hospital and calling off from my work, I went home to proceed with the call-back procedure to see if what I was reading in the reports was true. It turned out to be worse than I could have imagined.

We had missed the call-back deadline time by two hours due to her having to go to the hospital. I called the number, and when the call was returned I found out that the woman had already contacted my wife in the hospital via her cell phone demanding to know what our decision was! My wife had to practically beg her to call her husband and talk with me because her oxygen and blood pressure levels had dropped so dramatically she could barely talk.

It was all I could do to remain calm and objective with this woman just to hear her say all the same things all the other reports said. "Your child has been chosen as THE eight-year-old" was one thing she said. I asked her what do you mean by THE eight-year-old? She responded by saying that they had one opening for "an eight-year-old female caucasian". So I guess that would have fulfilled three quotas: the age, the gender and the racial quota. I felt like asking her if she was sure my child is Caucasian since she does have some Cherokee blood in her.

Like everyone else, I was treated with the same arrogant and condescending manner, and that if we were not ready to shell-out for their classes, then they'd have to find a replacement. I told this woman to go ahead with the replacement. No sympathy nor condolances for my wife's condition or whether or not she was going to live through her hospital ordeal were proffered. I was made to feel that my daughter and wife and I were all expendable and replaceable.

At this point I'm going to stick with the advice I got from Dennis Miller which was "Keep your kids the hell out of Hollywood!" Thanks Dennis, because if my chiild's experience with show business is going to include having to associate with a bunch of frauds, cutthroats, theives and liars like we had the displeasure of encountering at ACT, then I think I'll keep our daughter out of harms way and out of show business altogether.

Roboreporter

BALTIMORE, Maryland

U.S.A.