This Ford dealer training film is a BRILLIANT application of a classic training technique. It’s a “play inside a play”, with the actors trying to read an organized script while all sorts of crap goes wrong. An actor is missing, forcing the director to skip a scene. Union workmen bust in and start setting up for the next production. Finally an actor adlibs in a truly shocking way, forcing the director to give up and jump to the outro song.
Method in the intentional madness: When you know that your students have mastered the material, you can leave out parts of the known sequence, and the students will fill in the missing parts.
Ford assumed the listener knew the material. Instead of insulting the dealer’s intelligence by running through the steps in a non-salient boring way, the actors triggered an independent fillin by the dealer’s cerebellum.
Advertisers in the era of radio drama used the same technique. After the listeners were habituated to the usual spiel for The Product, the announcer would sometimes skip his spiel, evoking a fillin by the audience. “Aha! I know what he should have said!”
When you run through the material on your own, it becomes your own property and thus more valuable.
Polistra's Mill 