Sand Can – Class VIII Auditor

When he first announced the project to make training films for Academy students, LRH let us know that we would also be the actors in the films. The first shooting script was issued to the crew and we learned that it was called The Professional TR Course. There were about 30 scripts for tech films and he starts with the most fundamental of fundamentals, TRs.

We read the script and the story was, as many know, about a lousy field auditor who gets put through the wringer on a TRs course and is thus able to now get good results on his preclears. Believe it or not, the script did not read as a comedy, which the final product assuredly was. LRH just got the essentials down: the shot, the setting, the action, the characters and their dialogue.

We began discussing who should try out for which part. I was being pushed to try out for the lead character, Joseph Aaronberg Howard, and I wasn’t altogether sure whether this was meant to be a reflection of my past auditing, though I hadn’t really worked as a field auditor, just mission staff. But from some of my early TRs critiques it was pretty evident that I definitely could play the part of the bumbling Joe Howard. LRH set about to make sure I could play Joe Howard at the end of the film as well.

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