Methods
In the TV series, thanks largely to the involvements of William Read Woodfield (1928 - 2001) and Allan Balter as the producers, story editors, and scriptwriters, the IMF operated primarily by using confidence tricks, infiltration, and high technology devices on its targets. The agents of the IMF were able to deceive their targets into cooperating with them without detecting any kind of deception until the "impossible mission" was carried out. By that time, the IMF team had vanished from the scene and out of the target country.
Woodfield was a devotee of the book The Big Con, written by the linguist David W. Maurer, and Woodfield and Balter consulted it as one of the "testaments" in their "Bible" for the TV series. Its other "testament" in their "Bible" was a short four-page outline that they based partially on the principles of the writing instructor Lajos Egri, the author of the book The Art Of Dramatic Writing that Egri had published in 1946.
Read more about this topic: Impossible Missions Force
Famous quotes containing the word methods:
“The greatest part of our faults are more excusable than the methods that are commonly taken to conceal them.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“How can you tell if you discipline effectively? Ask yourself if your disciplinary methods generally produce lasting results in a manner you find acceptable. Whether your philosophy is democratic or autocratic, whatever techniques you use—reasoning, a “star” chart, time-outs, or spanking—if it doesn’t work, it’s not effective.”
—Stanley Turecki (20th century)
“The comparison between Coleridge and Johnson is obvious in so far as each held sway chiefly by the power of his tongue. The difference between their methods is so marked that it is tempting, but also unnecessary, to judge one to be inferior to the other. Johnson was robust, combative, and concrete; Coleridge was the opposite. The contrast was perhaps in his mind when he said of Johnson: “his bow-wow manner must have had a good deal to do with the effect produced.””
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)