Magic Is Dead, page 24
“We have a lot of great stuff coming out soon,” he told me.
“Well, that’s kind of why I am calling,” I said. “I invented a trick.”
“Your own trick? No way! That’s awesome.”
I could tell he was genuinely surprised but also trying to be polite. There’s no way the resident journalist could come up with anything worthwhile, could he?
“It’s actually kind of good,” I told him, “and I was wondering if you’d like to release it through Ellusionist. I am still finalizing it, but, I mean, I think it may be good enough. I think people would want to perform it, you know, themselves.”
“Well, Magic Live is in a few months. Are you going to Vegas? I’ll be there. You should just show me then,” he said. “If it’s good enough, we’ll film it, edit a trailer, and release it around Christmas.”
I took a deep breath.
“Perfect.”
21
Behind the Scenes
I became good friends with Doug McKenzie. When he wasn’t pond-hopping for high-paying gigs or skydiving on the weekends (one of his many extracurricular passions), we’d link up, cruise around the city in his tiny blue-and-white Smart car, grab lunch, and chat about magic.
Doug was born in Scotland, lived in Oman and Saudi Arabia as a child, went to boarding school in the States, and eventually studied finance at New York University. He was a computer nerd growing up, drawn to hacking by the incessant need to know how technology could be corrupted and controlled. He was an avid reader of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. And then, at age fifteen, he discovered magic. He was visiting Manhattan with his parents before heading off to boarding school in New Jersey, and walked by Magic Max, a now-defunct shop in Times Square, and saw a magician performing in the store for customers. He was hooked. It wasn’t long before he married his two passions and become a pioneer in tech-related effects, a subset of illusion that has taken the community by storm.
“I see a lot of parallels between magic and hacking,” Doug told me. “It’s the same mind-set. You are looking for loopholes, for ways to push people’s ideas of perception.” Strangely enough, the first “hacker” defined by modern standards was a magician. In 1903, Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi traveled to London to demonstrate his latest breakthrough in wireless communication. Marconi wanted Europe’s elite to use his service, which could instantly—and securely—send information from one city to another without the necessity of wires. Marconi wanted to show the audience how his technology worked in real time, so he set up the machine and sent a message to one of his assistants. But instead of receiving the message Marconi sent, the assistant received the word “rats” over and over again, dozens of times, followed by “There was a young fellow of Italy, who fiddled the public quite prettily.” They had been hacked.
Nevil Maskelyne, a revolutionary nineteenth-century British stage magician, had himself used a homemade radiotelegraphy mechanism during his act. His assistants could wirelessly transmit information to him in Morse code and, via a small device in his pocket that vibrated the coded language against his leg, he could discern the message. He could use this device to effectively “read people’s minds.” After getting word of what Marconi had planned, and not wanting the public (or other magicians) to have an inkling as to how this new technology could be applied to conjuring, he promptly set up his radio tower nearby and hacked into Marconi’s (supposedly secure) signal. If Maskelyne could hack into the system to make it seem like the technology didn’t work, or wasn’t reliable, people wouldn’t make the connection that it could be used for magic tricks. His scheme worked.
By 2000, Doug was hacking into old-school Nokia 6700 cell phones and using them for magic tricks. In one early trick, he would make a coin vanish and reappear inside of his phone’s screen (merely a photograph in which he made the coin appear by pushing a button), and then magically made the coin “fall out” of the phone’s screen and back into his hand. He’d do the same with a fly, catching an imaginary insect inside his phone (with it buzzing around on the screen, audio and all), later revealing a real fly in his hand.
Doug continued developing phone-related magic tricks, but the 2007 release of the iPhone revolutionized his approach. Many magicians jumped on this new technology, developing apps that could assist in magic tricks. Doug, however, wanted to take the technology to another level; he didn’t want an iPad or an iPhone to just be a gimmick used to create an effect. He wanted to utilize the functions for which these pieces of technology were created—calls, texts, voice mails—to display a truly impossible event for the spectator. With this approach in mind, Doug manipulated things that were inherently more real to the audience. Hacking the phone itself was Doug’s goal, not utilizing what the touch-screen technology was capable of. “I think, if you imagine sending somebody a text and all of a sudden they get a text message, sent by your imagination, that’s magic,” Doug explained. “How the fuck did you do that? You don’t know my number or his number! You didn’t know what I was thinking! Now that’s a story people tell their friends.”
Doug taught himself how to code and discovered a customizable software system that allowed him to write his own programs to be used for magic tricks. The software company that hosted the code eventually discovered what Doug was doing and reached out.* They loved how he was utilizing their technology, and even showcased them in their SEC documents after they went public (the company’s valuation broke $1 billion in 2015). The document reads, “Doug McKenzie is making magic new again by using his audience’s own phones to perform classic street illusions. Audience members select a card, put it in their pocket without looking at it, and then [the audience member texts Doug], which tells them their card correctly, every single time.” The effect they described in these documents is the same trick Doug performed for me outside Madison and Ramsay’s Airbnb.
Doug continued to develop new effects based on his exclusive code. One day, I was having lunch with two friends when Doug called me and asked what I was up to. We were near his house, I told him; maybe we could swing by. “Do you have any cards on you?” I asked over text. “Would you show them something?”
“Why do I need cards?” he responded flatly.
We met on the street. Right away, he asked my friends to take out their phones. He then grabbed each of their free hands by the wrist. “Put out your pointer fingers, both of you,” he said, “and hold your phones out so we can see the screens.” He slowly brought their fingers closer and closer together. When they touched, both phones started to ring. They were calling each other.*
It was Doug’s early penchant for tech magic that formed one of his most important friendships. In 2003, while at a New York Fashion Week after party, his friend Jake (son of the musician Sting) introduced him to David Blaine. Blaine was on his way out but told Doug to meet him at Marquee, a nightclub in Chelsea, later that night. While at the club, Doug brought out his Nokia and showed Blaine his coin-in-phone routine. Blaine was shocked; he had never seen anything like it. They became close friends, taking bike rides around the city, going to clubs, and jamming on ideas for magic tricks. It wasn’t long before Blaine asked Doug if he would help him invent new magic for his television specials. He wanted Doug to be a consultant.*
Famous magicians rarely operate autonomously. All big-time stage performers and TV personalities have a secret crew of illusion-savvy consultants helping them develop their routines. These creators are a crucial part of magic’s ecosystem. Without them, it would take a magician years to develop an entire television special’s worth of material. Moreover, because different magicians have different specialties, they bring new takes and insights into the mix. Every magician on television, even those at the level of David Blaine, need new ideas and fresh approaches to performance. These creators are the unsung heroes of magic, as many forgo on-camera fame for the satisfaction of delivering a memorable experience for an audience through another magician’s performance. In the twenty-first century, being a consultant has become a coveted role in the magic industry; not only is there a fat paycheck attached, but, more important, a high degree of respect is instilled from fellow magicians.
But this is nothing new. World-famous magicians have been hiring inventors for decades. In the early twentieth century, Houdini’s success was contingent upon the mechanic Jim Collins, his right-hand man, who was a master of wood and metal. He began working for Houdini in 1910 and helped build his most famous illusions, including Water Torture Cell, which took the pair three years to complete. “Collins was hugely important to Houdini,” John Cox, a Houdini historian, told me. “Specifically, about his escapes: Houdini conceived the ideas, but Collins was really the man that made it work.” Another assistant, Charles Morritt, who specialized in mirrors, created the infamous Vanishing Elephant illusion that Houdini performed in 1918 and whose secret has yet to be conclusively revealed. During the effect, he marched a full-grown elephant onto the stage, walked it into a massive box, and closed it for a brief moment. When Houdini opened the box, the elephant was gone.
Around this time, the popular American magician Howard Thurston hired his own secret weapon: Guy Jarrett. Jarrett worked with a range of materials and engineered complex props like the Siamese Cabinet. During the trick, Thurston would wheel out the cabinet, open all its doors to show it was empty, and then close it back up. A second later, people would start coming out of the cabinet—it could hold nine in total. He could also have people enter the cabinet, close it up, open it again, and have them disappear. One 1914 newspaper article described Jarrett as “the man with the know-how . . . whose brain builds the show for the big magician.” Jarrett, however, eventually took his skills to Broadway. He became cynical of magicians and their abilities, once writing that “not a single one has guts or ideas or imagination. They just got hold of a bunch of tricks and walked out on stage. So, they are only a bunch of ‘drugstore magicians.’” This is a sentiment no doubt shared by some contemporary performers like Ramsay and Madison, who are frustrated when young magicians just buy the latest and flashiest gimmick and post a video of their performance online.
Doug worked as the lead magic consultant on Blaine’s 2006 special Drowned Alive and helped conceptualize and build effects such as the Hundred-Dollar-Bill Face Switch, where Benjamin Franklin’s face turns into that of the spectator.* In 2011, Doug worked in the United Kingdom on the first season of Dynamo: Magician Impossible and, two years later, designed magic for Blaine’s 2013 special David Blaine: Real or Magic. In these shows, Doug would sit down with Blaine or Dynamo and brainstorm what kind of tricks they wanted to incorporate into the show, or how they could use the overarching theme of the special to come up with appropriate effects. In one brainstorming session with Dynamo, who wanted to do a trick that involved dozens of people, Doug, utilizing his skills in technology, came up with (and subsequently designed) an effect where a sea of spectators’ phones in Times Square would ring at the same time.
Inventing magic for television, however, is far different than doing so for live performance. “It’s a challenge,” Dynamo told me over lunch in London. “It’s hard to make a show that’s not boring television. On TV, you can’t really do long, laborious routines that technically might be some of the most amazing things to experience, because for the person watching it at home, they want it to be direct: the phone penetrates inside the bottle, the card appears on the other side of the window, the butterfly comes alive. A television channel knows that they have thirty seconds to keep someone from clicking away. It puts an immense amount of pressure on us.” Dynamo and his team (now led by two full-time consultants, young guns Harry De Cruz and Tom Elderfield) developed more than 500 pieces of magic for his show’s four-season run, only 100 of which made it on-screen.
Some magicians have quickly forgone consulting to produce their own shows. Anthony Owen, head of magic at Objective Productions from 2002 to 2016, was a performing magician before getting into television, booking corporate gigs and designing effects for other magicians. “I realized very quickly that just being a consultant was frustrating because I didn’t have final creative control or decision-making powers,” he told me. “If you’re not David Blaine or the star who has control, often you are battling with so many other things with making good magic on the screen. It’s hard if people you are working with don’t share the vision, or don’t have the understanding of what makes magic work, or don’t have a deep-seated passion for magic in general.”
In 2003—done with consulting, and now a part of Objective Productions—Owen teamed up with British magician and mentalist Derren Brown, one of the most famous performers in the United Kingdom. Anthony wanted to try something new for Derren, who isn’t a street magician. “We weren’t just going to copy the model of a Blaine special—we wanted to rip that up,” he said. “We wanted to take the documentary feel and the vérité feel but move it onto a three-act structure and include forms that weren’t just seen in magic shows.” They pulled structural inspiration from old David Copperfield specials—building toward a large climatic event or effect—but gave the concepts a modern twist specific to Derren’s unique performative skills. They also nodded at traditional film. For Derren’s special The Great Art Robbery, in which he employs a small gang of senior citizens to steal an expensive painting from a gallery, Owen and Brown borrowed cinemagraphic touches from Hollywood heist classics like Ocean’s 11 and The Thomas Crown Affair. Derren’s other specials pushed the boundaries of how the human mind could be manipulated. In The Heist, for example, he provokes, over the course of weeks, regular people to rob a bank under their own free will.
Consultants are being utilized more than ever before, budgets have grown exponentially ($50,000, or more, is a typical payday for working full-time on a show), and business models have adjusted accordingly. theory11, which launched in 2007 as a traditional online retail shop and playing card company, has morphed into a full-on magic consultancy. Led by the enterprising and business-savvy Jonathan Bayme, the company has worked behind the scenes of Now You See Me and Now You See Me 2, the popular blockbuster Hollywood franchise starring Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, Dave Franco, and Woody Harrelson as deceptive magicians; produced Dan White’s popular parlor room show The Magician and Justin Willman’s The Magic Show; and collaborated on a reinvigorated Mystery Box with J. J. Abrams’s production company Bad Robot.* They also designed playing cards for Saturday Night Live and Jimmy Fallon.
Working behind the scenes, both for Hollywood productions and magic shows on television, however, has become especially cutthroat. The big-money, high-stakes nature of magic consulting has pushed Bayme to exaggerate his company’s accolades when privately pitching new clients. As evidence of this, I obtained the marketing one-sheet that the company sends to prospective clients. In the document, Bayme claims that theory11 has engaged in “recent creative collaborations” with David Blaine and Dynamo and has “consulted on almost every major magic-related project on stage or on screen over the past 5 years.” The two big-named examples, however, were not official collaborations, but rather current employees’ gigs before joining the theory11 team, or jobs obtained independently while on staff at theory11. When I reached out to Bayme, he acknowledged as much, saying over email that “the intention . . . is to convey that our team worked on [David Blaine] projects for many years.” Bayme also told me over email that, regarding Dynamo, team members’ “engagements were negotiated / contracted by theory11 on their behalf,” an assertion that was categorically denied by a business associate close to Dynamo who was involved in the hiring of consultants. Bayme’s puffed-up branding, it seems, is a by-product of trying to be the biggest and the best as magic hits a new high in mainstream media—even if that means, ironically, using a bit of misdirection to accomplish that goal.
I parked my rental car, fed the meter, took out my phone, and typed out a text message: “I’m here.”
I stood in front of a massive gray and black building in downtown Los Angeles that reminded me of one of those structures that could be, based on its overt blandness, a CIA bunker. I waited for a few more minutes in front of the main entrance, and then the man I came to see sauntered out of the elevator. He wore black-framed glasses and his head was shaved. He flashed a bright smile as he opened the door and led me through the lobby.
“We are all so stoked to have to you here, to show you how things work behind the scenes,” he told me.
“Yeah, man. I’m really thrilled that you let me come hang out. I know all of this is pretty secret, especially for such a big project.”
“It’s all good, bro,” he said, stepping into the elevator, “It’s about time people get a glimpse at how all this comes together.” The doors closed, and we went up.
The man I had come to see was Danny Garcia, one of the world’s most prominent consultants for magic television shows. Danny, an incredibly innovative creator, has, like Doug McKenzie, been a mainstay in the consulting community for more than a decade. He worked behind the scenes on Dynamo’s show in the United Kingdom and has been a go-to consultant for David Blaine since his 2008 stunt-based show Dive of Death. Danny even made a few cameos in Blaine’s 2016 special Beyond Magic. One of the show’s plots follows Blaine as he practices his death-defying bullet catch, a trick where he shoots himself in the mouth with a real .22-caliber bullet. During a practice session, Danny guides Blaine as he lines up the shot and pulls the trigger. Blaine gives Danny a fist bump after the stunt’s success.*
That was the first time a major magician revealed the team working behind the scenes, acknowledging on camera that famous performers have consultants helping them. This, in some ways, is taking a cue from what a modern audience seems to want to see out of a magic show. They no longer want the all-powerful wizard doing supernatural feats; they want a real person dedicated to an art form, their struggle to overcome obstacles laid out honestly and evolving in real time. They want the magician to be more human than ever before, and they want to see the people with whom the magician chooses to surround himself as he accomplishes the show’s goals. In a word: authenticity.
