Fooling houdini, p.14
Fooling Houdini, page 14
WHEN YOU PURCHASE A TRICK, you’re typically paying for the secret. With the exception of large-scale illusions, the props are incidental. What you’re buying is a piece of intellectual property. But magic secrets are an unusual form of intellectual property, one that isn’t protected by conventional legal safeguards. You can’t copyright a magic trick, and patenting the method behind an effect automatically makes it part of the public record. John Nevil Maskelyne learned this the hard way when, in 1875, he patented his celebrated Psycho, a robot that played cards and did math. Soon after, a journalist dug up the patent and published the method in Macmillan’s Magazine. Maskelyne, his secret now on newsstands everywhere, was outraged. Similarly, in 1933, the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company exposed Horace Goldin’s Sawing a Woman in Half in an ad for Camel cigarettes. The ad was part of an aggressive marketing campaign—with full-color promotions in more than a thousand newspapers—that tipped the methods behind thirty-nine classic tricks. What, if anything, this had to do with cigarettes was never explained. “It’s fun to be fooled,” ran the slogan; “it’s more fun to know.” Goldin took R. J. Reynolds to court, charging them with unfair competition, but the judge tossed the suit, citing a patent Goldin had filed in 1923. A number of similar cases have failed after it was revealed that the plaintiff’s trick was already in print. Not surprisingly, very few effects are patented.
Magicians occupy a phantom zone in intellectual property law, one they share with fashion designers and chefs. (You can’t copyright shoes,* for example, or recipes.) But that doesn’t stop them from invoking their own unofficial laws. In the absence of legal protection, the world of magic is governed by a set of professional norms, as with the medieval guilds.
In addition to enforcing the secrecy rule, the magic community routinely sanctions those who pirate other people’s work. In a world without the protection of trademarks, attribution becomes paramount. Proper credit is the coin of the realm. This is why, in print and at magic lectures and on DVDs, tricks are meticulously footnoted. Every move has a history behind it and a surname attached to it: Vernon lift, Hofzinser cull, Tenkai palm, Bobo switch, Ramsay subtlety, L’Homme Masqué load, Ascanio spread, Charlier cut, Elmsley count, Green angle separation, Tamariz perpendicular control. The history and bloodline of moves are in turn vigorously claimed and fiercely debated. (It was this kind of debate that led to the fistfight between Wes James and Doug Edwards.)
Magic is a science of ideas, and some of the most respected magicians never perform. Much like physicists, who generally fall into one of two categories—theorists and experimentalists—magicians are usually either inventors or performers. There are those who do both, but by and large the big names—Angel, Copperfield, Blaine—farm out their R&D. The inventors never become household names, but they are highly esteemed within the guild. Few laypeople have heard of Jim Steinmeyer, for instance, the genius behind many of David Copperfield’s most celebrated illusions, or Paul Harris, the man who taught David Blaine much of what he knows. But among magicians these guys are gods.
Anyone found in breach of the plagiarism rule faces punishment by a brand of collective action. A few years back, a company in England called Illusions Plus started copying another magician’s material. Legally there was nothing the injured party could do. But the guild banded together and came to his aid. Magic journals stopped printing the company’s ads, and working pros boycotted its products. Soon enough, Illusions Plus went the way of Lehman Brothers.
A code of ethics, enshrined in the statutes of the societies, undergirds the discipline. All the major magical orders require neophytes to swear an oath of secrecy and agree to the code. If this sounds a bit like the Masons, it’s no coincidence. There’s a long-standing connection between magic and the old fraternal orders. No fewer than nineteen of the past presidents of the IBM and the SAM were Masons, and every year the Masons hold secret closed-door meetings, known as the Invisible Lodge, at the national SAM and IBM conventions. I know this because I’ve tried to infiltrate the Invisible Lodge on several occasions, and each time I was rebuffed by a white-haired man wearing the emblem of the Scottish Rite (a double-headed eagle).
The party line, magic’s central dogma, is that any form of exposure—even of one’s own material—undermines the art. Exposure is seen as a form of vandalism. It deadens the mystery and tarnishes the brand, shrinking all the grandeur in magic to the scale of an intellectual puzzle. Spectators lose interest, and magicians lose their jobs. If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, a lot of knowledge is a death sentence.
In reality, the facts are more complicated. During the golden age of stage magic, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, magicians routinely exposed one another’s tricks as they jockeyed for top billing. A big name like Maskelyne would debut an illusion only to have his rivals publish a pamphlet on the method the following month. As a result, magicians were constantly inventing new tricks to stay ahead of the curve. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the golden age of stage magic was also the golden age of exposures, because exposure drives innovation. Much in the way that market-oriented competition among businesses fosters economic growth by forcing companies to evolve, exposure compels magicians to modernize their acts and invent new material. Secrecy, meanwhile, is a license to be lazy. Like monopolies in the marketplace, it breeds stagnation.
There are more books on magic than there are about any other branch of entertainment—be it movies, theater, or dance—and yet, in a way, every magic book constitutes an act of treason, antithetical to the secrecy pledge. (Not surprisingly, many of the books in the magic canon were initially condemned as breaches of faith.) If exposure is so harmful, why isn’t magic dead? And by publishing your material, don’t you renounce all claims to secrecy?
Magicians sell their secrets. They put out lecture notes and DVDs. They open magic stores. They sell their products online, often on the same websites where they advertise their shows. And yet these same magicians are outraged when their secrets are leaked in a forum not intended solely for members of the guild. To me this is a bit like locking the windows on a house with no door. If I’d published my article in Magic magazine or Genii, no one would have batted an eye. The scandal came about because I wrote the article for Harper’s, a mainstream magazine for laypeople.
Not long ago, a friend of mine was over at my apartment, and she noticed an issue of Genii sitting on my coffee table. Leafing through it, she asked, “Can anyone subscribe? What’s to stop people from learning the secrets?” It was an understandable reaction. The way many magicians talk, you’d think they carried their secrets around in briefcases handcuffed to their wrists. Magic journals may not be on newsstands, but they’re available by mail or online, and in theory, anyone can subscribe. In practice, though, it’s a self-selecting audience. Only magic geeks subscribe to magic magazines. I myself subscribe to five—six, if you count the one in Spanish.
In truth, attempts to demystify magic only tend to heighten people’s curiosity. Practically every classic trick has been exposed at one time or another. For better or for worse, magicians still saw women in half, even though Goldin’s method has been public for some time. Anyone can learn how most levitations work, but try finding a Vegas magic show that doesn’t feature some type of floating effect. I’ve been asked countless times if I know how David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear, the biggest illusion in history, even though the secret is a mouse click away. Charles Hoffman’s “Think-a-Drink,” which was first exposed more than fifty years ago, is now the signature trick of New York society conjuror Steve Cohen, who banks $1 million a year doing private gigs and a weekly show at the Waldorf-Astoria.
There’s an unwritten rule in magic that you’re never supposed to repeat an effect for the same audience. But in practice people can be deceived again and again by the same effect, even after it’s been exposed. In the early eighties, when a rogue prestidigitator went on British television and exposed a simple thumb tip vanish to prime-time audiences, magicians everywhere began tilting at the nearest windmill. But the next day, veteran TV entertainer Paul Daniels went on the same show and did the same vanish with a minor variation in handling, and it fooled everyone. (Paul Daniels is such a legend in the UK that if you address a letter to “Paul Daniels the Magician, England,” it will reach him.)
Clever magicians have always known how to dodge exposure, or even use it to their advantage. The innovative duo Penn and Teller will often reveal the secret to a trick and then fry the audience with the same effect done a different way. At one show, they taught the audience three different card sleights during the first act—you could just hear the old guard gasping in horror—and then had virtuoso close-up magician Jamy Ian Swiss mill about the crowd at intermission performing card tricks using only those three sleights. Not one person caught on.
Penn and Teller also do a version of the cups and balls using clear cups—and it still fools you. Not only that, but Teller has found that even after watching this effect, people are still fooled by the classic opaque version. This illustrates a general principle: magic tricks can fool you even after you know the secret, because they exploit perceptual mechanisms that are etched into our brains. Clearly there’s more to magic than not knowing.
The ancien régime wigged out when Penn and Teller hit the scene in the early 1980s. “Penn and Teller take the mystery out of magic,” seethed David Berglas, president of the Magic Circle. “We’d rather keep our secrets and not have them exposed.” But to the young duo, playing to an audience’s intelligence—while still fooling them—was a way of elevating the art. After my article appeared, I spoke to Teller about my scrape with the SAM. “If magicians are pissed at you you’re doing something right,” he said. “It means you’re on the side of the public.” He told me that magicians gave him hell when he and Penn first started out, and concluded, “It’s a tempest in a teapot.” The brilliant New York City magician Simon Lovell, who has a long-running Saturday night show in SoHo, sang a similar, if bluer, tune. “Oh, fuck them,” he said, when I told him I was being kicked out of the SAM. “Their average age is dead.”
In the aftermath of the Masked Magician, the reports of the death of magic turned out to be greatly exaggerated. Attendance at the Magic Castle remained as high as ever. Criss Angel managed to score a ten-year, $100 million contract at the Luxor, even though several of his tricks had been leaked. David Copperfield maintained his perch atop the Vegas hierarchy, despite being outed on at least three illusions. In my own neck of the woods, demand for local magicians had only gone up. “I got more work after that,” Asi Wind, a brilliant New York performer, told me. Like most members of the younger generation, he was unfazed. “You think you can explain my magic in a thirty-minute show?” Then he laughed.
When Breaking the Magician’s Code first aired, there were no prime-time magic shows. Today there are several. One of them, Masters of Illusion, airs back-to-back with Breaking the Magician’s Code, something that has left many magicians scratching their heads. Wouldn’t the two shows mutually annihilate each other, like matter and antimatter? Isn’t the network shooting itself in the foot? The fact that they coexist strongly suggests that they share an audience. Clearly, in the eyes of most viewers, the two shows complement each other.
The main problem with the militant antiexposure stance is that it sells magic short. It portrays magic as a stagnant enterprise with a handful of secrets that might easily be exhausted. In reality, the field of magic is rapidly evolving. Each week, there are new moves, new palms, new sleights. Even people who devote all their time to magic can’t keep up. Methods have become so advanced that one needs years of experience and an extensive back catalog of technical know-how just to hang. Perhaps there was a time when you could learn all there was to know about magic, but that day passed at least a century ago. Eventually you realize that there’s no danger of overfishing the sea of tricks; there are enough secrets to last a million years. We’ll run out of melodies before we run out of magic. Even if you could somehow learn everything today, tomorrow you’d be out of date. And if magicians are constantly fooling one another with new ideas, what hope does the layperson have?
Take the Ambitious Card, for instance, the famous trick that fooled Houdini. It’s one of magic’s oldest and most popular effects. The classic method has been written about and exposed countless times. And yet experts still fool each other with it, in part because every magician makes it his own. (Shawn Farquhar, the Canadian I followed at the Magic Olympics in Stockholm, would go on to win the Grand Prix in close-up at the 2009 World Championships in Beijing with his trademark Ambitious Card routine.) Like any great trick, the Ambitious Card provides an almost limitless canvas on which magicians can vaunt their creativity. The same goes for the linking rings, the cups and balls, the Metamorphosis—all the classics.
Masked Magician hysteria also fails to give the audience enough credit. It infantilizes the spectators by implying that they can’t be trusted not to step on their own fun, arrogating to the performer the power to decide what’s in an audience’s best interest. The “loose lips sink tricks” credo suggests that there is only one way to enjoy magic: through the eyes of Peter Pan. But why does everyone have to see magic the same way?
Once again Penn and Teller cut to the chase, this time with a routine in which the audience members get to decide for themselves whether to learn the secret or keep the trick a mystery. (Those who don’t want to know the secret are given blindfolds.) By inviting the audience to exercise agency over their own experience, this routine challenges the accepted notion that magic can only be enjoyed from behind a veil of ignorance.
When I hear Jeremiahs like Berglas fulminating against exposure in a way that suggests to magicians and laypeople alike that magic stopped evolving a hundred years ago, I think of Max Planck, who was told by a college professor that he should leave physics because all the important discoveries had already been made. “Physics is finished,” Planck’s professor scoffed. “It’s a dead end street.” Good thing Planck didn’t listen, because twenty years later he helped discover quantum mechanics, the greatest revolution in physics since Newton.
Physics is dead. Long live physics.
Magic is a science as well as an art, and in science, knowledge serves only to deepen the mystery. Each new find opens vistas on an uncharted territory at the edge of human understanding. Nestled within each answer lies another riddle in an endless web of unknowns. “The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part . . . what is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it.” This from physicist Richard Feynman, and it seems to me that it applies as much to magic as it does to physics.
Magic is dead. Long live magic.
I HALF EXPECTED THE NEXT letter to arrive by homing pigeon or Hedwig the Owl. I waited for it with bated breath, on pins and needles and even a few steak knives. In the meantime, I began readying my defense. I’d decided I was going to make it a test case, a referendum on secrecy. I’d probably lose, but who knew? Maybe I’d manage to sway some liberal activist judge toward my rejectionist view of the magician’s code. I had visions of the Scopes trial. I fantasized about retaining Alan Dershowitz to represent me. I was preparing an amicus brief even though I had no idea what an amicus brief was. I had selected a philosopher friend as my co-counsel, along with a human rights lawyer from D.C. whom I’d met at a Halloween party. (I was Anton Chigurh, the killer in No Country for Old Men, and she was Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night.) Court drawings would show my legal team—which I’d determined would include at least one clown—badgering the “ethics chairman” and those immaterial witnesses who’d lodged complaints against me wilting under the cross.
But it never happened.
December 24 came and went without incident. No letter. No owls. Nothing. The Society had backed away from the case. I’d called their bluff, stared them down with my legalese-laden letter, seizing victory before the first crack of the gavel. Case dismissed.
Well . . . sort of. My membership at the local assembly had lapsed, and Tom Klem, the head of our local order, was refusing to let me pay my dues. I’d paid them late in the past, so this was the board’s way of ousting me on a technicality, ex parte and without a hearing. But my membership in the National Assembly remained valid, which was far more important.
Still, I felt uneasy. Even though I’d been granted a reprieve (more or less), the whole ordeal had cast a pall over my year of magical thinking. Not helping matters much was the fact that Richard M. Dooley, former president of the National Assembly, was denying any knowledge of having signed my Magic Olympics entry form. (He not only signed it, but also mailed it for me.) Maybe he forgot or was too ashamed at having rubber-stamped a loser—not to mention a traitor. After the Olympics, a new president had taken office. Had Dooley been cashiered because of me? I was told this was not the case, but I had my doubts.
IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE SAM debacle, I made myself scarce at Rustico II on Saturdays. I knew Wes’s stance on exposure. “I never give away principles,” he had told me once, when I broached the issue. And his feelings toward Penn and Teller were far from affectionate. “I have problems with some of the ethics of the stuff they do,” he said plainly. I decided it was best to lie low until the dust settled. But I could only duck Wes for so long. He was my teacher, after all. Eventually I had to face him.
I went to Rustico II expecting the worse. This was a man, after all, who’d cold-cocked a guy over a one-hundred-year-old trick involving an egg. Here I’d broken magic’s cardinal rule—I’d given away secrets! I literally feared for my safety.
