Ricky Jay Interview
An old, but excellent New Yorker essay on magician Ricky Jay. He's more than a magician: he's a con-man, a bunco-steerer, a World Record card thrower, an actor (a mainstay of Mamet and PTA, and recently on Deadwood), a collector of rare books on magic, a magic historian, an artist, and perhaps the world's best sleight-of-hand trickster. His approach to collecting rare books on magic reminds me of Mr. Norrell. A long article, but worth it if you've ever been intrigued by the confidence man personality, i.e., the ability to charm and disarm with some precise language, an enchanting gaze, and a supple wrist.
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[...] Okay, so I sort of liked this movie. I liked the mood, I liked Edward Norton, and I was generally invested throughout. About 30 minutes in, however, I realized something that perhaps unfairly colored my perception of the rest of the movie: magicians, as in the real-life profession kind, probably wouldn’t like this movie. And that was especially made clear in the context of seeing Ricky Jay in the trailer for The Prestige, a movie about dueling magicians. I don’t think Ricky Jay would like The Illusionist. [...]
[...] Which brings us to the second quote. In The Illusionist, I was annoyed at how I had to suspend disbelief that the computer effects I was seeing were actually mundane magic tricks. I far preferred suspending my disbelief in The Prestige to believe that Nikola Tesla could have invented a matter duplication machine. What made this especially believable and interesting is that 1) Tesla was indeed a scientific genius; 2) he did in fact spend time in Colorado Springs working on ideas that the scientific community found to be bizzare; 3) he had fascinating visions of the future, such that all electricity would be based on wireless energy; and 4) the machine that Tesla creates in the film leads to all sorts of interesting philisophical problems. While his actual science came nowhere near creating a matter duplication machine, it was real enough to work within the context of the film. Plus, the addition of Tesla allowed his real-life rivalry with Thomas Edison to serve as a foil to the magicians’ rivalry. Lastly, it says something interesting about the tenuous relationship between magic and science, perhaps embodied in the real world by Ricky Jay and in the film by the engineer Cutter, played by Michael Caine. [...]
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