The Genii Forum

Michael Caine appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman (04-27-10) to promote his new film 'Harry Brown'.

While discussing his first film 'Zulu' (1964) he mentioned that the director of the film - Cy Endfield - was a wonderful conjuror.

I regularly perform a piece originated by Cy Endfield in my strolling work. This appears in Cy Endfield's Entertaining Card Magic by Lewis Ganson (originally published in three volumes then collected in one hardbound volume by Supreme Magic). This volume(s) seems to be virtually unnoticed by magicians, yet contains very direct, commercial material.

Born Cyril Raker Endfield on November 10, 1914 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Endfield was a one-time professional magician who developed a career as a writer in the American motion picture industry. As a result of being blacklisted in the 1950s as a result of his name being brought up by the House Un-American Activities Committee, Endfield moved his family to England where he wrote several screenplays (almost never under his own name) and directed a few films, including Zulu.

He was friends with and even instructed Orson Welles in magic.

He died April 16, 1995 in Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire, England.

...and Martin Breese is soon to publish a reprint of Cy's "Entertaining Card Magic" book with photos posed for by me...

PG

That is a wonderful book. The bottom palm is great.

Martin does great work... I'm looking forward to seeing the book!

Andrew Pinard wrote:This volume(s) seems to be virtually unnoticed by magicians, yet contains very direct, commercial material.

The three books are filled with great material and yes, they are unnoticed by magicians. They are worth tracking down.

If you fellas email Martin to nudge him (to publish it), remind him that Paul Gordon posed for the pics...about 4 years ago! If you guys show interest, he might "finish" the project sooner than later. PG

Endfield wanted to write a new book on card magic toward the end of his life, and invited me to visit him at the Yale Club in New York City during one of his trips to the states in the early to mid 1980s. We met, discussed the book, and I never heard from him again. Evidently he had much unpublished material.

He had some stuff in Pabular including a one-handed keyboard for computers and a chess set where all the pieces fit inside each other for storage.

Endfield's computer item was a bizarre idea called "The Microwriter"--it was a very small miniature computer with a keyboard that was designed to be used entirely by one hand. It looked kind of like a squarish lump. I actually had one, but the company never delivered on the promised software so you could transfer the stuff you'd written to your desktop, so I returned it. It was an oddity and long forgotten. Why, unless you have only one hand, would you want a one-handed keyboard?

This is the latest iteration of the device:
http://www.bellaire.co.uk/

I remember the MicroWriter! British comedy writer Frank Muir was quoted in the ads saying 'I've given up writing, and so should you'.

It looked like an interesting concept at the time. I can see an advantage to being able to type one handed - no one (bar Da Vinci) writes with two hands. There's the issue of space for one - if you don't have the room for a keyboard, you can just sit the thing on your lap and go at it.

Richard - what was it like learning the typing system?

Ian

It was ridiculous! You needed to press a combination of keys in order to generate any single character. I can't imagine why this would be of advantage to anyone but a one-armed or disabled person. It was very difficult to learn and quite frankly I can't remember why I even bothered at the time.

In helping Martin Breese with the project, I saw loads of Endfield notes/scripts etc. Trouble is, I couldn't read a bloody word of it...bad hand-writing and mostly in code! PG

Richard Kaufman wrote:It was ridiculous! You needed to press a combination of keys in order to generate any single character. I can't imagine why this would be of advantage to anyone but a one-armed or disabled person.

Or someone watching pron. ;)