Bill Duncan wrote:Glen,
I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you bothereed that TV accurately represents reality,
In my opinion TV reality shows including this one has never accurately represented any kind of reality.
If you think that "drawing" a crowd or an audience by doing some kind of an escape is "easy" in my opinion it is not. Drawing a crowd or an audience in my opinion is "the" hardest thing to do in magic and the hardest thing to do in show business.
The simple reason is that having an actor - or some kind of a personality from MTV do escapes or magic. In my opinion it cheapens the effect in the way that it becomes less special in my opinion from my own magician's point of view.
In my opinion if anyone can do it - that can afford it the drawing power of the danger aspect can be lost - there-by making the publicity aspect or the publicity power of the effect weaker, for publicity reasons for a while to draw people to a theater or to a magic show.
In general I like watching magicians do magic and escape artists do escapes. I like the old days when the celebrity was more of a MC and then the magicians were the performers. But that is only my opinion.
Bill Duncan wrote:Magicians have been buying tricks and performing them before they are perfected for as long as I've been in magic.
Very few magicians can add the water torture cell to their act because it is an expensive escape stunt. It was invented by Houdini in my opinion to draw the outside audience - that would come to see his bridge handcuff dives - and his outside upside-down straitjacket escape.
Inside - to the theater to see something even more daring and spectacular.
I did not like it when Henning did it because he did not "look" like an escape artist - however I did like his ending.
Bill Duncan wrote:Magicians have been buying tricks and performing them before they are perfected for as long as I've been in magic. Hell, that's been a major marketing slogan for tricks for a long as I can remember...
I am not sure if you are talking about the you tube kids that buy magic and then make a video of it and put it on you tube. Or some kind exposing magic and using the web at an amateur level. Or the "selling" of magic done by the magic manufacture's and dealers. And that is not what I am talking about at all.
I am talking about show business.
And yes it is part of show business today for a TV show to buy or rent magic and then for the sake of what we call "good" TV or "entertainment" TV - pay some magicians to teach some kind of a celebrity how to do magic - and then let them do it and be judged by some panel of so called experts.
Good or bad as we all know television is a business.
However there are still magicians that use this stuff and try to eak out a living and do their best to try to draw an audience without the notarity and the TV exposuer.
In my opinion drawing an audience is the hardest trick in magic and the hardest trick in show business.
Just my opinion.