I have read some of the numerous threads here about how magic tricks are accomplished. Most threads of that sort contain answers with the assumption that the live audience was in on the trick to fool the TV audience.
I am not interested in a particular trick, but wanted to get some insight from someone who has been an insider in one of the big TV illusion events from someone such as David Blaine, David Copperfield, Criss Angel, etc.
Are you told how the trick is done? Or just told to react with astonishment?
Are you sworn to secrecy? Or are you allowed to tell your friends and family what you have seen?
Were you hired to be an “audience member” at this event? Or did you just show up and some producer was like “We are going to let you in on a little secret”
I saw Michael Carbonaro in Vegas. He took an audience member on stage for a trick, while the volunteer was being “prepped” backstage, he told the rest of the audience the trick was BS, and we were just going to mess with the volunteer. He was going to pretend to make the guy disappear and we should all go crazy and act like we couldn’t see the guy. So really the only person not in on the trick was the volunteer.
It was mildly funny, but I was hoping someone was in on one of those “make the huge _____ disappear” type tricks that required more setup
In New York City in 2009, I was asked to go on stage to help some Houdini-type performer do his escape act - it was my job as a bystander to tie him up first. Unfortunately, I tied the ropes the wrong way and he genuinely could not escape, leading to about 2-3 awkward minutes in front of the crowd.
I sat in the front row at a David Copperfield show in Vegas once, and before the show started one of the production assistants came by and asked each of us one by one if any of us were magicians or journalists. I assume they didn’t want anyone sitting up close who would be smart enough to the business to be able to figure out how he was doing the tricks.
I was sort of an opposite stooge. At work they had a couple magicians perform - to boost morale or something. The magician was doing a couple tricks at the same time. I picked the card, but instead of putting it back, I hid it under my leg. I was curious to see what he would do. He came to me, got the deck of cards and continued on. I guess he knew what I did and skipped that trick. Then when he was finished, I didn’t know what to do. I just gave him the card. He took it without saying anything.
I was in the audience in the “big” theater at the Magic Castle, and I was given a book from which I was supposed to pick a word which the magician would “guess.”
I didn’t notice it at first, but someone sitting near me (or one of the people I was with? Can’t remember now) said all the pages in the book were the same. The tricks the magician used to narrow it down made it super easy to guess.
Sounds sort of like one of the “kids’ magic tricks” I had back in the day. It was a board with an array of different symbols on it, and the mark would do something to end up on one of the symbols, and then you’d dramatically open up an envelope that said that the symbol they landed on was “three circles”. The thing is, there were four different squares the mark could land on, and all four had different symbols on them, but all of them could be described as “three circles”: There was one where they were concentric, and one where they were all in a row, and one where they were in a triangle, and one other arranged some other way.
Penn and Teller used a similar gimmick in their book Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends: you’d ask your friend to open a small pamphlet of short stories that came packaged with the book to a random page and think really hard about what was described on the first line of that page, and then you’d draw a picture of what they were imagining, thus convincing them that they had telepathic powers. Your friend wouldn’t notice that the first line of every page described something that could be plausibly represented by a circle with a few lines extending from it: a spider, a transistor, a volcano seen from overhead….