The Insider - Teller

it is now recorded hello and welcome to this week's episode of the insider now normally i give a big introduction to the guests i'm going to have on the show explaining what they've done but everyone listening will already know so i'll just say how lucky we are to be able to spend the next 30 minutes in the company of tala thank you for taking the time out teller how are you today uh i'm i'm fine you know it's a strange world we're living in but i'm adapting to it the i what i hear from all of my professional magician friends is that this is the time they've always been looking forward to for developing new material so that's that's the way that pens and my focus has gone we've done that and then we've done two uh so far we've done two uh from home broadcast television specials uh one of which will be on i want to say the 26th i'm not quite sure but i'm sure you can find that out from glenn uh and those are sort of interesting to do too you know to suddenly have a masked camera crew uh in my house uh and you know keeping social distancing from my cameraman and uh doing them essentially with only props that happen to either be around the house or can be ordered and and dropped off in boxes so to say it's a strange world but uh i i think it's a it's a good time to remember that in one's life in the course of one's life a single year is a very small amount of time one of the things that i think i've learned over the last probably 50 years is that when you know when you're it's just starting out in magic you you think well i've got to be really good in a month and that's just not true in any enterprise that you're in three years is a small amount of time you know if your sort of budget three years to be able to get even a foothold in the occupation and so now we have what looks to me like a year or a year and a half where live theater performance is going to be very very difficult to arrange and i think we just sort of got to say okay so that's the way it'll be for a while um and you know and learn to learn to accept that and do the best we can with it you know right now for us we have we have a considerable size um organization that right now we're keeping afloat with the savings of the company but uh it's a tricky thing so are you are you taking the time that you've got now to to work on new things because one of the things that impresses me about your show is how you're constantly bringing in new material um so are you taking this time to work on even more new material oh yeah and can you explain what the rundown is what's the process for bringing in new stuff because i know the the red ball took an awfully long time is there a process there is a process it's it is however not linear uh it generally the way it works with ben and me is um we get together for tea uh and sometimes he'll have coffee and nowadays our get-togethers are via zoom because we're keeping as strict quarantine as we possibly can because if either of us gets really sick the chances of us dying is pretty high and you know if either of us dies that means the other guy's out of a job and it also means that 15 other people are out of jobs so it's even more important for us not to take lightly the idea that we've got to be super super super careful so we have conversations and the conversations go like any conversation you've you've ever had which is each person brings something different to the conversation very often something that we have read in the news will come up and we'll talk about that for a while i remember reading that when alfred hitchcock would work with with writers they'd be very frustrated because they'd sit down with hitchcock and the first hour would be chit chat about travel and food and drink and then eventually they'd come to the the item in in question the scene that was to be discussed they'd get that out of the way in five or ten minutes uh after having you know talked about food and wine for for an hour it's not quite that extreme with pen and me but we really do start by just having a conversation and then as it goes on um either pen or i will say something like you know um and my pen might say you know i have this i have this idea that i have that i think is sort of that i've got a good clear theme on this but i'm not sure we've got a trick for it and or i'll come to him and i'll say you know we could adapt the idea of billet reading to passwords okay what could we do with that um and and it's just it's so irregular there's you know there just isn't a formula for how it for how it works it's just a conversation that's been going on for 45 years and that winds in and out of the practical and stage worthy a lot of a lot of it is spent nowadays rather courteously saying no i don't think so you know and we're we really are not of the we're not of the the the school of thinking that you must say oh that's a great idea you know uh and whether it's a great idea or not we might be rather frank with each other uh we're courteous but we're we are frank so we don't we try not to waste our time on stuff that's not practical but um i'll give you an example this is just a current example there is a there's a base maker a lutheran someone who makes you know big stand-up bases uh and and other stringed instruments who contacted penn saying you know i could make you any kind of gimmicked base you could ever possibly want and so this afternoon at three o'clock we're going to talk about what we might be able to do with the gimmick base we don't know anything about what it is but that would be one way that that that an idea would come you know that some some in this case a prop maker who doesn't even know he's a prop maker as an instrument maker uh comes it comes in with that sort of that sort of thought um it's so it's it's a complete um it's a complete adventure all the time sounds like a very exciting adventure um looking back over your long career in magic is there one thing that you'd wish that you'd done differently or one thing that you wished you hadn't done yes there are almost an infinite number of things i mean really i from from particular performances to wrong things i've said to people to a we we once we once spent about two years and sixty thousand dollars on a trick that was just a bad idea uh and it you know it it took us it we originally designed it for outside we couldn't get to shoot it outdoors we decided we'd move it indoors onto our stage but what it would involve is flooding the entire stage with water that in a way that just wasn't practical we tried to contain the water with plexiglass it spoiled the effect of the trick uh we we used a very expensive and expert uh magic builder to help us out with this he did his job beautifully but in the end the trick would have involved uh completely destroying our stage and drenching the front row of the of the audience and it took us it tooks it took us 60 000 worth of investment and two years to realize that we are not lacking in persistence and perseverance this is not perseverance is more often with us a sin than a uh than a virtue you seem to care deeply about the why in a trick how can the magicians listening to this start to find the why in the material that they're doing well tell me what you mean by the why why are you doing this do you know what i mean like why why is the ball in the in the the red bull why did you decide that the ball is rolling instead of floating why is the thing in the fish why the the the wise come from some so many directions um uh i you i have a very close friend who hates magic and he hates magic because he says why would any magician want to do that you know why would why would somebody want to take two rings and link them together and take them apart and link them together and take them apart one point of that where's you know my friend uses the term the envy factor you know when you go and see a performance there's the envy factor you want to be able to do what it is that the person on stage is doing and the question that has haunted him for many years is why indeed would someone want to do some of the stuff that you see magicians do why would you really want to take a a three-fold cardboard screen and pull out no handkerchiefs in the right mind want to do that now sometimes the answer to that might be that the the the effect is beautiful that that when you look at it it's enchanting more often than not however it's it's what al baker used to call dragging out a line of baby clothes so i what we certainly do think about whether the effect that we're going for is something that you would have some reason to want to do now if you take the the trick with the coins and the fish there's two very strong things that you might want to do i mean you might very well want to be able to take handfuls of water and turn that into handfuls of money i mean that's just a very pleasant wish fulfillment sort of situation um and you might very well want to be able to scoop up a handful of water and and create life out of that you know that those are those are two normal human wishes that get nicely combined in that in that particular routine um so there's the the the one question of is it something you would actually like to do in real life could you if you did this in real life would you feel better for it but then there there are other things that one does that we do that i i don't think the answer is i would do that because i wish to do that um you could take an example uh there's a trick that we do on on stage live where penn sings the teapot song i'm royalty pot short pens down and uh i'm standing next to him and i'm doing the teapot gestures and he picks me up by my elbow and pours a cup of tea out of me right so it gushes out of my hand now i don't think people would really want to do that in real life but i think it's a really funny idea i mean i think it's it's a it's a it's an idea that says what if when you did the teapot song there were actual consequences and you could actually spill tea by that means so it's just an interesting idea as opposed to the idea of you've got a little three-fold screen and you're dragging out rumbled silks uh there's nothing in that that that sings fun sure sure how how important is method to you in your process uh it's it's essential uh and method is often method is often a a huge stumbling block because i i know that there's a sort of movement among the the art school magicians uh you know where they they're thinking well let's just think of the effect and then we'll be able to do it somehow well no yeah it's part of the grammar of what you expect of a magician is that the magician is going to do something that astounds you that amazes you and that seems to contradict the laws of the universe um that's part of what you expect and in order to do that the the the the means of achieving that uh can are are very difficult think about it this is we're with this totally weird art form it's an art form in which you're your own writer more often than not you're your own director uh then you're your own performer and then you're your own tech team now yes we have people who help us absolutely we have a we have a wonderful staff of our own we have other people who have come in and advised and built for us but essentially you're as a magician you're doing everything in show business all at once and and that's difficult and one of the things that the the bottom line is you are required sort of by definition you're required to at the core of all of this do something that looks impossible but you're somehow making it seem possible because that's where the the joy of watching magic certainly is is not that the joy of watching magic is looking at something that can't be and saying wow it really seems to be what's going on it's it's not at all a comfortable form i mean this is not a magic is not a form that you sit and you you know you put up your feet and you lean back and you just it rolls over you magic is this very active former you're watching intently hoping that you will be deceived right you want to use all of your brain power and fail uh it's a strange it's a strange assertive form part of the one of the pieces of evidence that that people watch magic actively is how bad mentalism often is uh because mentalism sometimes when a mentalist doesn't say this is really impossible this is impossible and yet it seems like i'm doing it it's hard you know if the mentalist says well this might sort of be possible uh you don't get that same explosion of fun you know that you get out of magic where you know it's not possible and now suddenly it seems to be um that's it that's one of the things that makes mentalism kind of very difficult to do well there are some wonderful mentalists out there but i i appreciate them even more for the fact that they are ever able to overcome that very that that that ambiguity what are some magic books that you think every magician should have read well i think everybody should have a tar um the the formative ones for me uh were uh certainly tarbell as a reference and tarbell is not always correct but tarbell will at least give you some orientation in something uh anything i learned about card magic as a as a youth was learned from the royal road to card magic by hugh guard and broy and uh i spent an entire summer just learning everything right in sequence what's beautiful about that book is that it each chapter builds on the previous one so if you in the first chapter you learn to shuffle a deck in the second chapter you learn to shuffle a deck and do a trick with that and it builds consistently through the book and so it's a sort of a it's a like an anticipation of the idea of a programmed course um i one of the major books for me was um classic secrets of magic by bruce elliott uh that's what got me on the track that eventually became my version of the needles it's it's kind of what got me onto the miser stream to begin with uh that's i don't know whether that's in print or it might be in paperback um i let me think um i all the al baker books which have also been assembled in one big fact book by todd carr but all the al baker books are really good because al baker was very practical i mean he really worked in the real world at real parties in real places uh when he did his cake and hat uh he would sometimes be out on on the road for a week and his wife would bake him a week of cakes so that at the end of the week the cakes would be a little bit stale but they they'd still be they'd still be usable so all the al baker books al baker ways and means yeah i mean just look up al baker you'll you'll see all the names of them the two the two stuart kramer carl germain books which again todd carr has done a beautiful edition of um on germaine but they're still available individually the carl jermaine books by stuart kramer are very important to me because of the way germain first of all jermaine's methods are really subtle they're really complex they're they do what jim steinmeier talks about you know jim steinmeier frequently has said that that magic a magical method is not one thing it is a stack of lies that are arranged so that they all add up to something that looks impossible um and j you know all pretty much all of jim steinmeier's work is informed by that really quite brilliant thinking and they're they're very worth having uh having a round two um let me think of the other thing oh of course uh the bobo on coin magic uh modern coin magic by jb bobo that's a very thoroughly thumbed book uh my library and strangely for somebody who doesn't care for mentalism corinda's 13 steps to mentalism is very very good not just as a mentalism book but as a as a book about figuring out what is important in a trick and going for that by whatever means you have to go for it which is a very uh it's a very useful bit of thinking to get in there i think that's that's sort of my that's that's my my at the moment my litany of the um you know the the the 48 inch shelf of of good books i mean i also i i have the the the set of books that um fleming books put out years ago which is um let me think with sax sleight of hand right uh and so forth those those those four books are very interesting to to to see um the modern conjurer by c lang neal is a great great book mostly i think because uh he it's so heavily illustrated with photographs of peop of people of his period doing tricks so you see for example mad moiselle cap what is it uh patrice madoisel patrice uh producing spring flowers and dropping them into a parasol and you see charles bertram doing you know doing uh card tricks and he captures in those photographs the gestures of these people the the the character of the gesture that these that these people had um i'm just going to step back a little bit with bertram you have this very courtly sort of sort of presentation and you can see in his body what that kind of what that kind of presentation must be like probably other books will pop to mind as we chat we can add them in later are there who are some magicians that you wished from the past that you'd wished you'd had the ability to see perform i'd like to have seen david devante in his prime i bet david the band was pretty magnetic in his prime um uh let me see i i would love to have seen jermaine i would love to have seen um i'd like to have seen him do the cups and balls uh you know outdoors in a park someplace um i would love to have seen hofzinser uh even though i'm not very much a a a parlor magician's style person i'd like to have seen how his how his style played out in that environment that he was in because apparently he really captured the the uh the nuance of the time i had the good fortune to you know a couple of years ago to be given a an opportunity to go to egypt india and china and some of the see some of the street magic or the traditional magic that you always read about but that you know you always go wait a minute what's this how is this is going on and that wasn't that was an extremely illuminating experience for me it's one of the ones i mean it was not comfortable because egypt india and china are not places that you would want to live um boy boy do they not know how to do traffic we were in china we were on a bus in the middle of the winter that got hit by another bus and skidded off the highway in india we were in a bus where i swear the the bus just barreled ahead there's absolutely no thought that there was anyone else on the highway and pedestrians were screaming and running out of the way in front of the in front of the bus um you know and in in india the the level of poverty is uh incomprehensible to a westerner you know incomprehensible to to have a skeletal woman come to your car holding a skeletal baby making this gesture meaning i need money for food and you know we we see we see homeless people who are in terrible condition the they are in the lack of luxury compared to what we saw in india but let me think if there's anybody else in the in the past that i'd love to i think i might have liked to have seen harry keller uh harry harry keller i from what i read harry keller was quite a quite a presenter let's move to to now um with foolish you've created unarguably the best platform for great magicians to be seen by as many people as possible was this your intention when you started the show it came out of a conversation that started with me saying to penn wouldn't it be interesting to do a show in which magicians invented the tricks specifically to fool us you know i was picturing they would you know they would do espionage and find out what i was good at recognizing and what pen was good at recognizing and then we would follow them backstage creating the trick and then that would eventually come to the you know come to a performance so that you would be on the side of the performing magician knowing exactly how the trick worked to see whether it could fool penn teller or not and when i described that to penn uh i don't think i did a very good job of describing it because he misunderstood it to be what we actually have as the show which is the having magicians come on uh with with the with this one this one chore which is to to fool us now what what's what is good in my mind about this is that the television is bristling with um you know like the got talent type shows in which incredibly unqualified judges watch people who have worked very hard on a work of art and judge them by absolutely random standards so you know you get you get oh he's so cute you know you get oh she was so sexy in those moves i really liked her you know and it's just like it's like being judged by the by com completely unqualified idiots um i don't think the pen and i are any smarter than those than those judges but we've done done ourselves a favor of giving us only one thing to to do which is not to say this act is good or this act is bad but did it fool us or not it is a concrete standard and what this accomplishes is it overcomes a television is natural skepticism there's a television audience which has you know a television audience has seen youtube videos and television audience knows that they're not seeing everything in the youtube video i think very few people are fooled into thinking that the magicians who just you know perform on supposedly on the street are actually people who would fool them in real life this this overcomes that by just saying we are being frank with you we are we are there really just like you uh one of the things we're doing is is trying to figure out what the what the trick is um and that's it's nice to have that very simple standard there when it is accompanied by the other things that we do which is a the only people who get to be on the show are really good right so it is a very very good magic show you know that if you're if a magician comes out on stage the magician's going to be a fine fine entertainer um it it it it it allows it allows the audience then to have the confidence that they're really watching this uh and i think we set kind of an example um there is a tremendous amount that you see on television and in politics nowadays in which people are rude to each other you know it used to be that if you had a if you had a talk show on a political issue it was a dignified debate now it has it has well it's descended into depravity where people you know call each other schoolyard names um and and interrupt each other constantly the the the level of bad example that's being shown to us on television uh most of the time about how people should treat each other is uh horrific and so one of the things that we we are very conscientious about is we are polite and we are appreciative and since everybody who comes on is good there is always something very good we can say to that person so the the feeling of the game aspect of this is very much the gentle person's game right this is this is people it it's sort of like when when uh sometimes when magicians come to see us live they'll visit with us after afterwards in our green room backstage and we'll sit around and talk and once in a while one of them will say i have a little something you might like to see and they'll you know they'll they'll do something for us and will or will or won't fool us but the the whole aspect of it is very uh polite it's friendly it's polite and part part of the biggest message i think of the show to the to the viewer is that it is possible to talk to another person politely even if you're even if you're describing how the how the magic trick is being done we even do that with such discretion that uh no one ever feels no one ever feels like oh they just spoiled my whole career by giving away my trick no we do it in code and we do it in a gentle and genteel way what do you think makes a perfect foolish act um for me a protocol-less act is one in which i am completely gobsmacked i mean a perfect foolless act is one in which i go i don't have a clue i which i feel i mean deeply and totally amazed there are some acts that don't that that that sometimes win on our show because we don't have details about their their methods but that don't quite give me that feeling but what i'm what i'm in quest of is the feeling that uh that what i'm looking at for i don't have a clue i mean it's just that that that that impulse that got you into magic at the beginning which is being fooled and going ah that's what i'm looking for this this might be like picking a favorite child but are there some standout performances that you've seen on the show can you pick a couple and explain why they resonated with you um sure let me think i i've seen there's so many acts i mean there's there's one act on this year that i won't tell you whether she fooled us or not but i will tell you it is the greatest quick change act you've ever seen in your life and it's an absolute miracle i mean you were watching what you always dreamed quick change would look like and your jaw is on your chest all the time when when helen coughlin first came on on the show uh you know she helen coughlin is an australian um very uh straightforward you know aussie kind of here you are boys can you figure out my trick uh i i absolutely love her all the time whenever she comes on uh i've only figured out one thing that she ever brought us uh she and her 90-something-year-old father come up with these extremely clever things and her presentation is so sort of forthright um i loved being fooled by um john lovick handsome jack because he completely and utterly did a sucker gag on me he did he did a torn and restored paper in a way that looked exactly like the chinese laundry ticket that you know that i had bought when i was uh you know six years old and you know and he finishes it up and then he just handed it to me and walked away you know i it was just there there was a there was a great joy in being that thoroughly suckered um let me think oh well you know paul gertner is quite wonderful and paul gertner also does all of those levels of subtle that allow a magician to go oh that well that's what he must be doing uh oh i don't have it now you know so that's that's fun i love the number i mean i i i pretty nearly every uh woman magician that we've had on the show has been very good which is no surprise because as as with doctors for years and years magic was just a men's club and uh and so for a woman to have the the the stamina to withstand all of the prejudice that uh women have had to withstand in magic i mean that's already a great credit to the person's the person's character but lately we've been we've been seeing women who have been um extraordinarily inventive and creative and personal so that they're not really just repeating the kinds of things that men have done for years you know there's this there's this there's the style of of female magician who will come out you know in a tail coat and do do you know card fans that's okay but that's not really bringing a woman's perspective into it and i particularly this year again you will see on the show some uh amazing women some women who just who've just said wait a minute i'm a woman i have things to work with that men don't have to work with sure advancing inks vanishing's co-founders andy gladwin and josh jay have both appeared on fool us and said the experience was amazing i've interviewed many magicians on this show who have agreed with them how did you set up the production side of things so you would make the magicians appearing on the show feel so comfortable well i can't take a lot of credit for that and for the first few years of the show that was the a lot of what made that work was the combination of johnny thompson i was originally just johnny thompson and then for a while johnny thompson and mike close and now johnny uh died and mike mike has taken over mike was the you know the the uh the key person this uh this last season um i mean we want everyone who comes on to come off magnificently so the magicians arrive and are warmly welcomed and then are given time to rehearse on stage very often longer than we get to rehearse on stage with the assistance of somebody like mike close who has a great sense of humor and who will he not only knows well this the trick will be more will be more uh deceptive if you do this mike also will say you need a joke here and no you know no to add that so when magicians arrive they're supported immediately they're supported and encouraged by the by the by the people we have here because everyone wants them to look good i mean nobody nobody ever i'm in fact i believe everyone in the entire crew wants them to fool us they they that's their their the aspiration of everybody i mean kind of including us is is we really want people to come on and fool us so there's this tremendous sense of support then um you know we really truly don't know who's going to be on the show ever uh it's kept we're kept in a completely separate location uh sometimes people will even be in town who are good friends of ours and they won't tell us they're in town because uh it would you know give away the fact that that's that's what's going on they're kept in a completely separate location from us um and then when when they come out there is a moment before the cameras roll where basically penn and i both go you know hi thank you so much for coming and really let them know that they're they're uh honored they're honored guests and we're rooting for them and then uh i i mean i i think that kind of accounts accounts for most of it that we're we're treating them well we're treating them as we would like to be treated back to the back to the thing you said about television not being a good example you making it a good example where did the idea of you and penn standing outside chatting to everybody after a show come from and aren't you drained after a performance well i mean it's something that i'm afraid won't be we've always been in the midst of the crowd we've never been people who um you know sort of uh separated ourselves off with a velvet rope from the people who come to see the show uh we don't you know after a show we don't hop into the limousine and fly away uh when we when we first worked the very first gigs that we got were street performance you can't get away from the crowd there they are they are they are they're they're part of the show they are part of you uh then when we played small theaters one of the first small theaters that we played there was no stage door right you couldn't get out from backstage without walking right through the auditorium so we started to end the shows by walking through the auditorium just hanging out in the lobby now why a performer would not do that is amazing to me um i mean i guess i can understand if if i'm if i mick jagger and i have you know fifteen thousand people in my you know in a stadium or a hundred thousand people in a stadium i'm not going to have time and i'm not and i'm probably going to be treated somewhat roughly by people who have sort of idolized me from afar we've never been that that that successful you know if you're that successful i can understand being a little more distant but when you're only when you've only got an auditorium that's got in our case like 1500 seats in it if you're if you're willing to hang out outside the theater for what there's usually a half hour 45 minutes the amount of fun that is is fairly hard to uh to to exaggerate it hey i'm eating people from all over the world b i'm meeting people who have uh come to see the show sometimes spending a lot more money than they'd spend on anything else they really really are happy to be there see i have there's generations of people now you know we've been in business for so long there's generations of people who come to the show so that i i think the the one the perfect moment for me is the moment when a guy came up to me and said um i want to tell you when i was seven years old i was on stage i was the kid on stage with mofo the psychic gorilla i still remember that and i'd like to introduce you to my seven-year-old son oh so why wouldn't you do that you know if you could but you know now i i we we were we when the pandemic first hit and we got word of it you know people said well just don't shake hands and touch your face wash your hands before that so we meticulously did that but there was about a week of shows when when the contagion was really spreading when we were at risk and just didn't know it fortunately at the end of the shooting of of a fool us i mean it's just fortunate that you know that we had just we had scheduled fool us in such a way that it just skirted disaster no one zero no one and involved in fool us came down with any symptoms of anything it's pure pure sheer luck after many years without publishing material for other magicians what made you want to tackle something like masterclass um you know i i was a school teacher uh for six years before i went into this uh this line of work and uh when you've been around for a while sometimes you have stuff that's worthwhile to say uh i you know my my own instinct is while i'm doing material that's not material that i want to publish yet and you know certainly i would i think i would be remiss if sometime before i'm dead um we don't publish material that we are no longer using and you know i mean if we're uh so the the the the disinclination to publish material is just that uh when you publish it you're inviting other people to do it and i you know there are things that i would rather keep exclusive for now um masterclass was an opportunity to take all of that experience that we'd have that we had and um talk about the things that we'd learned in in interesting ways i it was it was a great deal of fun and the the master class organization really knows its way around those those that format and they made it they made it look very elegant they and we we shot the entire s you know course in three or four days long days uh but then they took it away and they came back and they organized it beautifully you know they took things that were by themselves not very satisfactory but put in context very useful they you know they they should take we can take credit for the knowledge but they they should take credit for the the artfulness of that and you know it was also as it turns out johnny thompson's last tv appearance and um and it's wonderful it's just wonderful that he was part of that for sure for sure talking of mastery can you talk a little about the t.s eliot quote that you like about every venture is a new beginning a raid on the articulate really inarticulate sorry inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating [Laughter] you know uh it's true that if you're going to do something new uh it's always you're always starting from zero uh now that's not always the case sometimes you know especially if we have to produce a lot of material we will think of we will adapt something you know we will find a way of adapting an existing trick with a new with a new idea uh but i'm always resentful of magicians who say oh there are no new ideas in magic it's all you know i mean they they usually say it's all old wine and new bottles but i would rather say it's it's all new wine and old bottles as though they're as though they're uh just repackaging some some lightweight idea in a in a way that looks very classy but um i i i resent people who say everything is just the same as the past you've just got to do it again and again and so i'm i'm i'm drawn to that t.s eliot quote in which he complains that after all the years he's spent writing every time he starts writing it's starting with a blank page and he has to come at it again and he has to go through the same process again things don't get easier really the you do get a little smarter about your choices and you do learn a bit of process i mean i'll give you an example i think when you know when i was 20 i i believe that i would if i wanted to build a box trick i would design it build it and it wouldn't work and i'd be surprised and disappointed nowadays if i wanted to build a box trick i would get the idea for it i'd whack together something in cardboard and see if anything about it could possibly work if that was encouraging we do another version in plywood and uh and get modify it down and do it step by step by step by step nothing that you think of ever comes out the way you envision envision it you've got to test every little thing step by step by step by step i'm i'm doing that right now with one of the new things that we're that we're creating i was over last night i was over at tom rubino's house tom marino's a brilliant magic builder in in las vegas um just brilliant he's built several things for us before and he's built things for carbonaro and and um uh matt uh uh franco um you know he i mean he's built for a lot of people and he really knows what he's doing but he knows just like i know that you've got to go step by step by step so last night i spent an hour and a half in his kitchen because his workshop was too hot because we're in the middle of the desert uh in his kitchen and he had his little saber saw and he had his measuring tapes and stuff and we modified this and tried this and modified this and tried this for one beat in a big routine um that's the one thing i can say that you you've got to understand if you're creating actual new stuff it is going to take time it's just the first idea that you get will not work and that's just fine because once you spend enough time with it you will get better and better and better ideas part of part of what happens when you know part of what is called practice practice isn't just repeating the same thing over and over again uh that's that's stupid that's that's that's pointless practice is doing something again and again and again and each time getting better ideas and applying those better ideas one after the other after the other and very frequently when i'm sitting in my tv room i will have a deck of cards with me because i'm still not happy with the way i control the card to the top of the deck so i keep experimenting with would this look more natural would this look more natural would this does this fit me does this is this is this comfortable for me um so that's when t.s eliot says that i fully understand that but i don't think of it as a as a negative i think of it as you just need to know when you're starting on a new bit the magnitude of what it is you're trying to do and you also don't want to stop the first time you perform it that johnny johnny says said that said to us and i will never forget this most magicians stop thinking too soon you know you need to get it out in front of an audience you need to work with it you need to say oh yeah this would be so much better if i did this and then you take it back and start again you know and until you get get to what you're trying to do because we are in an extraordinarily difficult form what we are doing must look perfectly impossible absolutely perfectly impossible that's a very very high demand i mean it's magic is this sort of off on switch either it's magic or it's crap and you know it's it's ludicrous crap too so it is really really important to just keep continually improving it because it's such a difficult art form for those of us not lucky enough to have had johnny thompson in our life to sit out the front and say no you should have done it like this and do it like that what are some ways that people listening to this can go down that journey of improvement if they're just kind of on their own i i think by by by not being on their own i mean they're i think you you need magic is a is a social form you can't do magic in a vacuum you know maybe a violinist can play a beautiful piece of music for himself and get a certain uh certain satisfaction out of that magic is not that way magic is a communication it's it's much like um it's much like comedy in that it doesn't exist comedy doesn't exist unless there's an audience there to get the joke and laugh so i i think that one essential thing that magicians should do is utilize other people in in partnership to to uh watch what they're doing i mean there's so many levels at which people can be helpful it's it's helpful just to just to have someone volunteer to watch what you're doing it's helpful to have somebody who is skillful watching what what you're doing and saying hmm you might try have you thought about it this way i i i say this this is very much in the forefront of my mind not only because penn and i do this with each other all the time constantly and it's one of the reasons that we've been able to produce as much material as we have but because the other night i had done a little talk for for tannen's magic camp and matt franco a fellow magician in town a wonderful performer uh had been on the program also he wrote me a little complimentary email and said if i can ever be of use to you let me know and uh there was a problem that i was stuck on for a piece that pen and i are working on and i was just stuck on it you know the way you sometimes you just can't break loose you you go around in a circle and then around lines circling around in a circle and i wrote back to matt want to zoom right now and he went okay and he zoomed and i told him what the situation was and we talked and part of the answer came out of the fact that i have a bin of socks just just around the corner there and part of the answer came from matt saying you could end it with this and uh suddenly it broke the lob jam and i said matt do you have anything you want you're working on right now and he said well actually yeah i got this this this routine that i'm working on do you have time to look at it i said sure so i watched that and afterwards we talked about it and i think maybe we were able to do a little bit of a breakthrough to to um to unstick him on the problem that he was that he was dealing with so i i think uh appealing to other people and you know not being so damned uh terrified you know magicians are just they often are terrified they're terrified of getting caught well i'm afraid that part of getting good is getting caught so you know do the do the perform whatever it is that you're working on for somebody whether they're an audience that's skilled or whether there's an audience that's unskilled the the conversation will help advance the art thank you um can you talk a little bit about lying without talking i understood you first realized the power of this back in your college days with doing the razor baits razor blade swallowing it's a very interesting thing uh i i was i was a strong rebel against patter because i thought most of the time patter was awfully redundant you know here i have a ball i'm putting it into my hand and now it's gone i mean that's just flat why would you ever say those words and yet a lot of people did and i thought i really just thought as an experiment can i get the audience to tell themselves the story that i want them to tell themselves by putting by action by putting evidence out here and letting them add this to that and come to a conclusion which is in our case what we desire as a false but artistically beautiful conclusion um so that it started as that experiment and as i did it i discovered a kind of an extraordinary quality that not talking has and that is when you stop talking people are forced to think and look and study what's going on there is a level of intimacy that that you that you get that you don't have when there are words between you if i stop right now suddenly the whole temperature of the room changes uh it becomes intimate it i mean it becomes really powerfully intimate i i noticed this very dramatically when i broke that that that rule um when i was first working on the red ball trick because that kind of trick had always been done to music uh our musician that works with us mike jones wrote a great little composition to go with my routine and it the routine was not really hitting very well and one night he had to have some emergency surgery and i thought well i'll just do it to track and then i tried doing that and that was terrible and i thought let's just try doing it dead silent and that that moment the moment that the ball hit the floor you could hear it the moment there was a slightest rustle of reaction from the audience i could hear that the conversation had resumed where the musical patter had been in the way so i'm very interested in that in in that experience and you'll see that it you know weaves in and out you don't want an entire show done that way i don't think i mean i i could conceive of it kind of working but uh there there is a great important place for speech but it's got to be speech as interesting as the speech that pen does you know if you don't have that if you don't have that interest in that kind of language maybe you should try not speaking uh it might not work for you it happens to work for me because something about the way i think it's almost as if the audience can read my mind i'm really i never act you know i never act i never really make faces i never do you know that sort of clown stuff i just think the thoughts that i would think if the thing were really happening and somehow or other the audience seems to be able to read that on my body and it's very uh it's a weird it's a weird experience it's almost you know if i if i believed in that sort of thing it seemed it seems almost telepathic and that they are really reading what i'm thinking but i know they're reading what they're seeing for sure we're nearly out of time i just wanted to say ask you really whether the whether you've enjoyed this forced time off that we've all had at the moment has it been a welcome breather for you or are you just antsy to get back to performing i i i'm i'm i miss performing very much uh i have to say i'm but i'm also not somebody who spends a lot of time uh wailing over what he can't have that doesn't seem to me very efficient uh so uh i'm you know i'm i'm trying to i'm trying to do what i can to continue to exercise the um artistic uh impulses that make me me uh without the without the nightly presence of an audience for however long this is going to be you know i i again i think that we're talking about a year or a year and a half um i'm 72 years old a year and a year and a half with this much time in the course of that i can learn to live with that and i can learn to to take advantage of that um so what are you doing to scratch those artistic issues um well primarily working on new material i mean that's right that is what we're doing i'm also i you know i've i've been making the beginnings of write-ups of some of the the pen and teller material with the intention that by the time i'm ready to publish they i will have accumulated all of that all of that stuff because i really would i'd like not to uh not to pass out of this world without leaving some good uh gifts for people who are also in the art form i mean i i when i think about how much i learned from uh oh you know like the great robert harbin book um which i bought when it came out that and now harbin is gone but still if you if you really want to understand the zigzag you you don't don't watch people do it on tv read what robert harvin has to say about it because you will really understand if you if you take advantage of the gift he left us uh you will you will really understand why that trick is incredibly beautiful and powerful uh and you won't get that out of some magician who you know who puts it on wheels and dances around their own state and does it as it does it as the quick flash effect because it's not it's not that kind of it's not that kind of piece of magic it's a very deep fooler you've just excited every single person listening to this show with the talk of that book could you tell us anything more about where it's at what your thoughts are you know where where it's at is i'm halfway through the first the first draft of a chapter on the the needle trick i have i have uh probably five pages of of of notes on shadows um that's that's about where it is it's it's this you know this long-term project that i s i have told myself if you ever get time off you'll do it's very hard to do i mean writing is one of the loneliest hardest things you can possibly do um but i'm hoping that i mean depending on how long the pandemic goes we'll see how much of that gets done now well that's a very exciting bombshell to end the show on teller thank you so much for giving us so much of your time this afternoon i really really appreciate it you know i do a lot of interviews here and there and this is one of the nicest i've ever done because your questions are not the obvious ones and they're thoughtful and deep and worthwhile thank you thank you

Channel: Vanishing Inc. Magic

Views: 48,719

Rating: 4.9387236 out of 5

Keywords: vanishing inc, magic tricks, vanishing inc., andi gladwin, joshua jay, magic shop, magic store, learn magic tricks, teller, fool us, magicians, television, agt, bgt, talent, got talent, female, fooler, penn, p&t, rio, interview, las vegas, the insider

Id: TLgwejKVI04

Length: 57min 51sec (3471 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 03 2020