by Jon Racherbaumer

"David combines great talent with charm and personal presence. If there's a more deserving magician out there. I suggest they get a better agent."

- Ted Harbert, former chairman of ABC Entertainment, who approved the Blaine Special.

David Blaine is a man of contrasts, coming out of nowhere. He is open and closed, forthcoming and mysterious; and has definitely taken a less traveled path to prime time. By means still fuzzy to everyone except himself and his agents, Blaine had pulled off the trick of the year, if not the trick of the decade! He induced a television network to buy and air a show by someone with zero name-recognition. In fact, Blaine is almost completely unknown to the magic community. When asked what he does for a living, he says. "I'm a juggler!" This is a private joke that amuses him. So, forget about finding promotion stuff like clever business cards, flashy brochures, slick promotional videos, and other puffery. You will not find him at magic clubs or conventions, carrying a close-up case. I(n terms of a conventional career-track - the kind of magician follow and expect others to follow - Blaine is anomaly with a television special.

On the surface, Blaine's biography seems somewhat normal. Underneath, other curious aspects emerge. His interest in magic began early. When asked, his stock answer is: "When I was four or five years old, I stood on tables and did those silly tricks for adults. Instead of using cards, I took a dollar and poked a pencil through it, kept the dollar and bought new magic. " His mother actively influenced him and his grandmother, according to Blaine, was a witch and tarot-card reader. "I assume it was tarot cards," he explains, "She would do readings on people... I think she used to do research on the person beforehand, For example, I know she would get somebody to dress up and stand outside their house and watch the person, where they went everyday, who took out their garbage. She did readings for wealthy people at the Cotton Club and the Ziegfield Theater. She was making that whole crowd. Her name was Martha White, but her real last name was Weiss. W-e-e-s-s, like Houdini."

Blaine grew up in Brooklyn until he was 10. When his mother remarried, they moved to Jerseyville, New Jersey. At 17, he moved back to New York and lived in Hell's Kitchen, a place, which quickly test your mettle. Blaine, now 24, says, "Rent wasn't that expensive there, so I did magic, booked myself for private parties for wealthy people, and started moving up financially." The death of his mother when David was 19 was a turning point. "That was the worst thing that has happened in my life," he says, "I was standing there with nobody and nothing left, no relatives. So, I went full force ahead, doing magic everywhere, every single second, because that's all I really had!" When asked about his father, he adds, "He was in Vietnam. My mom left him when I was one or two. I never really knew him."

When asked about his influences, David cites Uri Geller, Orson Welles, Martin Luther King, Malcom X, Muhammad Ali, and Jesus Christ - not necessarily in that order. The only magicians, besides Geller (his favorite), he acknowledges are Bill Kalush, Paul Harris and Michael Weber (the latter two are listed as technical advisers), but he cautiously adds, "I watched them and a few others, saw what worked and was completely supportive." When asked about hanging out with other magicians, he admits that he is somewhat of a loner. He does not claim to be an elitist, only and outsider who chooses to be outside the usual circles and loops. "I don't discriminate against them. I respect anybody who believes in themselves and what they are doing. I respect many magicians."

After David Blaine: Street Magic airs and the ratings are in, most magicians around the country will be scratching their heads and asking pointed questions. They will want to know more about Blaine and the modus operandi of his current celebrity. How does and unknown street kid position himself in such a manor? How did he bewitch the likes of Robert DiNiro, Harvey Weinstein (co-chairman of Miramax), Woody Allen, Spike Lee and Leonardo DiCaprio? How did and ordinary young man, with a pocketful of dealer items and a deck of cards, dazzle television executives who rarely look up from the bottom line? At this point, it does not matter. Blaine did something nobody else has done. His television special is now a fait accompli. Whatever ruckus is raised in magicdom will be irrelevant. As one wag put it, "Blaine eats Becker any day!" Blaine is mum about how much he has earned being a juggler. He, in his own words, lives simply. A one-bedroom apartment on Gramecy Square may not be Walden Pont, But it will provide him a place to focus on his upcoming one-man show and meditate more on how Houdini and Geller reaped so much publicity. He may turn out to be a fascinating footnote in magic history, but right now he is a blazing roman candle.

Bingo Bango!

Mondo Magic Guy

A Review by Jon Racherbaumer

David Blaine: Street Magic is different, gritty, surprisingly viewable, and occasionally slap-happy. It's narrator, in subdued, California-cool voice (like the one in television's Hitch-Hiker), tells us Blaine is "a man without smoke and mirrors". His stage is the street and his magic is " in your face - pure and undeniable." Indeed. This show, it turns out, is unadulterated video verite and like its cinematic counterpart, it draws its power and fascination by seeming to be wholly spontaneous. By using everyday people in real-world settings, it takes the risky tack of deconstructing "grand illusion" with its hype, hoopla, and staginess and brings it down - way down - to earth.

David Blaine is no Copperfield, Burton, or Jay, but is an odd mixture of strangeness and ordinariness - a Gen-X creature and a baby's breath away from being listless. He is on the Far Side of magicdom, the antithesis of celebrated, somewhat inaccessible fantasy creatures from the ethereal world of television. You cannot imagine him on any smoky, glittering, mirrored sate in Vegas. Instead of blow-dried hair, his cut is concentration-camp chic. Instead of black leather and billowy shirt, he wears a slacker's uniform: T-shirt, wind-breaker, sneakers, and occasionally shades. This guy looks like he lost his skateboard in Jersey - unpretentious, undistinguished, undramatic, and… let's face it… pretty mundane.
However…

Everybody usually associates with "mundane" with ordinary and banal things, but its roots pertain to the everyday world. And the everyday world is precisely where Blaine does his thing - places where his publicist claims there are "no rules, no barriers."

Once you adjust your bearings, the "world" revealed in this show will surprise you. Blaine lopes through it like an officious interloper. He approaches anyone, anywhere, and offers unsolicated, hand-delivered "miracles." You have got to hand it to the guy. There is something simultaneously brave and beggarly about approaching complete strangers and asking, "Wanna see something?" And if you momentarily overlook this intrusive, questionably approach and forget about his deficiencies as a performer, you will see a compelling force at play - the primacy of magic and its powers to dramatically affect people. Make no mistake about it, the focus of this show, boys and girls, is not Blaine. It is really about theatrical proxemics; about the show-within-a-show and the spontaneous, visceral reactions of people being astonish. That's the hook!

Astonishment is a great leveler. Ask Paul Harris, Tommy Wonder, and Eugene Burger. Who fails to understand widening eyes, dropping jaws squeals of surprise, and outburst of laughter? Everybody reacts when others leap, gasp, or drop to their knees. As stage illusions get bigger and bigger and less and less believable, Blaine is gently tapping into the primal roots of magic. He wants to infiltrate minds. He wants nothing less that to penetrate the defensive threshold of what ordinary folks are willing to believe and are unprepared to contemplate. Instead of using magic to impress, intimidate, promote himself, and make a profit, he performs on the street, in the subway, outside restaurants, on boardwalks, in locker rooms, and in the desert. And everything is free, unbidden, like the air you breathe. Forget about state-of-the-art boxes, Peter Pan flying, giant saws and die-hard drills! Using several sure-shot tricks and trite-but-true things sold by every magic dealer on the planet, he baffles, convules, and blows whatever is left of the minds of supposedly ordinary fold. (Some of the spectators are hardly-run-of-the-mill. Except for a few, most of the spectators in this special have probably never paid to see any magician.)

This show should stir lively discussion among magicians. Every time another magician gets media attention or appears on network television, the "noises" ration on the Internet increases and feeding-frenzy of criticism battens the babble. Regardless, Blaine somehow did a special, getting almost 30 additional minutes of "fame". He may turn out to be one-trick pony, a flash to be panned, or the Forest Gump of close-up, but TV-producers saw something else. Somebody put up the money. What Blaine does, how he does it, and more important, how people react to him is interesting television. Allen Funt understood the game. Don’t' be surprised if you find yourself grinning and liking this magic special. Moments of astonishment, after all, are rawly human. When it happens to us and when we see it happening to others celebrates our common humanity. We grin, giggle, and nudge our neighbors. Some of us - like everyone (including Blaine) in the last 15 seconds of the show - bust a gut, laughing. Compared to recent magic specials, this was a welcome change and a short fuse to exhilaration.

Traffic Counts

Who:

Of the 106 spectators approached and involved, 35 were female and 71 were male. Two stray dogs made it to the final cut. Most recognizable victims: Dallas Cowboys, Deion Sanders and Emmit Smith. Also recorded and not forgoten: Fruit Loops outside a body piercing shop in Greenwich Village.

Where:

New York City (Times Square, Greenwich Village); Atlantic City; Dallas; San Francisco (Haight-Ashbury, Fishermand's Wharf); Comptons, California; and the Mojave Desert.

Weapons:

Of the 26 different effects performed there were 17 card tricks, four coin tricks, and five with other things (sometimes a body part). Many were repeated: Meir Yedid's "Arm Twister," "Raven Coin Vanish," "Ambitious Card," Fetcher's "Card Transposition," and a "Double-Card Change in Spectator's Hand" were done twice; the "Wrist-Watch steal," a "Think-of-a-Card" effect, and the Bitten-Restored Half-dollar" were done thrice; a form of "Self-Levitation" was accomplished seven times.

For the Record:

Two most impressive tricks: Bob Hummer's "Selected Card-Against-and-Behind-Window" and David Blaine's visually enhanced "Self-Levitation."

Plane Blaine

Before his ABC special aired last month. David Blaine was reluctant to talk about it. He definitely did not want to be the subject of an article or do an interview with Magic. After much persistence, David returned a call, via cellular phone, as he was flying (in an airplane) from New York to Los Angeles.

Magic: How do you think magicians are going to react to your special?

Blaine: I'm sure they'll hate it.

Magic: Why?

Blaine: Because it's like stating the obvious.

Magic: Was the concept for the special yours?

Blaine: Yes, completely. I executive produced the show. I hired Stephen Chao to co-executive produce it. I hired Tom Richmond as the director of photography, as well as the Cops people, to shoot it. I hired Victor Livingston to edit it. I sat in the editing room for hours.

Magic: Less than 45 minutes of edited material appear on screen, What kind of shooting ratio did you have?

Blaine: We shot quite a bit, somewhere in the realm of 15 to 20 hours.

Magic: In saying you hired these production people, do you mean that you assembled the team before you went to ABC?

Blaine: No. I sold ABC, then built the team.

Magic: How does one go about selling ABC?

Blaine: I walked into Ted Harbert's office, who was the chairman of ABC Entertainment at the time, and did magic for him. I showed him a tape that I had cut together with two VCRs. It was like fourth generation quality, but they loved the idea, and asked: "What do we have to do to keep you from going to another network?" And, I said this, this and this...

Magic: Was it your different approach to magic on television that made the deal?

Blaine: I figured there's no way to compete with David Copperfield, Lance Burton and all those who keep trying to make each illusion bigger than the last. I wanted to take the exact opposite direction - the simplest way, the most entertaining, the most believable. And, I wasn't performing for magicians; they always seem to be performing for each other. I didn't do that, I was performing for the world, to the public, for the masses.

Magic: You don't really hang with magicians?

Blaine: Not that I have a discrimination towards them... I respect anybody who does anything well, as well as anybody who believes in what they do. I don't discriminate against magicians at all, there's quite a few that I respect.

Magic: What are you planning after the special airs?

Blaine: Link together a one man show. It's going to be in New York, and It's going to be very different from every magic show that we've seen. It probably won't open until winter, because I'm not going to do it until it's exactly the way I want it to be.

Magic: What about more television? If Street Magic is a success, has good ratings, they'll want more.

Blaine: I'm not in a rush.

Magic: What about career goals?

Blaine: My goal is to use magic as an art form to open people up, break down their logic, give people a moment of pure truth, where there are no logical barriers in front of them. I'm not really concerned with the money. I know that sounds superficial, because I put myself up as executive producer. I do want to produce good pieces of work, and I don't mean as a magician, but as entertainment.

Magic Do you for see yourself doing anything other tan magic-related work?

Blaine Absolutely. I'm putting a film together right now. I've been working on it for a couple of years.

Magic: Is this work about you, or is it by you?

Blaine: There are some pieces of the character that represent me; but no, it's really not about me at all.

Magic: What about acting?

Blaine: I don't exclude anything. I haven't done anything with films, and I've been turning down offers. I don't want to do something unless I think it's worth a great cast and a great director. I'd like it to be a good piece of work. I don't think it matters what you're doing - I think when you're emotionally connecting with a person, truthfully - that is what matters.

Magic: Do you think that's the secret special of your life?

Blaine: I think it's the secret of everything I do.