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Month: March 2015

A Movie on the Life of the Amazing Randi, a Magician, Escape Artist and Skeptic

A Movie on the Life of the Amazing Randi, a Magician, Escape Artist and Skeptic

    A Movie on the Life of the Amazing Randi, a Magician, Escape Artist and Skeptic – Los Angeles | Los Angeles News and Events | LA Weekly   

     “The public really doesn’t listen when they’re being told straightforward facts,” says the Amazing Randi. The magician, escape artist and tiny lion of principled skepticism, now north of 80, leans forward in a black chair, all knees and elbows and Old Testament beard. If it weren’t for that sharpie’s suit he’s wearing, the kind that looks like it has face cards slipped between its every seam, he could be some wise-wizard marionette rigged up by the Henson Workshop.  

     Randi is dismayed, thinking of frauds he’s exposed, truths he’s fought for, and the fact that America still hasn’t run its psychics and UFO abductees and flim-flam preachers out of the country on a rail. “They would rather accept what some charismatic character tells them than really think about what the truth might be,” Randi says. “They’d rather have the romance and the lies.”

http://www.laweekly.com/film/a-movie-on-the-life-of-the-amazing-randi-a-magician-escape-artist-and-skeptic-5422399

Las Vegas pickpocket steals the show in ‘Focus’

Las Vegas pickpocket steals the show in ‘Focus’

By CHRISTOPHER LAWRENCE
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

It sounds like someone who’d be lurking in the background of one of those Joel Schumacher “Batman” movies. You know, next to the artistic muggers and the flamboyant burglars.

But Las Vegan Apollo Robbins has carved out a niche in the magic world thanks to his almost supernatural ability to take something off or place something on practically anyone. He estimates he’s picked more than 250,000 pockets — “FBI, U.S. Marshals, I’ve stolen from everybody pretty much I can think of,” he says — in the name of entertainment. And those skills, as well as his knack for social engineering and applied deception, not to mention his near encyclopedic knowledge of cons, will be on display starting Friday in the new Will Smith movie, “Focus.”

“Overall, we created maybe 40 bits, I’d say, for all the actors throughout the film,” Robbins says on the phone from England while promoting the movie.

“We” includes his wife and partner in crime, fellow deceptionist Ava Do. Robbins, 40, credits her interest and eventual degree in psychobiology with expanding his horizons beyond traditional pickpocketing, something he picked up while growing up in Missouri with two half-brothers who weren’t shy about stealing.  Read more…

http://www.reviewjournal.com/columns-blogs/christopher-lawrence/las-vegas-pickpocket-steals-show-focus

David Copperfield Agrees to $500,000 Settlement in Employee Lawsuit

David Copperfield Agrees to $500,000 Settlement in Employee Lawsuit

Looks like David Copperfield is ready to make a big chunk of money disappear from his bank account.

The famous magician is looking to settle a lawsuit brought against him by former and current employees of his show at the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, according to court papers obtained by TheWrap.

A U.S. district court judge in Nevada has approved a motion for preliminary approval of settlement, which would find Copperfield and the other defendants shelling out $552,282.74.

The lawsuit was filed in February 2014 by a group of employees from his Vegas magic show claiming that they were stiffed out of overtime pay that was due to them.

The suit accused Copperfield of “consciously implement[ing] a system of coercion and deception aimed at denying employees their rights to overtime pay.”  Read more…..

http://www.thewrap.com/david-copperfield-agrees-to-500000-settlement-in-employee-lawsuit/