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Month: October 2016

Exclusive Interview with Professional Magician & Magic Theater Owner Steve Spill..

Exclusive Interview with Professional Magician & Magic Theater Owner Steve Spill..

What’s life like for a man who makes his living fooling people? I decided to find out, in this interview with professional magician and magic theater owner Steve Spill.

Steve Spill has spent his entire life performing magic, producing magic shows around the globe in places such as the French Riviera’s Cannes Film Festival, Universal Studios Hollywood, Harrah’s Tahoe, and Toronto’s Massey Hall.

Among the projects on which Spill has provided expertise are the CBS TV special “The World Greatest Magicians,” and the FX TV series “Penn & Teller’s Sin City Spectacular.”

Spill grew up at the Magic Castle, a private club for magicians in Hollywood where his father, Sandy Spillman, was a manager in the 1960’s and the young aspiring magician was tutored by industry icons such as Dai Vernon, Charlie Miller and Francis Carlyle. Read more….

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-c-miller/exclusive-interview-with-_44_b_12614606.html

What’s the Trick to Fooling Penn & Teller?..  Part 3 of  3

What’s the Trick to Fooling Penn & Teller?..  Part 3 of  3

By Paul Gertner.. It was almost time to see whether my new ending to UnShuffled would be successful in fooling Penn and Teller. On Sunday, April 10th, my wife Kathryn and I flew to Las Vegas for the taping of Penn & Teller Fool Us.  I felt good about my routine and was hopeful that the surprise ending I had planned just might do the trick.  A car from the show picked us up at the airport, and as I glanced at the driver’s schedule sheet, it quickly became evident that this was a complex operation.  The car service schedule was filled with names of magicians, many names I knew and some I did not, who were arriving for the show. One exciting bonus of the Fool Us experience was finding out that I would get to see my friend, gambling expert, Richard Turner.  Richard and I had just spent the past July and August in China, where we bonded over many decks of Bee Playing Cards during the seven-week theater tour. Read more at:   http://gertner.com/whats-trick-fooling-penn-teller-part-three/

(Special thanks to Mel Klentz’s  “Magician’s Life Web Notes” for first pointing us to this story…)

What’s the Trick to Fooling Penn & Teller?: Part Two..

What’s the Trick to Fooling Penn & Teller?: Part Two..

By Paul Gertner.. 

So… as I mentioned in my last blog post “What’s the Trick to Fooling Penn & Teller?  Part One,” I was booked to appear on Penn & Teller:  Fool Us on the CW Network to perform my trick Unshuffled.  The problem was that Penn and Teller already knew the secret to how the trick works.  How was I going to go about fooling Penn and Teller? There was no way I was going to fool them with a trick they already knew… unless I threw in an unexpected twist.  That became the plan.

I rehearsed the routine about 50 times and then began to video tape each performance.  Once I had a smooth looking performance, I posted it on a private YouTube Channel and sent the video link to about 10 friends. This included some of the top sleight-of-hand magicians in the country.  My request to them was that they view the video once and only once then tell me if it fooled them. Read more at:  http://gertner.com/whats-trick-fooling-penn-teller-part-two/

What’s the Trick to Fooling Penn & Teller?   Part One…

What’s the Trick to Fooling Penn & Teller?   Part One…

By Paul Gertner…  One of the hottest shows this summer has been Penn & Teller: Fool US, which is now in its third season on the CW Network. I had the pleasure of appearing on the show this season. I was assigned the task of fooling Penn & Teller…with a trick they already knew.

If you have not had a chance to view my recent appearance on Fool Us, you can go to my YouTube page and click on the Penn & Teller Video Link to watch that performance video before reading any further. If you do, this Blog Post will make a lot more sense. You can also link to the video from my website.

Back in February I was contacted by Lee Terbosic an excellent magician and good friend from Pittsburgh who said he had an opportunity to appear on the TV show Penn & Teller Fool Us. But the tricky part (pun intended) was that they wanted him to perform my routine Unshuffled and he was contacting me to get my permission to perform that routine on the show. (As a side note to magicians reading this: That was a very professional thing to do. Unshuffled is a published routine and Lee was under no obligation to do that, but he’s a pro.)

I have to admit, I was a bit surprised that Fool Us wanted someone else to do my trick because to me that show is all about original inventions… or at least magicians adding their own unique presentation to a trick and seeing if their performance was clever enough to fool the Bad Boys of Magic: Penn & Teller. Read more at: http://gertner.com/fooling-penn-teller/