wizard wars – Magic Roadshow

TechnologyTell Interview: ‘Wizard Wars’ co-creator Rick Lax makes SyFy ratings magic..

September 18, 2014 Rick Carruth

By Brian Allen for Technology Tell

SyFy’s new hit competition Wizard Wars is like Chopped for magicians. Participants are given items to create an illusion with, then have their work judged by a panel including magic icons Penn and Teller.

Like many great ideas, the concept for SyFy competition Wizard Wars had humble beginnings. Vegas-based magician Rick Lax was having some fun with friends at a restaurant.

“After shows, a group of five or six magicians would go get some cheeseburgers and bring an item we wanted to do a trick with,” Lax said. “We’d just pass it around the table. Sometimes a really good trick would come out of it, sometimes we’d get nothing. But it was always really fun to do and really fun to watch.”

September 11, 2014 Rick Carruth

By Dan Solomon for Fast Company..

If you think about it for more than a few minutes, the fact that magic is still a popular form of entertainment in 2014 is kind of surprising. When the first magic theater opened in Paris in 1845, people had few opportunities to see the impossible. Right now, without leaving your chair, you can watch a lifelike giant lizard stomp the hell out of San Francisco; you can control your favorite football players on a photorealistic gridiron; you can send a message around the world in seconds flat. With all of these things in mind, the idea that magic is still relevant to people seems hard to imagine.

But magic is relevant. Top magicians still sell out theaters, Hollywood scores regular blockbusters with films about magicians, and–as evinced by shows like SyFy’s Wizard Wars and the CW’s Penn & Teller: Fool Us–the reality of an illusion crafted by sleight of hand and misdirection can catch our eyes even when that same screen could also be used to show big-time special effects.

No one knows magic–and how it stays relevant–like Penn Jillette, and he can trace the evolution of the form in recent years from David Copperfield (“he had a debonair quality that magicians jumped on”) to Doug Henning (“he created the kind of casual hippie magician”) to current stars like David Blaine and Criss Angel…

August 29, 2014 Rick Carruth

Lee DeVito for Detroit’s Metro Times..

Rick Lax used to practice magic tricks at Caribou Coffee as part of Royal Oak’s little street performance scene. He moved to Las Vegas in what was supposed to be a short stint to work on a book about magic, but his stay has since extended to seven years, in which he successfully developed and pitched a new SyFy show called Wizard Wars, a reality TV competitionthat premiered last week.

“You can peek behind the curtain without fully lifting the curtain away. It’s a peek,” Lax tells us by phone. “Each episode, you will be let in on the creative process, but also in each episode, you will walk away fooled. You’re going to get a hint of the magician’s process, and that’s real — you’re going to learn the terms, and see the way the magicians think — but we’re never going to give so much away that you know 100 percent how the trick is done in the end.” Lax describes the show as like “Iron Chef for magicians,” with Penn and Teller serving as the show’s judges.

http://www.metrotimes.com/Blogs/archives/2014/08/27/watch-wizard-wars-co-creator-and-detroit-area-native-rick-lax-perform-13-magic-tricks

Behind the Scenes of a Reality Show Where Magicians Fight for Fame

August 24, 2014 Rick Carruth

By Angela Watercutter for WIRED

We know you desperately want to see what happens behind the scenes of your favorite magic competition show. OK, fine, Wizard Wars probably is the only magic competition show, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be your fave, and it’s always fun to see television, um, magic in action.

The video comes from show creator Rick Lax, who shot the footage during the making of Wizard Wars. The program, basically a reality show where magicians face off in something akin to Iron Chef (the original Japanese version, not that sorry Americanized version) but with magicians, started as an internet video made by Lax and some fellow Las Vegas wizards. After the clip made the rounds online (and possibly at the suggestion of WIRED) Syfy turned it into a series judged by Penn & Teller. “Walking around the set was surreal. Such an upgrade from my living room,” Lax says, referring to the set for his video clip…

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