#houdinieffect

A post wherein illusionist Michael Carbonaro shares his fascination with Harry Houdini.

When he was a boy, Michael Carbonaro wanted to be a make-up artist. He’d spend hours over at his local magic shop, rummaging through supplies and imagining ways to re-create illusions like those of his favorite special effects artists. After a time, Carbonaro worked his way out of the make-up section and over to the costumes, masks and tricks. He’d found his home.

Today Carbonaro stands among the acclaimed illusionists in the industry and his @trutv show The Carbonaro Effect celebrates the joy we feel when we stumble on magic in the most mundane of places – a convenient store, a bicycle shop, a dry cleaner. Unlike other hidden camera shows, The Carbonaro Effect doesn’t self-congratulate on duping unwitting subjects. Instead it applauds people’s fascination with the extraordinary and their desire to formulate answers to make sense of an incredible universe.  

“Just recently I put together this clay turtle piece by piece, and then it comes to life. I say, ‘Turtles actually breed in this ground, so the clay has turtle DNA in it.’ The woman I was talking with asked, ‘How does it move? Is it the heat?’ I was like, ‘Yes. It’s the condensed heat.’  She handed me that explanation. I was like, ‘You got it. You think it’s heat, let’s go with heat,’” Carbonaro says, a laugh in his words. Fan explanations like these delight Carbonaro because they tap into a child-like awe with the world.

Carbonaro’s subjects are his show’s stars, and it’s this willingness of his to share not only his own but everyone else’s take on wonder that makes The Carbonaro Effect so worth watching.

With our network premiere this Sunday of Harry Houdini’s once thought lost THE GRIM GAME (’19), Social Media Lady Noralil Ryan Fores called Carbonaro to ask about Houdini’s legacy in both the magic community and the larger culture.

TCM:  What is your attraction to Harry Houdini’s work?

Carbonaro: The symbolism of what Houdini does, the legend of what he does, far outweighs his acts. He truly creates an illusion in not only the act of magic or the escape he would do but also in the story and the legend surrounding it. He’s the first icon, the first superhero in a way.

TCM: Right! You’ve mentioned that illusionists like David Copperfield, for instance, have also been icons you’ve looked to.  What other illusionists have influenced your work, and how have they?

Carbonaro: My entryway into magic was through special effects…So I regard some of my biggest influences in magic as: Tom Savini, a make-up artist whose work I followed and studied as a kid. He did such movies as CREEPSHOW (’82), and his special effects were really like magic tricks. They had gimmicks. They had secrets. They created the illusion of something happening that wasn’t really happening. In particular, in this one effect that he created in a movie called MARTIN (’77), Martin has to take a razor blade and cut across somebody’s wrist. The illusion Savini created is absolutely perfect. It uses a real razor blade and a real person’s arm, and he has this amazing little simple secret to create this illusion of the slicing of the wrist. Steven Spielberg I also regard as a magician that I looked up to as a kid. He has this cinematic stacking the deck in the right way to create an illusion. When I think of the movie ET (’82), Spielberg gave us just enough of the story, just enough of the visuals, a few shadows, a couple of fingers poking out. In his movie JAWS (’75), the illusion of the shark is told through people’s reactions and things being pulled into the water, yet most of that illusion is created in your mind. That’s a real magician’s work.

Special effects and magic and filmmaking are right there, all together. Houdini was so interested in filmmaking, both making his own movies and being a movie star, and lots of actors have a magical background too – Steve Martin, Neil Patrick Harris, Orson Welles and Adrian Brody, of course, who’s in the new Houdini miniseries. Johnny Carson. All have ties to showmanship, magic, filmmaking and acting. It’s interesting how those all live under the umbrella of illusion, because an actor’s work is like illusion.

With performing magician icons, I was a Copperfield kid growing up. I loved watching David Copperfield. I really learned how to connect to an audience, and I really discovered my own personality from at first emulating David Copperfield. I would watch the guy jump up on stage, laugh with the audience, really be in the room, make jokes, be silly and pull people up into these wild, dramatic acts of magic. I thought, “If he can do that, I can do that.”

I started performing shows in junior high school, and by the time I was in high school, I had a full illusion show. I was cutting girls in half, making people levitate, stabbing light bulbs through people, bringing people up from the audience, hosting a full evening show of magic and illusion, discovering my own personality with improv. In a way – I’d actually never thought of this before right now – special effects got me into magic, and then magic got me into performing and acting. I went to NYU thinking that I just wanted to learn everything I needed to know about being the greatest magician of all time. I wanted to be the next David Copperfield. So I studied dance, movement, speech, voice, acting, anything I could to learn about the dramatic arts to make a spectacular show. I really found I loved comedy – doing acting scenes with comedians, doing stand-up comedy. This all bloomed, and it does still fall under this umbrella of illusion.

Penn & Teller are still huge influences for me. They have a hip intellect that’s totally different than anybody else’s in our art. They play with the audience. They give away secrets, but Penn & Teller are so cool that they’ll give away a secret about how a trick works and then literally fool you with that same secret 60 seconds later.  When you’re in the know of that as a magician, boy, it’s this double layer moment of, “Oh, the audience think they know how this works, and they turn around and don’t know how this other trick works. But, it’s the same trick!” It’s just a wild, layered, intellectual show.

Eugene Berger is a mentor of mine who I met at Mystery School. We actually have a mystery school, believe it or not, in our world. He’s a great performing magician. Barclay Shaw is a magician who I’ve always looked up to who combines puppetry and magic. These are lesser-known performers than are out in the mainstream, which brings me back to Houdini, if I could just keep on this rampage here. You’ve probably never heard of Barclay Shaw, right?  

TCM: No, I haven’t. Barclay Shaw is new for me.

Carbonaro: Barclay Shaw is this incredible magician, performed all over Las Vegas, was in tons of television shows in the 80s. The late Barclay Shaw; he’s passed away since. He combined incredible, innovative magic with acts of puppetry. He lived in this world of magic and illusion, and his show was spectacular, wonderful. Copperfield owns a lot of his stuff today. But, it’s funny that you don’t really know him.

But what Houdini did: Houdini is an escape artist. He never came back from the dead, which was one of his goals  - to prove that it's actually possible to do - when he got into his work with debunking spirits and fraudulent mediums. He made the pact with his wife that he'd try to come back, and so for 10 years they'd do the séance on the anniversary of his death every year on Halloween. They never actually made contact, but Bill Kalush, the author of The Secret Life of Houdini, talks about an experiment where they walked into a park asking people if they knew the name 'Harry Houdini,' and 100% of people did. Then 100% of people that they asked knew Harry Houdini by a photo – without him in chains or hanging over a building – just the image of Harry Houdini's face. A hundred percent of people they asked in this park knew who Houdini was. Can you name any other performers from the early 1900s? I can't. Houdini literally escaped death. He did come back from the dead. He never died. He solidified his image and his soul into our culture in a way that literally is an escape from death.

What’s so awesome about Houdini’s work – this is what I was trying to say in the beginning – is that it speaks to something so much larger than what his acts were. Houdini’s is a simple story and one that pre-dates the superhero. Here is a man who cannot be withheld. He can escape from anything. It’s like, “What? How can he do that?” That is so culturally huge on an elemental level. We think, “I’m stuck down in my job. I can’t get out of this rut in my life.” Well, here’s Houdini, an immigrant coming from Budapest, and can you imagine life for an immigrant in America then? The images and posters of Houdini’s being restrained by police officers – his is an escape from authority, an escape from the chains that bind us. It’s that symbolic, and that symbolism is the reason Houdini has such resonance. Before social media, Houdini got his name out there, and it’s still out there today...For Houdini to have created such a name and huge presence through word of mouth, it really was the creation of a legend. Gosh, who doesn’t want to be like that?

TCM: As illusionists, both you and Houdini I find fascinating, but I find you fascinating in different ways. For me, Houdini flaunts his performance whereas you seem to strive for authenticity and naturalness in your work. In a past interview you’ve said, “I’m doing everything I can to take the magician out of the equation of magic. I want people to believe in what they’re seeing in front of them.” I love that about the show, and I wonder why you’re attracted to that particular approach to illusion.

Carbonaro: As you asked that question, it folded over on itself. I agree with you. Houdini definitely came out and said, “I am a magician.” But, in an odd way, his escape acts created a hyper-reality; people really believed that this man had the ability to escape from anything. It was a bit of a superpower. So to say that Houdini flaunted magic in his performances is true, but very similar to what I’m doing with my show, Houdini created the possibility of experiencing the impossible and unbelievable. People would say, “I was there. He had those handcuffs on. There was no way out. He jumped off that bridge, and he got out of those handcuffs. I believe in this.” They would believe he wasn’t doing a trick; he was really getting out. So there’s a parallel between Houdini and me there.  

On the other side of this, I’m not taking credit in the way Houdini did by saying, “I have this superpower. I’m the one who did this.” I’m turning the model around to see how someone relates to the magic itself, not necessarily a magician. I want to see somebody staring at a hole in the universe, not necessarily looking at a super-human person who can create a hole in the universe. It’s wild to get to be the host, the Bugs Bunny, the trickster who leads audiences down that path, to experience with them a moment when they get to stare at a hole in the universe and wonder if it’s real.

TCM: What purpose does magic serve for our culture, and why is it that we so want to believe in magic and illusion?

Carbonaro: When you witness or experience a moment of magic, it is a moment where you’re faced with the question of whether the universe works the way you think it works. If you were shown for a second proof that the universe works differently than you thought, if that object can disappear, it slips through a time warp, or if that object can levitate, something is going on that I didn’t know about, and what a wonderful feeling that is. It lets us know that there’s so much more to the universe to discover.