Dec 2006 - Dennis' Deliberations

The Florida Magic Association Convention, faced with declining attendance and economic hardship, tossed in the towel a while back and decided to combine activities with another magic convention event. This year it was Harry and Irv's "Daytona Festival of Magic" held on the first weekend of November. I have been to the last three of the independent Daytona festivals through the generosity of our former president, Richard Hewitt. Richard makes it an annual event we attend together and he and his wife Phyllis graciously let me spend Friday night in Richard's magic room so I didn't have to drive all the way back to Orlando . I fell asleep in Deland watching the moonlight shine in the window and onto his Town House Head Chopper next to my guest bed!

Let me preface my remarks on the Daytona Festival by saying that Harry and Irv really try to make this convention an enjoyable one for magic aficionados. The ultimate results of the Festival have been a successful and enjoyable weekend. Their dealer markets have adequate displays in which to spend money and most of the lectures are informative and fun. The artistic success with the stage shows has been up and down from year to year. The technical aspects of the stage shows are top-notch ,in spite of sound system issues that I understand were not the fault of our crew. The show tech is managed by our own experts in Ring 170, Art Thomas and Sue , James Songster, Joe Vechiarelli and their families and other ring members. I always have a good time. This year spent an hour or two talking with Steve Hart. Chuck Smith, Dan Stapleton and many of us old guys found time to sit around and fellowship.

The Friday Night acts on the cabaret shows are typically only a little better than a yearly banquet show by a large Ring. Remember that not a lot of great entertainment is expected on Friday Night . Of all the shows I have seen, either the comedian or ventriloquist got the best response. One unforeseen problem with this year's slate of shows was that four major acts ( Johnny and Pam Thompson, The Pendragons, Scott Humston and Ron Conley) were forced to cancel and fill-in acts substituted.

This year ,comedy magician John Ferrantino stole the Friday Night show. Unfortunately he was the opening act. The show closed with a weaker , but adequate, standard illusion act,Don Townsend and Company. Combined with the wrong order for the acts was Dave Risley,a less than vibrant MC . Joe Young did a rather dated "Rubics Cube" act with a lot of clever moves. Sammy Smith is a solid performer within any children's show venue, which is not really what the Friday Night show crowd wants. Erick Olsen was well received and opened with a self levitation. His "Instant Elvis" using an audience assistant ( in this case, Dan Stapleton) lip syncing to "Burnin' Love" was a crowd pleaser. Determining the show order of performance is a hit or miss proposition. The producers take an educated guess on the basis of sound checks and rehearsal appearances. With so many major changes in the acts this year due to illness and accidents, we were lucky the show went as well as it did.

Much more in the way of great magic is expected on the Saturday Night show, but keep in mind that it is an "open to the public" show and not for magicians only.
Last year's Saturday Night show with Max Maven and James Brandon was a vast improvement over the year before when the show was entirely the bizarre minimalism of Jeff McBride's full-evening show . Two years ago Kohl and Company brought down the house in the Saturday night show.

This year's Saturday Night show was a mixed bag with a weak first half and a strong second half.

Let me digress: The biggest disappointment of the convention for me was Franz Harary. It began with Franz's disgraceful and dishonest Friday Night lecture. I left after 20 minutes.

Franz began the lecture by saying that he does not do lectures and did not have a lecture prepared. He then said that he would do something better and is almost never done.He would take questions on how he accomplishes his feats and answer them! "Everything is on the table! There will be no secrets!". A wave of excitement swept over the crowd of magicians. He said he would begin by showing his 12 minute promotional video and then bring up the lights and explain anything that anyone wanted to know.

The lights dimmed and his highly produced promotional portfolio splashed across the screen. He moved mountains, made space shuttles vanish, made helicopters appear and even floated a woman across a swimming pool and another assistant up the side of a skyscraper.

The video ended and the lights came on and the cruel farce by Harary began. It was painfully obvious within 3 minutes that he never intended to specifically reveal anything! A duped magician raised his hand and asked, "How did you make the girl float across the swimming pool?" (To the best of my recollections) Franz responded with , "Well, we first wanted to float her over Waikiki Beach and over the Pacific but we had trouble getting permission from the Hawaiian authorities. We finally settled on the hotel swimming pool. The girl floating is now my wife and the tape was done 2 days before our wedding. At one point she dipped a bit and got her dress wet and we almost didn't get married. We had to get up at 5 in the morning to do the shoot and all the people around the pool were my friends. It was a great effect! Now, do we have another question?"....

He continued on with an obfuscation of another question by a magician about the Appearing Helicopter by retreating into talking about the television screen being two dimensional and being able to move the camera and "force perspective camera shots" and then he said, ""Is there another question?".

This was far more than I could handle in terms of honesty ,so I walked out.

I can not understand why Harary didn't just come clean at the beginning and say, "While I can't give you exact specifics about what I do, I will give you some broad and generalized principles on doing the kind of effects that I do". Instead he came off as an arrogant and pompous politician who steadfastly refused to be honest with his supporters. No one really wanted to know the gauge and tensile strength of the wires he (more than likely) used to suspend the girl over the pool or the brand name of the cherry picker Hi-Lift he probably used (out of the camera frame) to suspend her from above . No one was asking the shape of the lift she was laying on or how the wires were connected. Oh my Gosh! I just gave you far more specific information here than he ever did at the lecture!

Some of Franz's "vanishes" seem to me to involve painted partial flats that are not detectable due to the lack of depth in a TV screen. He uses them the way the old "glass shot" was used in Hollywood. In those days the camera shot through a large sheet of plate glass and parts of the frame were painted with realistic details while other parts remained clear glass so you could see the actors in the smaller part of the frame. In one stunt on the "Masters of Illusion" PAX-TV series, Franz made a plane appear on the runway. He had a large framework made of lighting trusses. A curtain dropped down to cover the frame for a fraction of a second and then it dropped away to reveal the plane. I believe he used a clever partial flat to simulate the empty runway. The plane was behind it all the time. The flat's edge ended where a distant horizon was at the far end of the runway. What was deceptive was that a pickup truck was traveling along the edge of the horizon! No one was the wiser that they were looking a flat painting or computer generated photo image on the flat. This is stuff that Franz led us to believe he would reveal, so I am doing it for him.

Another technique is to rotate the viewer's platform (that also contains the camera) into a matching adjacent vacant area directly on the side , thus it appears the object has vanished. This was the Copperfield method on the Statue of Liberty. The big joke of his "Space Shuttle Vanish" was that the clouds changed! This was because what you saw was not the same real cloud pattern as that around the Shuttle. Man, I am really telling you folks what you should heard at his lecture if he had been completely true to his opening statement!
Harary's act on the Saturday night show was less than worthy of someone with his fame. Franz used a large upstage screen to project his promotional videos.
When he came on stage he was dressed like a street bum in tennis shoes and baggy faded pants. This was not the sharp suit and manicured image we saw on his excellent "Master's of Illusion" Pax TV series. Do not misunderstand me, when he wants to, he is a class act. He deserves our admiration for all the things he has done. My complaint is that we deserve to have been treated better by him.

He began this stage show with his original "Walking through a woman." staged with female dancers doing outdated 80s choreography. The name of the illusion is far more spectacular than the actual effect even though it uses an extremely clever and simple method. His act included a Paul Osborne Palanquin. It is a girl production cabinet that looked identical to one that local Ring member and illusionist Rex Todd Alexandre built and owns. Did he borrow Rex's? Then there was a horribly long and nonsensical bit with a woman and a snake in a Duck Bucket that was probably also a borrowed prop. There was something with a Peanut Brittle Snake can. Did he borrow that from Harry and Irv?

Yes! he must have done another major feature of his Franz Harary stadium show: 5 minutes with a little boy and a mouthcoil!
Finally, he did the second of his original illusions, "Culture Clash" where he locks down two girls and rotates them so that each change bottoms. That was it.

Never has so little been done for so many with so few actual illusions, to borrow a phrase from Winston Churchill. Out of 35 minutes of actual time he took, he was backstage a significant portion of the time while we, in the audience, watched his promotional videos.

Harry and Irv probably try to spare all expenses in bringing in their acts. This helps to keep the Festival on a profit-making basis for them. We can't criticize them for that.
Sometimes the seemingly threadbare talent budget shows around the edges and Harary probably was an example. From my point of view as a consumer, I paid to see Franz Harary's Show and not a pale cobbled-together , scaled down version of him using mostly borrowed props and killing time. I could have lived with the Saturday Night show, but his Friday Night joke-of-a-lecture cemented my negative opinion of his role in this year's event. Even Friday night we did not get to see and hear the honest and real Franz. Saturday we didn't see the real Franz either.

I have a hard time believing it was intentional on the part of Harry and Irv and I hope that they never repeat this type of insult to the intelligence of their paying attendees.

I was drafted on Friday night to judge the talent contests the next morning. I judged both the junior and senior division. This must have been the year for "Snowstorms" and "Flash Parasols". Japanese acts took the major prizes in the adult division.

The Saturday night show again featured the Patriotic opening. The first year the Daytona Festival was held was 2001 and the weekend following September 11th. Harry and Irv have made this fact a recurring theme in every Saturday night show opening. After the awards, the show opened with the winner of the previous day's Adult talent Contest. This year it was the shapely Mika Hazuki with a well developed manipulation act.

Terry Seabrooke added some comedy bits as the evening's MC. He is clearly a very talented and funny man but the ancient Roman writer Ovid's advice, "Tempus edax rerum" ("Time, the devourer of all things") is apparent. He may go the way of George Burns and John Calvert in that their talent became less of a factor than their longevity. I know that if I survive to a very old age , I have no desire to be a geriatric freak show.

The second act of Saturday night's show opened with Fukai. Call him a doveless Shimada on steroids. Parasols of every shape and size appear. Confetti flies. His act is one display after another. It is visually spectacular and got a standing ovation from the largely magic crowd. Fielding West followed and closed the show with a comedy routine and lots of subtitle mystery.

West was also well received but possibly not quite as well as Fukai. Knowing magicians, I believe it is because they are convinced that they can buy all the props that Fukai uses and duplicate his act! (Indeed, the props in the contests the day before reflected this) It takes real talent and timing to come anywhere close to Fielding West's act. Plus, it takes his personality. So they laughed and applauded his talent. With Fukai, they applauded his prop demo.

I headed back home and was unable to attend the Sunday activities due to a booking . I look forward to the 2007 Festival.

Dennis Phillips