In just one hour Larry and Blake attempted to come up with a new magic trick. The following is an excerpt from their conversation, which took place at MAGIC Live in Las Vegas, and a description of one of their ideas.
Blake Vogt So this is the first ever live edition of Inventing Magic, and I’m so excited. My guest is Larry Fong, and for those of you that don’t know, Larry is an amazing cinematographer and magician. And if you don’t know him you certainly know his work from shows like Lost, and films like 300.
Normally I’m just in my office, but I grabbed a lot of stuff today. Danny Garcia and I were playing blackjack the other night, and I got a 50-cent piece from the blackjack table. I’ve got sugar packets from the hotel room, Kleenex, batteries, scissors, an EpiPen, and magnets… everything we need.
The last time we jammed I was walking through an airport and I saw Larry, so I chased him down and we sat in an empty terminal for a couple hours doing magic together. What is your favorite setting to perform magic?
Larry Fong I don’t really perform in front of crowds or do things that feel like a set… I like to improvise a bit, with normal objects. Obviously I do cards and things, but I like it when it feels spontaneous.
BV Do you get asked a lot like to perform on set?
LF I do, but time is money on a film set, so I can’t sit in the corner doing card tricks when working time is worth a million dollars a day. But if we are waiting for something else that can be a good time to do magic.
I’ve created some effects that are specific to filmmaking, like a card-to-impossible location where it ends up in the camera. You also get craft service on a film, so you can waste all the food and sodas you want.
BV I get stuck on cruise ships a lot of the time, so I play around a lot with ideas that use stuff that you find in hotel rooms.
LF To check, is the EpiPen real?
BV It’s real… I have tons of allergies and they’re all real: shrimp, shellfish, nuts… all of the nuts. I talk about them in some of my tricks. I remember I was hanging with Dan White one time and he suggested I do a tossed-out deck with allergies. And that has become one of my favorite tricks.
LF Do you know the Phil deck? I’ve been doing that a lot lately, and people think it’s funny. For anyone who doesn’t know, you ask someone to think of a card, and say that you will tell them its name. You then say it is called “Phil.” They don’t get it, and you say it was a joke. Yuck, yuck, yuck. Then you get a real pack of cards out and spread through them to find the card they named. You explain that all the cards have different names on the back, and show they are all different. Then when they look at their card it has the name Phil on the back.
Well, you can get them with blank backs, rather than printed names. That means you can put any name on the back
BV Are there any non-gimmicked versions of The Phil deck? That’d be really cool, because the trick you described is so great, but the one downside is that you have to have the gimmick deck on you.
Let’s say the Seven of Diamonds says Phil on the back. Bad example of a random name. You could say to somebody, “When I ask you to name a card, say Seven of Diamonds.” Then you just write Phil on the back of the Seven of Diamonds. Now you could do the trick with a regular deck. And if you found out their name ahead of time then you could do it with their name.
LF Or you could have a friend who is helping you and, while you are performing, they put the name on the card and get it to you somehow.
BV I will write that down. We are at 42 minutes, which is not too bad, and we already have an idea. I’ll tell you the secret behind the podcast. I tell people we are going to invent magic in one hour. But you can’t invent a trick in an hour. Sometimes it happens in 30 seconds, sometimes it happens over the course of 10 or 15 years. The secret goal of this is just to show people how much fun it is to jam with other people.
Jumping back a little bit, what kind of things do you have at craft services you could do magic with?
LF Twizzlers. I feel you can always do two in the hand, one in the pocket. And there are those tricks you read about when you’re a kid that you never really do. Like the thing with a needle that means that when you peel a banana it is already sliced.
BV I really love that, when it looks impromptu. I feel like sugar packets are always there and stir sticks. You can always vanish and then produce the sugar, or something, with a thumb tip.
