The Secret Life of Houdini
Anybody who thinks magic is stupid is an idiot. Having said that, some magic is stupid. For every Amazing Randi, there’s a David Copperfield. For every Penn and Teller, there’s a Siegfried and Roy. Sadly, I think the magician’s days are slowly coming to an end. People are becoming less and less willing to suspend their disbelief on behalf of a great trick. Instead, they get pleasure out of declaring it ‘fake’ or trying to be the first to figure out how it’s done. It’s like a heckler at a stand up comedy show who can’t stand someone in the room getting more attention than him. Magic rant over.
Dark Horizons is reporting that Summit Entertainment has acquired the rights to William Kalush and Larry Sloman’s 2006 Houdini biography, “The Secret Life of Houdini”. I haven’t read the book, so automatically I’m thinking ‘what’s this SECRET life all about?’. It’s at this point that I actually read the source’s news story beyond the first paragraph and find an answer; the book supposes that Houdini acted as a British spy and “was asked to be an adviser to Czar Nicholas II’s court in prerevolutionary Russia.” Interesting. It also gets into his debunking of psychics and spiritualists; a topic I’m quite interested in. Oddly, the film is being described as an ‘action thriller’. God, I pray (figuratively) that Tom Hanks isn’t playing Houdini and Ron Howard isn’t directing. Fincher would be a good choice I guess.
Comments (6)
Heck yeah Fincher would be cool or Nolan. I enjoyed The Prestige but I wanted more gadgets and magic and this seems like it’d be an awesome movie to have it!
Posted by Ian on March 27th, 2009I love Houdini and magic in general. So anything with Houdini, I’m in for.
Posted by Drew on March 27th, 2009I’d like to see a movie that his friendship with Arthur Conan Doyle and their mutual interest in psychic mediumship which lead to their falling out. The movie could focus on the Margery Crandon case which did eventually turn them against each other. It could also cover HH’s invention of the taking off your finger trick. Which is related to their falling out and just a really funny story.
There is a film similar to that. I forget what it’s called but it’s about the girls who took photographs of faries in their back yard. Harvey Keitel played HH.
Posted by Rusty James on March 27th, 2009Ironically, the film was marketed as a magical tale about faries. but the movie itself played fair.
I remember seeing the 1978 BBC tele-play about the fairies incident. Looking at IMDB though I see that Houdini wasn’t a character in that version, only Conan Doyle. I haven’t seen “FairTale : A True Story”, but the combination of Harvey Keitel as Houdini and Peter O’Toole as Conan Doyle makes it sound good.
But I’m wondering if this new film is coming too close on the heals of “Death Defying Acts”. I know that film wasn’t hugely popular, but I thought it was pretty good.
Posted by David Munn on March 28th, 2009I would love for someone to adapt the book Nevermore by William Hjortsberg where Conan Doyle and Houdini team up to solve a serial killer recreating the murders from Edgar Allan Poe stories.
Posted by swarez on March 28th, 2009Magic is pretty stupid. I like the magicians that tell you how they do it in the end, it makes me respect them and I can enjoy the show. When they don’t, to me it’s like listening to Rockbusters without the answers. An entire show consisting of “I know something you don’t, and you can’t possibly figure it out! Pay me!”
Watching David Blaine put a card through glass is the equivalent of “That man likes sucking on iron”.
Posted by Henrik on March 28th, 2009Leave a Reply