Monday, November 14, 2005

A Great Time Waster

I just made a wrong turn at the Washington Post website and discovered Sudoku puzzles. If you're looking for a way to get nothing done for the next few hours, go try one. But don't come whining to me about how addictive they are.

• Posted at 10:08 PM · LINK

Honest Trickery

That Penn and Teller special last night reminded me of some ongoing debates within the magic community having to do with ethics and misrepresentation. When a magician tells you that no camera tricks were employed in the taping of his show, that's supposed to mean that no camera tricks were used. But that same magician also told you that he put the three of diamonds in his pocket and he didn't. A lot of magic involves lying and getting you to think the trunk is empty when, in fact, the trunk contains three geese and two showgirls. Some in the magic biz have argued and continue to argue over which misrepresentations constitute lying and which are just acceptable parts of a trick.

Any magician on TV will tell you that no camera effects are used and that what you're seeing at home is exactly what you'd see if you were there live. But of course, there's plenty of wiggle room in that claim. All these shows are edited, especially when they do the big tricks. It really took thirty minutes to "vanish" the jumbo jet or the Empire State Building or whatever they made disappear. It may even have required two or three takes. All this is chopped down to five minutes and you are, in one sense, seeing just what you'd see if you were there. You just aren't seeing all of it because that would make the trick seem less spectacular and maybe even boring.

Is that a camera trick? Maybe.

And while you may be seeing what you'd see if you were there, you're also seeing what you'd see if your attention was as rigidly controlled as the camera's lens is on what they want you to see. If you were there and you looked slightly to the left or right, you'd see exactly how the trick was done. What makes it work is that you can't.

Another camera trick? You might say that.

Magicians, live and on TV, will often tell you that no confederates or audience "plants" are employed and sometimes, that's true. But sometimes, it's not. It's a running joke among magicians to wonder aloud how certain magicians can make any money when so much of their audience is on their payroll. Is it lying to bring up someone out of the audience and pretend they're not in on the trick when in fact, they are? Or is it like saying the trunk has no secret doors when it actually does? These are issues that magicians debate. Or should debate.

Throughout most of their special, Penn and Teller got around most questions of honesty by simply showing you how they did everything. Years ago, when a rogue magico was exposing tricks in a series of Fox TV specials, a lot of magicians cursed his name and/or reassured one another that it didn't matter; that the magic of magic was in the performance, not in the secret. With some presentations, it's both but in most cases, it doesn't ruin a trick because you know about the trap door. Heck, with some tricks, you can't fully appreciate how good the magician is or how much skill it takes to do what he's doing unless you know what he's really doing. It sure never ruined my enjoyment of a ventriloquist to be well aware that the dummy's voice was coming from the guy next to him with the quivering lips and forced smile. Penn and Teller are clever enough to do a two-hour magic show, expose all the tricks and still be entertaining.

And then at the end of their special, they pulled a super-reverse gag on the audience and on all of magic. If you didn't see it, let me summarize: The big finale, touted in ads and all through the special, was that they would make a full-size submarine disappear. Which they did. It was on the bottom of a lagoon, surrounded by scuba divers with underwater video cameras...and I guess the implication was that you at home were seeing what you'd see if you were one of those divers.

Penn kept saying over and over, "We're going to tell you how we did it" and just before they showed it, he admonished us that if we wanted to preserve the wonderment, we should close our eyes and look away. I'm guessing less than 1% of the viewership opted not to peek. If you looked, what you saw was this not-too-convincing CGI trick shot of three helicopters flying the submarine away on cables.

Much of America said, "Ah, of course, that's how it was done" but of course, that's not how it was done. (There are a couple ways they could have done it. I'm guessing they used the same method Copperfield used to vanish that airplane in one of his first specials.) Few people probably noticed the special effects footage didn't look all that real. Few people probably noticed that Penn initially described the sub as weighing eight tons and that he later added a syllable and it turned into eighty tons, which may have been a deliberate hint for the terribly-observant. Even the lesser weight would be quite a strain (and balancing act) for three helicopters, to say nothing of the fact that if the idea was just to raise the submarine vertically, it could have done that under its own power. Nothing in the special said that those divers couldn't or didn't look up. Come to think of it, nothing in the special even claimed that none of the divers were confederates who were in on the gag.

It was a great trick but it wasn't the one most viewers thought they were seeing. By showing us how all the earlier tricks were done, Penn and Teller had done what every good confidence man does: Gain our trust. Then once they had that, they tricked the home audience so well, most of it didn't even know it had been tricked.

You see? Even when you think you know how the trick is done, you too can be fooled.

• Posted at 1:49 PM · LINK

Samurai DVD Collector

Always fun to wake up in the morning and find out what you got wrong. An avalanche of mail this A.M. (more letters even than want to sell me Viagra) inform me that the special on the first five seasons of Saturday Night Live did come out on DVD. I apparently missed it because I checked on a DVD site by searching for the full name of the show and it was listed only as SNL: The First Five Years. It appears to contain about an hour of material that wasn't on the original telecast so I think I'll order one and take a peek. If you'd like to order one too, here's an Amazon link.

• Posted at 7:31 AM · LINK

Live From You-Know-Where...

Some might call it sacrilegious but I've long thought that the classic "first five years" of Saturday Night Live have been praised way beyond their worth. They were good — especially seasons 2 through 4 — but don't quite live up to some of the hype, not that anything could. Truth to tell, I thought the years when the show was dominated by Phil Hartman and Dana Carvey were just as fine, if not better. So I found it interesting that near the close of last evening's special — Saturday Night Live in the 80's: Lost and Found — Lorne Michaels, who presided over both versions, came close to saying the same thing. It was almost like he was trying to say it without saying it, if you follow me.

Actually, the two-hour overview NBC aired Sunday evening was unsatisfying because it tried to cover so much. That meant only brief fragments of sketches and frustratingly short interviews with cast and crew members. So much went unsaid about the intervening years and little was included that hasn't been covered in past histories of the show.

It would have been nice to hear more than the standard line about how the show plunged to embarrassing lows when Jean Doumanian took over from Michaels as producer in 1980. I don't know Ms. Doumanian and can't defend the show she put on the air...but it always seemed to me like NBC stuck an unqualified person in an impossible job and then she somehow got all the blame for the resulting failure. No one could have delivered what they were expecting of her, which was a show that would debut, with a very short lead time, with something approximating the magic that everyone imagined the first regime had displayed. Plus, at the same time, she had to discover "The Next Chevy," "The Next Gilda" and other stars with spin-off potential. Others might have done a better job but I doubt anyone could have succeeded. Still, it's a compelling tale to note how others built back after that catastrophe.

Among other things missing from the two-hour special was any mention of the many variety acts and stand-ups that appeared on the show. Come to think of it, some pretty impressive hosts went unmentioned and I don't recall any reference to the show's political humor which got rather potent in some of those years. I seem to recall that when a similar special on the first five years aired some time ago, it was reported that there would be a DVD release of an expanded version letting many of the sketches and "talking heads" run longer. As far as I know, no such DVD ever materialized but it should have. And they really should do a longer version of the cursory overview that ran last night. There's a lot more of that story.

• Posted at 1:01 AM · LINK

November 15, 2005 • Current • November 13, 2005