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There is a century-old magic trick that Jim Steinmeyer finds particularly fascinating. It involves a burglar, a safe, and mind-reading, and it unfolds like this: A group of random audience members file on stage and each place a personal possession inside a sturdy, commercial-model safe, out of view of the magician, Charles Morritt. The safe is locked before anyone looks inside, and after a beat, a burglar appears. The lock-picking bandit looks at the closed safe with a pair of field glasses and disappears. Moments later, a telegram arrives for Morritt. It\u2019s from the master thief. It says, in essence, \u201cI\u2019ve decided not to crack that safe and steal the contents\u2014it\u2019s not worth my time. But here\u2019s a list of everything inside.\u201d When the safe is opened, the list matches up, item for item.
I\u2019m sitting in Steinmeyer\u2019s studio in Burbank, California. By almost any estimation, Steinmeyer is the greatest creator of illusions in the history of magic and theater, but describing Morritt\u2019s idiosyncratic piece of stagecraft still animates and energizes him. He\u2019s not even sure what to call the act. It\u2019s a mind-reading trick, but instead of the magician playing the part of the clairvoyant, it\u2019s the third-party burglar. \u201cSomething bigger is happening,\u201d Steinmeyer says. Morritt had come up with a new twist on a familiar routine: Magician presses his fingers to his temples, closes his eyes, and sees the un-seeable.
Steinmeyer uses the mind-reading trick as a launchpad into a disquisition on how magic tricks evolve, which is fascinating, but it temporarily walls me off from a question I\u2019m eager to ask about the trick, or, really, any trick: How does it work? That\u2019s the point of my visit\u2014I\u2019m here to understand what Steinmeyer does and how he does it. I\u2019d approached Steinmeyer with this intent a few weeks earlier. He\u2019d been polite, but wary. Given the nature of his business, he said, he had to be proprietary about sharing the way magic is accomplished. \u201cYou know, in terms of explaining how things work,\u201d he told me, \u201cI can\u2019t get into too much of that.\u201d But after some back and forth, he had agreed to let me inside his world under an ill-defined agreement to stick to the basic principles of building magic tricks. Of course, I\u2019m still hoping he\u2019ll decide to lift the lid on his more guarded secrets, and I\u2019m alive to the fact that I\u2019m sitting in the room where much of his classified material is hiding in plain sight.
My eyes flick across Steinmeyer\u2019s studio, his array of artifacts and scale models. The space is shrine to the history and craft of stage magic. Here is a miniature version of the cabinet used in the Disappearing Donkey illusion, a once-lost trick that Steinmeyer\u2014after years of reconstruction via dusty tomes and informed intuition\u2014unveiled to a roomful of confounded performers (\u201cMagicians are actually pretty easy to fool,\u201d he says). There are two walls of reference materials: books about magic, of course, but also books about furniture, graphic design, screenplays, and antique apparatus. Resting along an opposite wall is a pair of tables used in the iconic sawing-the-assistant-in-half illusion, as well as a locked chest for mind-reading tricks, a cylindrical \u201cphantom tube\u201d used for optical illusions, and a foam-core model of the magic table he created for Disney\u2019s latest stage rendition of Mary Poppins. This clever prop allows the British nanny to pull gigantic items from her carpetbag, including a hat rack and full-length mirror.
But what Steinmeyer intends to unpack for me is uncertain. He\u2019s not going to let me flip over his mirrors or rifle through his drawers, and when I give him a straight-line question, he responds with misdirection\u2014labyrinthine tangents and looping alternate pathways. Only when Steinmeyer finishes speaking do I realize we\u2019ve barely moved from my starting point. His story about the burglar and the safe is as much about what he doesn\u2019t say as what he does. My brain fizzes with unsated curiosity.
Secrecy is the coin of the realm here, and Steinmeyer is an open secret himself: Most people who see magic shows assume the performers invent their own tricks, but it\u2019s illusion designers like Steinmeyer who conjure most of the magic offstage. The New York Times, in fact, labeled Steinmeyer theater\u2019s \u201ccelebrated invisible man.\u201d
But even given Steinmeyer\u2019s relative anonymity compared with the Cooperfields and Blaines of the world, magic as a whole exists now in the age of YouTube. Type any trick into a search bar and you can view explainers and deconstructions of its mysteries in seconds\u2014endless variations on invisible wires, trap doors, and rigged boxes. You can find books that lay out the mechanics of most illusions in sonorous detail, down to diagrams with measurements. Some of these tell-alls have existed for generations. Some of the more recent ones Steinmeyer wrote himself.
So as one of history\u2019s greatest conjurers of magic continues to explain and not explain the safe trick, I find myself wondering: If anyone can dig up the secrets behind many of Steinmeyer\u2019s tricks, why is he so intent on hiding them?
He\u2019s a large man, around six feet tall, sturdily built. Though his thinning hair and beard have gone gray, at 61 Steinmeyer retains a striking youthfulness that manifests in an easy grin, a cheerful chattiness, and eyes that seem lit from behind. He wears a khaki vest over a tie and pinstriped Oxford, a look that combined with his affable demeanor conjures him as a boy haunting Chicago-area magic shops in the 1950s, hobnobbing with performers, probing for tips. As we walk through his home, posters of great magicians past stand guard along the walls. One shows an illustrated Harry Kellar, a sensation in the early twentieth century. Kellar\u2019s arms are elevated skyward, a woman floating above his hands. The legend reads: \u201cLevitation\u2014The Greatest Illusion in the World.\u201d
We say hello to Steinmeyer\u2019s wife, television producer Frankie Glass, whose many documentary credits include Ancient Aliens and a series called History vs. Hollywood. Then we cross their yard to his studio followed by Albert, their doddering but ebullient 13-year-old dachshund. Once settled, I make an opening gambit: I ask Steinmeyer about the state of magic today.
He launches into a commentary about how people don\u2019t just receive entertainment anymore\u2014they see it as a challenge.
\u201cThat\u2019s what this has become,\u201d he says, lifting Albert into his lap. \u201cIt\u2019s become like, let\u2019s talk about magic as a puzzle. Let\u2019s deconstruct it.\u201d
Steinmeyer has given the world more to tease apart than almost anyone on the planet. The god-tier highlight of his career is arguably designing David Copperfield\u2019s televised vanishing of the Statue of Liberty, but over more than three decades, Steinmeyer has engineered an entire pantheon of physics-defying, brain-exploding, how-is-that-even-possible feats. He made a real-seeming flying carpet for the latest turn of Aladdin on Broadway. He transformed the Beast into a prince at the end of the stage version of Beauty and the Beast. He vanished and gradually restored on stage\u2014from veins, to nervous system, to skin\u2014the titular character of The Invisible Man. He erased an elephant from the center ring for Ringling Bros.
In the more traditional world of magic, he brought a painted portrait to life and back again (\u201cThe Artist\u2019s Dream,\u201d performed by husband-and-wife team the Pendragons, among others) and designed a whole series of illusions in which the performer walks through a mirror, a wall, and a number of other impenetrable objects. Steinmeyer has invented card tricks and box tricks and levitation tricks and ESP tricks and every other imaginable kind of theatrical deception, then some you couldn\u2019t imagine, and all this for the biggest names in entertainment, including Orson Welles, Siegfried & Roy, Doug Henning, and Ricky Jay.
Aside from its ambition and quality, what stands out is the breadth of Steinmeyer\u2019s work. Most illusion creators stay in a lane: big-stage illusions, escapes, mind reading, theater productions, or \u201cclose-up\u201d magic. Steinmeyer does it all.
\u201cJim is an expert in virtually every area of magic\u2014in fact, he\u2019s singular in that,\u201d says Richard Kaufman, publisher of the industry magazine Genii and the author of scores of books about magic. \u201cNobody else is working at this level. People like Jim come along once every two or three generations.\u201d
Steinmeyer keeps his secrets out of reach as hours of conversation unfold. He is engaged, insightful, and animated, and he speaks about his life and biography with depth, but he deflects other questions that remind me of the conversational rope-a-dope magicians use, suggesting one thing\u2014See these rings? Solid metal, right?\u2014before doing another.
I ask where his ideas come from. His answer, at first, is that he doesn\u2019t really like the question. \u201cFor years and years, I avoided\u2014I just thought it was presumptuous to say, \u2018Here\u2019s how you create things,\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cI always hate reading that stuff.\u201d
Only when I press does he finally relent.
\u201cMy secret,\u201d he says, \u201cis that I keep a messy notebook. It has to be all three things: That you keep it, that it\u2019s messy, and that it\u2019s a notebook.\u201d A spiral-bound Strathmore Sketch pad sits on the table between us, and he flips through it, pausing just long enough for me to glimpse the pages. There are careful sketches of rotating, hinging mechanisms, drawings of altered cabinets and wardrobes enveloping phantom figures and annotated with measurements and enigmatic notations. Two pages depict a giant industrial fan\u2014clearly an illusion in which the performer passes unharmed through the spinning blades\u2014but many of the others are impenetrable.
There are 24 notebooks, 100 pages each. Counting both sides of a page, that\u2019s 4,800 pages dating back to 1980 or \u201981. Steinmeyer shows them to no one. His job is to \u201cthink of something completely impossible, then figure out a way to apparently accomplish it\u201d\u2014and that process can be messy. It usually involves revision upon revision, sometimes over several years. \u201cWhat happens,\u201d he says, \u201cis that an idea branches\u2014you start working on something and you go, \u2018Oh, it would really be good if it was like this.\u2019 And you pursue that for a little while and you go, \u2018Yeah, that\u2019s not right.\u2019 And then you go back and you pursue this for a little while, and this starts working. Well, those\u201d\u2014he points to a stack of notebooks\u2014\u201care all that. So when I abandon something because it\u2019s not working, I can go back and find it. There are no dead ends.\u201d
For example, the Mary Poppins illusion originated as an unrelated, sudden jolt of inspiration: a table that employs angled mirrors to conceal items within its folds. \u201cI remember thinking that was a really good idea, but I had no use for it at the time,\u201d Steinmeyer says. Into a notebook it went, and years later he excavated it for the play.
Part of the challenge is that a trick has to tell a story, because magic above all is about storytelling. And the stories involve multiple layers of deception. \u201cThere are three scripts in a magic show,\u201d he explains. \u201cThere\u2019s the script where you ostensibly say what\u2019s happening, which is often a lie. Then simultaneous with that, there\u2019s the script of what you\u2019re actually doing, so there\u2019s a divergent thing where you\u2019re saying one thing and you\u2019re doing something else. And then there\u2019s the script of how you\u2019re maneuvering the audience through the act.\u201d
The story should be both familiar and impossible. Audiences should recognize the magic about to be performed. \u201cYou want that thing where people go, \u2018Ohhh, they\u2019re about to divide a person into three pieces,\u201d Steinmeyer says. \u201cYou want that thing to be very clear.\u201d
Once magicians manipulate audience members toward certain expectations, those expectations can be subverted, and the audience can be dazzled, and fooled.
Steinmeyer began as an audience member. While attending elementary school in suburban Chicago, he went home every day for lunch, flipped on the TV, and watched Bozo\u2019s Circus, a variety show sometimes featuring touring magicians. Steinmeyer\u2019s older brother, Harry, nine years his senior, had a drawerful of abandoned magic props, and when Jim was about six, he says, \u201cI found that drawer.\u201d
Jim\u2019s bounty: a P&L Change Bag (turn one item into another, or pull something from an empty bag), an Ireland set of cup and balls, and a collection of mystifying instruction books. Harry taught Jim it was about more than props\u2014you had to engage the audience with a story\u2014and between this tutelage and the television and Chicago\u2019s booming local magic scene, a fascination took hold.
Steinmeyer immersed himself in Chicago\u2019s magic-shop subculture, popping in on Saturdays, hanging around, and talking to other magicians. Before long, he developed what was known as a \u201cmedicine pitch\u201d act, in which he played an old-timey snake-oil salesman and incorporated tricks into demonstrating his various cures. The act won a few local awards.
When Steinmeyer was 13, his father died, leading to what he describes as \u201ca hell of a year.\u201d As the family wrestled with grief, his mother encouraged him to attend a magic convention in Michigan with his friends, to plug into something that might distract or excite him. Steinmeyer went and saw a performance by George Goebel, a veteran magician with a grand-scale stage act. Rather than perform for a small circle of spectators, the tuxedoed Goebel stretched his act across the entire stage, employing costumed assistants in larger illusions like levitation and sawing someone in half. \u201cThat\u2019s when I became interested in stage magic,\u201d Steinmeyer says. \u201cIt was that performance with that guy. I was a 13-year-old kid who just lost a father\u2026 And it was like another door opening on an interest I already had, and opening in some bigger, grander way.\u201d
In the following years, Steinmeyer dropped his own act; what he really loved, he realized, was conceiving ambitious illusions\u2014the flashbulb of an idea popping inside his head, the mental calisthenics of how it might work, the sketching and spitballing. In college, he started pitching tricks to Doug Henning, arguably the world\u2019s most famous illusionist during the 1970s. Henning eventually bought a piece called \u201cModern Art,\u201d an illusion in which the magician stands inside a frame and, when the frame is moves, is subsequently split in half\u2014their legs stay in place while their torso and head slide with the frame. Henning liked the way it spun off a trick called \u201cThe Zig Zag Girl,\u201d in which the performer divides an assistant into thirds. \u201cIt was very much of its time,\u201d Steinmeyer says. \u201cBecause Zig Zag was so fresh in the \u201870s, things that felt like that were attractive.\u201d
Two other Steinmeyer illusions soon made a Henning TV special, and Henning eventually offered him a job helping launch Merlin on Broadway. It was supposed to last six months; Steinmeyer kept the gig seven years before moving on to Disney Imagineering. These positions had their rewards, he says, but he struggled with the compromises that come with corporate productions. He knew that if he wanted to do what he loved\u2014design illusions from a molecule of an idea in his notebook and let it grow into something naturally\u2014he needed to be on his own.
Today, running his own business requires an astonishingly disparate set of skills. Some days Steinmeyer is a mechanical engineer, building scale models with foam core, mirrors, and toothpicks; others, he\u2019s a historian and detective, reconstructing old tricks; still others, he\u2019s a graphic designer drawing up informal blueprints, or a playwright developing scripts to go with his illusions.
Each illusion involves close collaboration with the builder and the performer\u2014Steinmeyer\u2019s client. \u201cEvery trick has a flaw,\u201d he says. \u201cIf it didn\u2019t, it wouldn\u2019t be a trick, it would be reality.\u201d
For magic to accomplish the impossible\u2014making something disappear\u2014a \u201cflaw\u201d in the magic has to be hidden, like a trick mirror or special compartment. If a magician can\u2019t conceal this secret, the trick is worthless. Steinmeyer relies on both meticulous design and well-suited performers to construct tricks. When he offered to help launch the solo career of Alex Ramon\u2014a former magician for the Ringling Bros Barnum & Bailey Circus\u2014he asked Ramon to write down his favorite tricks, architectural styles, pieces of art, color schemes, and so on to garner a sense of his aesthetic and his way of thinking.
Ramon had never performed original tricks before, but in Steinmeyer\u2019s studio he understood for the first time how they were birthed. \u201cIt made me think about magic in a different way,\u201d Ramon says, \u201cI was just a performer. I didn\u2019t have that engineering mind.\u201d Today, he has a trick in which his \u201cblond assistant\u201d materializes in an empty chair covered by a cloth. Though the assistant\u2019s silhouette appears at first to be human, it turns out to be Ramon\u2019s dog. Steinmeyer helped Ramon create what has become a signature part of his act. \u201cI definitely owe a big chunk of my career to Jim,\u201d he says.
During the evening on my second day in Hollywood, Steinmeyer drives me to the Magic Castle. The members-only club for magicians and enthusiasts is both a laboratory for the craft and, by night, a place for guests to take in performances both large-scale and intimate. At the time of my visit, Steinmeyer served as president (though his tenure has since ended), and we arrive about an hour before opening. After I borrow a tie at reception to pair with my sport coat and meet the dress code, the manager greets us. As is customary for first-time guests, I\u2019m given the password that, when spoken aloud, opens the hidden door into the castle. Built in 1909, the building is a shambling maze, a classic chateau-themed manor with narrow passages, branching wings, antique banisters and Tiffany stained glass windows.
Steinmeyer heads to his board meeting and leaves me to roam the castle, still only occupied by staff hustling to prepare for the first dinner seating. In a room tucked behind the main entrance, I test \u201cIrma,\u201d the ghost operating the grand piano, and she nails my softball request (\u201cHotel California\u201d).
The energy ramps up once the doors open, the dressed-up crowd rolls in, and the performances start. In the Close-Up Gallery, Tom Craven peppers his card, rope, and metal-ring tricks with a stream of old-world patter. Over in the larger Parlor of Prestidigitation, Bill Abbott presents a mashup of puppetry and magic featuring a lustful monkey. In the Magic Castle\u2019s showcase room, the Palace of Mystery, Greg Otto performs a comedy-laden routine (When a heckler pipes up, Otto looks toward the crowd and replies, \u201cI thought I told you to stay in the truck.\u201d) before Kyle and Mistie Knight deliver a classic big-stage performance heavy on audience participation. To take the stage, Kyle passes through a giant fan with spinning blades\u2014the very trick I\u2019d spotted in one of Steinmeyer\u2019s notebooks.
What\u2019s striking, besides the polished performances, is the feeling in the building. The Magic Castle rules call for people to stow their phones, and there are no TVs. It\u2019s a time capsule, everything analog, and the audience arrives with a roiling, tipsy energy. People call out to performers, laugh, slap shoulders, and scream with surprise and wonder. No one is sneaking a look at their phone, and no one resists the timeless astonishment that has come from magic audiences for decades, from Charles Morritt to today.
I mention this to Steinmeyer on the drive back\u2014he\u2019d been in his meeting for the duration\u2014and he nods. \u201cI know it’s weird to say, but somehow magic is immune from technology,\u201d he says. When he watches performances, he tunes in not just to the magic but the way people respond to it. \u201cThe thing about the Magic Castle and places like it, when you\u2019re there in the right size theater, the intimacy is just completely amazing. People always say afterwards, \u2018I had no idea the performances were going to be so strong.\u2019\u201d
My last day hanging around with him, I ask Steinmeyer straight up: How does the sawing-in-half trick work? In the studio with us are two of the trick tables. I decide this is where I\u2019m going to make my stand and try to extract a secret. The illusion has been around for more than a century, and Steinmeyer has mentioned its timelessness and layers of innovation. It still coaxes grasps from a crowd.
So what\u2019s the trick? True to form, Steinmeyer first gives a non-answer. He begins a mesmerizing filibuster about the illusion\u2019s evolution, citing his friend and mentor Alan Wakeling, who in the 1970s came up with an \u201cincredibly elegant\u201d design for the trick in which two audience members shackle the hands and feet of the woman, and instead of sawing the box in two, the magician stabs four blades through the sides. Coincidentally, I\u2019d seen that exact trick at the Magic Castle the night before.
Steinmeyer allows that historically, the trick is that the woman pulls her knees up to her chest when the sawing happens. But with Wakeling\u2019s box, you can still see her feet sticking out the bottom, and beyond that, the box looks too narrow for a knee lift. So I press: \u201cBut there\u2019s no room for her to\u2014.\u201d
\u201cRight,\u201d Steinmeyer says. \u201cYeah.\u201d
He smiles and shrugs as if to say, What more do you expect? \u201cI mean it\u2019s all\u2014as soon as people believe you\u2019re doing one thing, you can subvert it by doing something else.\u201d
This time, though, I don\u2019t let it drop.
In Hiding the Elephant, his narrative history of magic, Steinmeyer points out what most of us already suspect or know: The secrets of magic are not true secrets\u2014the answers are often right in front of us. A magician friend often told Steinmeyer, \u201cIf you want to keep something a secret, publish it.\u201d
So why don\u2019t more of us know how magic works? I realize Steinmeyer has been trying to lead me to this point all along. Magic is not about knowing how we\u2019ve been deceived. \u201cMagic,\u201d he says, \u201cis an opportunity to experience a deception without actually being threatened.\u201d
In a world of deepfakes and identity theft and warfare by invisible computer viruses, real-life deception has consequences. You need to know the mechanisms of these tricks to avoid being taken in. That\u2019s why we press for answers.
Steinmeyer sees I\u2019m not going to let the sawing-in-half trick go, and maybe against his better judgment, he relents. The feet are fake, he explains. The box incorporates design elements that make it appear narrower to the audience than it actually is. In fact, there\u2019s just enough room for the woman to drop her knees to one side and avoid the blades.
I nod. Huh. It\u2019s cool enough, but somehow learning the answer isn\u2019t as exciting as I\u2019d expected.
I remember something I\u2019d read in one of Steinmeyer\u2019s books: Magicians don\u2019t protect their secrets from the audience, they protect the audience from their secrets. The truth of how magic works is that most of us don\u2019t know because we don\u2019t want to know. What we want, instead, is to sign what Steinmeyer calls \u201ca mysterious pact between a performer and the audience.\u201d We want to be in the midst of that credulous, shrieking crowd at the Magic Castle.
\u201cThere\u2019s no substitute for that,\u201d Steinmeyer says. \u201cThat\u2019s really what this is. When you gasp or scream in response to a card trick, it\u2019s a hotwire to that emotion, to that sense of being incredibly pleased and feeling a sense, not only of surprise, but of wonder.\u201d
The secret of magic is not knowledge, it\u2019s feeling. Steinmeyer and I eventually wile away almost an hour analyzing the early-1900s illusion with the thief and the safe. He reveled in the intricacies of it\u2014the different historical accounts, Charles Morritt\u2019s possible motives, all the potential explanations. Steinmeyer holds that feeling himself. He admires a trick well done. He treasures the wonder that comes with being fooled in an artful way.
Steinmeyer doesn\u2019t know how the safe illusion works. He never has, it\u2019s possible he never will, and this doesn\u2019t bother him in the least.
Excerpted from https:\/\/www.popularmechanics.com\/culture\/a33336282\/magic-tricks-explained-steinmeyer\/
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