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Magician David Copperfield Accused of Grooming, Groping, and Drugging Women
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this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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He was huge in the 80's and 90's amd did some big scale acts like disappearing a whole bridge and stuff like that.
One of the most convincing tricks he pulled off was transporting two people from the stage to what looked like a believable beach. Totally fooled me (but I was a kid when I watched it).
Edit: I started to figure out that something was amiss soon after, because every single one of the supposedly "random" people he invited on stage to do his tricks with (usually by throwing plastic balls into the audience) wore incredibly "inoffensive" and poorly fitted clothes. At some point, I was able to spot which people he would end up picking from a mile away even before he had done so.
I never understood those. It's always camera trickery and mirrors. At least with the stage performances there are real people in the room with a full field of vision.
I saw a Penn Jillette interview a long time ago where he explained that quite a few other magicians fake their recorded stage performances. They'll perform a simpler trick, get the audience reactions, and then use camera trickery to make the trick look far more impressive for TV. This was in the context of him claiming that he absolutely doesn't do that.
For what it's worth, he claimed he never used camera tricks in his specials.
Of course, he's under no obligation to tell the truth.
When he says camera trickery he means that he doesn't edit anything. when I say camera trickery I mean that the camera must be at a certain angle for the trick to work. If he has a mirror for example and the camera moves a step to the right, the mirror is suddenly not aligned properly to my field of view and the illusion doesn't work.
The hobbits in Lord of the Rings is an excellent example. Nothing is edited in the shots but it relies on a very specific focal length in the camera and carefully planned forced perspective. It's impressive and a technical feat but it not "magic" like card tricks are magic.