Magic

We had all of the elements of a great magic trick. Let's see: One large stage umbrella, five LED lights, tripod, camera, lens cards, two lovely assistants and, of course, one able magician.

We also had one very difficult location: A mountain overlook above the San Fernando Valley, the lights of the grid finally turning on. But the nighttime sky was black; the distant mountains at the edge of the grid, counterpart to our own, were barely visible.

The wind was picking up. The magician, David, a man who would soon become a close friend, fought to keep the umbrella afloat.

I called him a few days before, trying to get a guest invitation to the Magic Castle, the real-life haunted mansion of the Hollywood Hills. Somehow, I thought that a strictly-exclusive, hundred-year-old mansion filled with magic shows and artifacts and secret passages would be a great spot for a first date. No, that idea didn't seem at all absurd.

The only way inside the Castle was to be invited. And the only person who could invite me was holding an umbrella weighed down with the five magnetic LED lights, his right hand cupping a small pool of water, ready to release on the count of one … two…

When I saw David for the first time, this trick was the one to stand out as completely his, a product of four years of imagination and practice. He began with an old theatre trick, his audience tasked with creating the sound of a rainstorm, building from a soft patter of the hands to a loud drumming on the knees.

But sound can only take you so far. So David rolled up his sleeves, rubbed his hands together and produced rain - water first dripping out of one hand, then the other, into a black vase that (of course) held a rose a moment later. The audience turned their drumming into applause.

It's the kind of trick that would be as effective at a Halftime show as it would be in a living room. And it's only showy in the sense that magic itself, the idea of pulling something out of thin air, is showy. But there are no Bengal Tigers or puffy chest hair or explosions or magic declarations. The "show" is that David can make water pour from his bare hands. That's enough.

Three days prior to the photo shoot, a very well-known street magician offered to purchase David's rain trick. The other magician would get the secret behind the trick and the right to perform it as his own and David would get a pile of money and the right to remain silent. The famous magician would stay famous. David would have another four years to go back to the drawing board.

So David had an unbearable decision to make. I've thought about it, and I don't know if any other kind of performer, entertainer, or artist has to make such a decision. A painter can sell her paintings, but the buyers usually don't want to sign their own name in the lower right. A great performance might inspire an actor, but very few cruise the local theatre scene and try to buy them permanently.

There is an art to performing a magic act, that much is undeniable, and it is most assuredly a performance art, but it is a performance that ideally cannot be duplicated by any other magician. If the performance is airtight, no other magician can figure out the secret. The secret, then, is what separates a magician's performance from that of an actor.

The secret also serves as protection. But David was worried about this as well. If the popular magician figured out how to do the rain trick, there wouldn't be much to stop him from performing it as his own.

A few months ago, David performed 'Rain' in front of about 1,000 magicians at an annual conference. The magic community, David told me, polices itself. If a magician performs a trick that isn't theirs, they'll be shunned, forced to do magic for birthdays and bar mitzvahs. If one thing will allow David to keep his trick, it would be the power of live witnesses.

That, of course, and the photographic evidence we were creating on the side of the mountain. David released his hand and the water came falling down, illuminated by the lights in the umbrella and the lights of the city below. I set up my camera and tripod, guessing at the focus and spraying the shutter, hoping for the best.

The first images were a blurry mess. But Liam and Lily, my two lovely assistants, kept pouring on the water and the light again and again. Ten-and-a-half frames per second. Compact Flash cards filled in six seconds. And David in the middle of it all, standing on the side of the mountain, resolute.

I thought of David, faced with the decision between staying the course and quite literally selling out. Either choice a gamble; one on the quality of his trick to make him a success, the other on the quality of his imagination to come up with new illusions. Either way, his path to becoming a famous magician himself would not be easy. But if he kept 'Rain', he would have at least one companion to call his own.

So David called up the well-known magician and politely declined. The true magician, I suppose, never reveals his secrets.