I'm a magician, like David Blaine. I could never fall.
Literally, my last call was with David Blaine, congratulating him on his show. I have a camaraderie with David.
I had loved magic tricks from the time I was six or seven. I bought books on magic. I did magic acts for my parents and their friends. I was aiming for show business from early days, and magic was the poor man's way of getting in: you buy a trick for $2, and you've got an act.
My cat, Ethel, is an indoor cat but somehow she's sneakin' out at night. 'Cause the other morning I found a stamp on her paw... I wouldn't have noticed myself, but I just bought this new black light and she passed right under it and I said, 'Hey, what's that on you paw?
That's John Constantine. You put him in a corner, and you squeeze him, and he'll find his way out. There's something in him - he's a great escape artist.
Whereas you have someone like Houdini, who works really, really hard to get really, really famous, and then has actual intellectual ideas that he puts into the culture that stay there.
It is just flipping unbelievable. He is a mixture of Harry Houdini and a greased piglet. He is barely human in his elusiveness. Nailing Blair is like trying to pin jelly to a wall.
I think if you would have cut Houdini with a knife, blood wouldn't come out, PR would.
I remember finding a Houdini book at the library and seeing an image of him chained on the side of a building. He looked so intense and scary, and I couldn't get that image out of my head. That started building up my love of magic.
I did a film called 'The Escape Artist' for Francis Coppola. I had the title role.
There's something about the Houdini act that is not always made clear - about the escape act in general.
You know, I'm not very good at magic - I can only do half of a trick. Yes - I'm a member of the Magic Semi-circle.
There are performers who have built their whole career doing magic on TV and can't really perform live at all - don't really have jobs and skills.
Houdini connected to people on an emotional level so that when he would escape that straight jacket it wasn't about the straight jacket. It was about people looking at it and escaping poverty. When you have that it's the truest form of magic.
In 1921, Harry Houdini started his own film company called - wait for it - the Houdini Picture Corporation.
Catch me if you can -A
You're always in a box, and you're an escape artist if you do what I do - or if you're a creative person, period. You build your box, and then you escape from it. You build another one, and you escape from it. That's ongoing.
GSP can't hide from me forever, you know.
I was a magician's assistant and had to go in the box that they put the swords through, and there's no trick to it. You literally have to dodge the swords.
No one has the Houdini school of composition.
It was just like a digital fixation with cards and math and science and then I started to look at images of great magicians from Houdini down the line.
One of my inspirations, Harry Houdini, remains an icon of the art because he defied our primal fears. His demonstrations in the early 20th century, especially his escape from the Chinese water torture cell, represented triumph over suffocation, drowning, disorientation and helplessness.
Pick-a-lock, Pick-a-lock, you'll regret the day, When you took a mouse thief and locked him away, Silly cat, look at that, it's two for one, A thief and a warrior, by dawn will be gone.
As a kid, I always was obsessed with Houdini.
Well. That's helpful. We'll put an APB out on the Gingerbread Man. I'm not hopeful it'll do us much good, though. Word on the street is you can't catch him.
