Dustings #61

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Everybody and their sister has been sending me this video of Mark Lemon at Blackpool. (You need to be familiar with Ellusionist’s goofy Black Ops Watch to really “get” the joke as intended.) It’s nicely done which is something I rarely say about anyone in magic trying to be funny.

Sometimes when I first meet someone and they’re telling me about what they do for a living, I like to say:

“Oh, how much money do you make?”

I say it real innocent like. That moment where they’re trying to figure out if I’m serious is usually good for a laugh.

Along the same lines, I was recently wondering how much money you can make creating viral Facebook videos. No real reason, I was just curious. So I sent an email to Rick Lax and said, “Hey, how much money do you make?” Unsurprisingly, he didn’t want to give an exact number. But he did give this information which potential viral video creators may find motivating…

We post videos on Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, and sometimes YouTube.
A bad video makes nothing.
A fine video makes $1-$100.
A good video makes $100-$10,000.
A great video makes $10,000-$300,000.

Now, obviously he means a great performing video. Not a video that is, like, “great” artistically or something.

But there you go. Now you see what’s possible. I think the best route to take is to create one great video and make $300,000. But that’s maybe too lofty a goal. My plan is to make 300,000 fine videos, which I think is more doable for me.

I assumed this was widely understood, but it came up in a discussion with someone recently and they seemed to not know this:

If a trick is advertised as “great for social media,” that’s their way of saying, “this looks like shit or is completely unworkable in the real world.”

It would be like if I said, “Hey, I’ve got this amazing girl I want you to meet. And guess what? She looks good in pictures!” That’s your clue that she’s probably a bit of a disaster in real life.

So this is pretty cool! This is a sneak peek at some footage from an upcoming Penn & Teller documentary. This clip captures an early meeting between Joey Teller and Penn (née Norman) Jillette. In fact it documents the first time the subject of magic came up between them! It’s crazy that this was caught on tape and that it has survived all these years.

I’m not sure when exactly this piece of footage was recorded. My understanding is that it comes from a little bit after the time when Teller was a detective in Beverly Hills. But quite a bit before the time he was married to the ex-wife of the guy who accidentally killed santa, put on his suit, and therefore inadvertently became subject to a legal technicality known as “The Santa Clause.”

Is there a sexier line in magic literature than this one from page 40 of Sam Sharpe’s Neo Magic?

Hell yeah. This sexy-ass book got me feeling some kind of way.