Hooper

Imagine

It’s Saturday night. My friend Bella has came to my place to have some dinner and watch the 1978 classic, Hooper. (“Classic.”)

After the movie is over, I ask her for her help with something I’m working on.

“Myself and some of my friends who are also interested in magic have a little competition going on. It’s kind of like a tournament where for who can come up with the best trick. You have head-to-head match-ups and the winner gets to go on to the next round. It’s a long-term competition. You have three months for each round. So with 16 of us ‘competing’ it takes about a year to crown a winner. There’s quite a bit of money involved, but really it’s just a way for us to make sure we keep in touch, because we don’t live in the same city anymore. So this is really just an excuse to get together—on Zoom at least—every few months. And then once a year we all meet up to do the ‘finals’ in person.”

I take out my phone and set it up to shoot video and prop it up against a candle on my end table.

“I’m so far behind on my submission for this round. Can you help me film something for it? It will be easy.”

I give her a piece of paper and pen, as well as a lighter and a silver bowl.

She agrees to help, so I start recording on the camera.

Speaking to the camera, I say, “Okay, guys, this is Andy. And this is my entry for Round 2 of the competition. I call it… Smoke Reading.”

I tell Bella that I’m going to walk over to the other side of the room with my back to her and the camera. I’ll stay in frame the whole time, so it’s clear I don’t turn around. I ask her to keep her back to me so that her body blocks anything she’s about to do.

“Before we do this, have I set-up anything with you before we started recording? Did I ask you to do or say anything in particular?”

She says “No,” and I ask her to say it into the camera.

She looks into the camera. “We haven’t set anything up,” she says, and gives it a wink.

“Wait… why’d you wink?” I ask. “Now it looks like we have set something up.”

“Oh, that’s not what I was going for,” she says. “We haven’t set anything up. I was just being cute.” She winks again at the camera.

Fair enough.

I walk to the other side of the room with my back towards everything.

“Bella, I want you to think of a word. Any word in the English language. Something that it would be very unlikely for me to just randomly guess. Do you have something in mind?”

She says she does.

“Great. Write it down on that piece of paper. Show it to those watching. And then fold the paper in half and in quarters. Now I want you to take that lighter, set the paper on fire, and drop it in the bowl. Be careful. Let me know when the paper is mostly burned away and there’s no chance I could read anything on it.”

After a few moments she tells me the paper is mostly burned up.

“Perfect,” I say, and turn towards her. “So even if I came up next to you I wouldn’t be able to see what you wrote down, yes?”

She agrees.

“Okay, I’m actually not even going to get close enough to look at the paper. Instead I’m just going to look at the lines in the smoke.”

I stare from the opposite side of the room into the smoke coming out of the bowl.

After a few moments I say… “Bella… be honest with me… were you thinking of the word… poetry?”

She smiles.

I smile back.

“No,” she says.

“Wait… seriously?” I ask. “It wasn’t poetry?”

She shakes her head. I walk over to her and stop the recording.

“What the hell,” I say softly as I contemplate what went wrong.

“Okay, let’s try again and hopefully it will work this time.”

I start resetting the props. Dumping out the ashes and grabbing a new slip of paper.

“What word did you end up thinking about before?” I ask.

“Pudding,” she says.

“Hmm… I don’t know,” I start to say, and then catch myself. “Wait… what??”

“Pudding?” she says again.

“Are you fucking serious?”

“Yes.”

“What the…,” I pause, trying to understand what just happened. “Did someone tell you to say that or anything?”

“Huh? No. What do you mean?” she asks.

“Are you positive?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know a guy named Woody Sullivan, by any chance?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?” I ask.

“Yeah,” she says, “I don’t know him. I don’t know any Woodies.”

“Fuck me. How the hell?…” I mutter.

I snap out of my reverie and pick up my phone.

“Here, check this out,” I say.

I pull up a video on my phone. There is a guy sitting at a table.

“This is Woody Sullivan,” I say. “This is the guy I’m competing against in this round of the competition. He sent me this video like two months ago.”

I play the video.

Woody says:

Hey. Okay, so my submission for the competition is in the box that I sent you. Feel free to open it up and take a look inside. It's not going to seem very magical just yet. But trust me... it will. So hang onto it until the deadline.

Best of luck with whatever you're working on. I look forward to seeing it.

Okay, I guess that's it. Take care.

"Check this out,” I say. I take Bella by the hand to my office area and show her a little plastic box sitting on a shelf. There is something folded up inside the box.

“Woody sent this to me two months ago.”

I open the box and remove the small white card in side. When I unfold it, it says…

Pudding

Bella’s arms reach out in front of her, palms to the sky. “Wait… what?!?!” she says. “Are you fucking serious?”

I shake my head. “I guess he’s going to win this round of the tournament,” I say, dejectedly.

Method

This idea came to me via Madison Hag1er. The underlying idea is to use the camera remote app on the Apple Watch to get a peek at something someone has written or drawn and shown to the camera on your phone. For those who don’t know, the remote app will show on your watch whatever your iPhone camera is looking at.

While this idea has probably been considered in the past, it likely didn’t catch on because “show what you wrote to my camera” is sort of transparent as part of a presentation. At the very least it would come off as suspicious if you didn’t have a fairly solid reason for why you wanted them to show what they wrote to the camera. Here, the reasoning is pretty unassailable, so long as they buy into the story you’re telling them.

But even more important than having a good reason for them showing it to the camera, the most powerful thing going on here is that you’re not taking credit for the impossible thing they’re going to see.

Not taking credit is the most disarming technique in magic, in my opinion. Laymen can conceive of the idea that you spent 100s of hours perfecting sleights. They can understand that there are maybe technologies unknown to them that would permit you to do things that look like miracles. They can imagine psychological techniques or mathematical methods that are beyond their comprehension, but which you could maybe harness to do this impossible.

But one thing they have a hard time grasping is that you'd put the effort into showing them something magical and not take the credit for it. It spins their brain off in a different direction.

That’s the real secret here.

The mechanics of the method are simple. I had the face of the Apple Watch (I never wear the thing) on a bookshelf across the room. And I had a card and a Sharpie in my pocket. As Bella was burning the paper I had far more time than I needed to take out the card, write “pudding” on it, fold it, and put it back in my pocket. I could have done anything at that point. She was setting something on fire—an action which people usually devote most of their attention to.

You could theoretically be in the other room when they show the camera the word, but I didn’t want her to think I was doing something in another room. If there was any question about what I was doing, she had video evidence that I was standing on the other side of the room with my back to her the whole time. From the camera’s perspective, you couldn’t see me doing anything.

I eventually removed “Woody’s” prediction from a Vision Box 2.0. These are mostly sold out at the moment, from what I can tell. But you could use any type of mystery box.

And you don’t have to use the camera remote peek. It you have some other stratagem to get the peek from across the room, you could do something similar. Maybe one of those clipboards that sends you an image of what they write/draw. Or perhaps there is a low-tech way I’m not considering. The nice part about the camera remote peek is how clean it is when paired with this premise/presentation.

Madison is responsible for both of those things as well. He had the general idea to be recording the video as a submission of some sort, and for you to get it wrong and have an outside entity be the thing that successfully completes the trick. Those elements are his. The only thing I added was this specific story.

And this story is doing a lot of work for you. It takes the focus off of you as the performer. It gives a much richer idea of what it’s like in the world of learning and sharing magic with other magicians. And it blows out the experience so it’s not something that just happened in this one 5-minute moment, it’s something that began weeks ago when you were sent this package in the mail.

I’m calling this trick Hooper, not just because it’s the movie I watched with my friend this weekend, but also because I see parallels between the movie and this trick. Hooper is about stuntmen. A stuntman’s job is to add thrills and excitement without taking credit for what they’re doing. They are doing this in service to the story and the audience’s experience. This is the goal of audience-centric magic as well. Not making every trick about you in a desperate attempt to seem special. But rather being a facilitator that creates a thrilling and mystifying experience for others without making it all about themselves.