Copperfield Levitates Guests at LA Gala

Inside Magic Image of Kellar's Levitation

Magician David Copperfield contributed to L.A.'s Promise "A Night of Magic" fete this week and gave attendees a souvenir unlikely to be forgotten.

Mr. Copperfield's creative people built a photography studio to simulate each guest's levitation. The effect was really cool.

As regular (and irregular) readers of this magic news source know, we are loathe to expose any magic secrets, ever. So this story provided a challenge for us. Could we expose the secret behind trick photography used to apparently show a real magic trick that we would never expose? We checked with Mystic Hollow, Michigan's resident scholar on all things related to ethics and magic, Maurice "Moki" Vanderwallenjag. Professor Vanderwallenjag wrote the book on magic ethics, literally. His The Ethical Magician is the authoritative text in the field and he teaches a course on ethical considerations of the variety performer at the Mystic Hollow Community College every other year.

"To expose a trick is always wrong," Moki wrote. "Unless one is exposing the trick to a very select audience for the purpose of educating that audience on the subject of performing said trick and the trick being taught is the sole intellectual property of the instructor."

We weren't sure how that helped us in this circumstance. We didn't feel like asking for clarification because we had a deadline to meet and Moki takes forever to say anything. There was a reason he succeeded as a silent act and failed miserably as a telephone solicitor.

We invite you to visit BizBash for a behind the scenes look at Mr. Copperfield's very ingenious method.

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