Something to watch tonight: Thursday 20 March

Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants (Mamet, 1996)

Through the 90s and early 2000s, if you saw this face in a movie you knew it was going to be an inter­est­ing one. He was, essen­tially, dis­covered by David Mamet and made three films in a row for him from 1987 to 1991: House of Games Things Change and Homicide. He then went on to make dozens of appear­ances on screen (includ­ing nar­rat­ing Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia and act­ing in 10 epis­odes of Deadwood where he fit right in) until he passed away in 2018.

But he wasn’t an act­or. At least, that wasn’t his profession.

Ricky Jay was an illu­sion­ist, a card manip­u­lat­or, a sleight of hand artist, a pres­ti­di­git­at­or. In addi­tion, he was a racon­teur and an afi­cion­ado of card cul­ture and a col­lect­or of rel­ics. He was an expert at close magic and – while his live per­form­ances were legendary – tele­vi­sion is where his skills could shine. In close-up – with sleeves always rolled up – there is nowhere to hide. Let David Copperfield make the Statue of Liberty dis­ap­pear, he can have it. I’ll watch Ricky Jay shuffle a deck of cards any day of the week.

There’s a bril­liant doc­u­ment­ary about Ricky Jay called Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay (2012) which tells the story of the great man’s life, pro­fes­sion­al rela­tion­ships and cul­tur­al influ­ences but it is unavail­able in Aotearoa. DocPlay really need to get their hands on it.

In the 1990s, Ricky Jay made three spe­cials for HBO that were based on his stage act. All have dis­ap­peared from legit­im­ate view – per­haps that NTSC video aes­thet­ic wasn’t a per­suas­ive jus­ti­fic­a­tion for restoration.

A few weeks ago, I read this art­icle about an enthu­si­ast for sav­ing old VHS tapes dis­cov­er­ing a first gen­er­a­tion HBO dub of Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants in a thrift store. It wasn’t a mas­ter tape but it was as close as we are likely get out­side of the Warner Bros. vault (and we know what a ter­rible atti­tude they can have about their heritage).

This chap digit­ised it using the finest VHS tech­no­logy still avail­able and uploaded it to the Internet Archive. I can be a bit dubi­ous about archive.org as a lot of what they have online can’t really be described as ‘orphaned’ but it is abso­lutely where this film belongs – it is a museum of video eph­em­era and 52 Assistants is a trib­ute to a lost era of show­biz, as well as street cons like ‘Find the Lady’ which is giv­en an immacu­late treatment.

I love clos­eup magic demon­stra­tions on TV and there is no bet­ter exem­plar than Ricky Jay. It’s extraordin­ary to think that you are being bam­boozled just as effect­ively from thou­sands of kilo­metres and nearly 30 years away as the audi­ence in the room.

52 Assistants was dir­ec­ted by David Mamet and I should address that par­tic­u­lar ele­phant in the room. For a long time, Mamet was cat­nip for act­ors. I saw friends per­form A Life in the Theatre back in the late 80s and worked on a pro­duc­tion of Glengarry Glen Ross at Downstage in Wellington in the mid-90s. I still have his short book, On Directing Film. That run of fea­ture films from House of Games to The Spanish Prisoner were amaz­ing. Intelligent, bril­liantly con­struc­ted and unlike any­thing else being made at the time. He wrote the screen­plays for Wag the Dog and that crazy Alaskan bear movie The Edge which was dir­ec­ted by Lee Tamahori.

Then 9/11 happened and, like a few people, Mamet appeared to lose his mind. He became increas­ingly con­ser­vat­ive in his polit­ics and more strident in his art. I lost interest, sadly, as did a lot of people in Hollywood, which only served to rein­force his mar­tyr syndrome.

But don’t let that get in the way of appre­ci­at­ing the great Ricky Jay. You won’t regret it.

Where to watch Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Worldwide: Streaming on Archive.org (the International Archive)