Thoughts from The Business Magician
Kostya’s Blog
How A Magician Prepares for Penn & Teller: Fool Us
While viewers of “Fool Us” see 5-8 minutes of a particular magician’s performance, let me tell you about the 3 days each of us spends in Las Vegas getting ready for the showtime/showdown with Penn & Teller.
Our first morning began bright and early, with filming for the “bio package.” The total shoot takes about 4-6 hours and is different for each performer. Each of us worked with our own producer on our spot.
How Fooling Penn and Teller Changed My Life
Performing for Penn and Teller changed my life in one way I never expected. Up until then I had assumed I was going to remain, for the rest of my life, an anonymous, local magician. And this wasn’t a bad thing.
My friend and I would talk about how we would retire by the beach and do magic tricks into our last days. We knew that doing magic would always make us happy because it made others happy.
So as a teenager I embraced this fact with aplomb: to be happy in life I wouldn’t need to be famous, I just needed to do magic.
And then came the chance to be on national television and get a taste of national exposure.
Why I Performed for Penn & Teller
At the beginning of this year I received an e-mail invitation to perform on Penn & Teller’s hit TV show on the CW network, “Penn & Teller: Fool Us.”
A dozen thoughts went through my head. How do I respond? What do I perform? What will Penn possibly say on national television when he and Teller figure me out? How will he expose me in front of millions of viewers? Then I read the last sentence of the email and all those frantic questions flew out of my mind. “You were recommended to us by Johnny Thompson.” Without a second thought, I responded to say I would do the show.