A couple of years back, Fox-TV found a magician greedy enough to put a mask over his face and expose the secrets of the trade.
Many of the performer’s cohorts feared his disclosures would cause them irreparable damage financially, while others dismissed the guy as a disgruntled hack.
The Masked Magician’s antics certainly didn’t have any impact on the Siegfried & Roy, or the famously outrageous pair’s decade-long streak of sold-out performances at the Mirage resort in Las Vegas. If anything, Fox’s flaky exposes might even have encouraged a few viewers to spend $75 on a ticket to Siegfried & Roy’s show, just to see if they could spot the seams in their act.
Such doubters probably will find the new 3-D movie “Siegfried & Roy: The Magic Box,” which opened in Chicago on Oct. 15, even more intriguing.
The 45-minute large-format film, which was produced by Santa Monica-based L-Squared Entertainment to be shown in Imax theaters, takes some of S&R’s trademark illusions and splashes them on a giant screen. If S&R had something to hide, putting it in 3-D would be like trying to camouflage an elephant by tying a ribbon to its tusks.
“I choreographed the camera movements to take the audience up onto the stage with Siegfried & Roy, which is something you cannot do even when you see the live show,” says director Brett Leonard during an interview. “We shot 360 degrees around many of the big illusions, which makes them all the more wild, because you’re right up there and everything’s 10 times bigger than real life.”
This in-your-face technique initially caused “the boys,” as they’re referred to in Las Vegas, some concern.
“We wanted to keep alive the integrity of magic,” said Roy (born Roy Uwe Ludwig Horn, in Nordenham, Germany), the younger, dark-haired one. “We’re not just entertainers, we’re also magicians . . . and we wanted to keep our craft private. It’s not to fool people, it’s to entertain them, so they’ll forget their daily problems.
“But we’re telling a story that’s larger than life, and that’s what Imax is all about.”
Adds Siegfried (a.k.a. Siegfried Fischbacher from Rosenheim, Germany), “I’m used to performing in front of a live audience, and we make a tiger disappear in a cage. Brett said, `We’re going to go all around the tiger with a camera.’ I said, `But, I’m selling my movements. When you’re behind the camera and I’m not there, it’s boring.’
“He said, `No, we have to try to do it. I’ll sell it with my camera.’ He got great results . . . it almost fooled me.”
With many illusionists, Leonard suggests, “you could never shoot their stuff in 3-D. There are no special effects added to the performances in `The Magic Box.’ . . . I could actually go all around their illusions — put the audience on the stage in a way that isn’t even possible in the best seats of the Mirage — and they not only still hold up, but they’re even more amazing.
“When they make the elephant disappear, we crane all the way up on top, and we go behind the animal on stage. It really was an opportunity to capture the legacy of what they’ve created, in a way that’s even more involving than the stage show.”
Siegfried and Roy were in Los Angeles on the first leg of a rare national public-relations tour, which had begun earlier in the evening with a stop on the “Tonight” show. Their tour included stops in New York on “Regis & Kathie Lee Live!” and “The Today Show,” where they had to compete for attention with a pair of show-stealing white tiger cubs.
Beyond being simply an excuse for having tigers and lions appear to jump onto the laps of viewers, the Imax 3-D technology adds a fantastic dimension to the biographical portrait painted in “The Magic Box.” Much of the film describes their personal journey from the depths of the post-World War II depression in Germany to the promised land of Las Vegas.
Born six years apart in Germany, both entertainers are the sons of soldiers, who, like so many other men on both sides of the conflict, “went to the war one man and came back as another.”
For Siegfried, 60, magic provided an escape from the reality of his tortured home life.
“When I was small, I’d walk past this book store on the way to school, and I saw this magic book in the window,” he says. “As innocent as I was, I thought, I can solve all my problems at home with this book. I found 5 marks in the street, which, at that time, you never did . . . so I feel there was a spiritual power at work here.
“I learned a trick to show to my father, and it was the first time I had a conversation with him . . . he noticed me. He said, `How did you do that?’ “
The animals in the Bremen Zoo, where Roy’s uncle worked, offered relief from the pressure of his pain.
“I was very disappointed by people, and those animals were the closest things in the world to me. . . . They taught me what I needed to know in life,” he said. “That’s why, today, I’m so concerned about the white tigers and lions. . . . With animals, you have to be very real, and there’s not much time to think.
“Human beings can be hypocritical, contrived, prefabricated. But, animals can’t.”
Siegfried and Roy first met about 40 years ago, while both worked on a cruise ship doing odd jobs. After the captain convinced Siegfried that the ship’s passengers might enjoy a post-dinner magic show, Roy asked his new friend if Siegfried could make a cheetah disappear.
Not knowing that Roy was actually traveling with a pet cheetah that he had “liberated” from the Bremen zoo where his uncle worked, Siegfried answered: “In magic, anything is possible.”
Then, of course, he had to make good on his promise, and that initial collaboration led to more performances on cruise ships and at nightclubs throughout Europe. It was a hardscrabble life, to be sure — Chico, the cheetah, had to be fed better food than they themselves ate — but, in Monaco, they finally made the connections that brought them to Las Vegas with the Folies Bergere, at the Tropicana.
At first, their act was squeezed in between the scantily clad dancers’ feathery production numbers. A few years thereafter, they became headliners at the Stardust, Frontier and Mirage.
Besides amassing a huge fortune — and attaining icon status in Vegas, along the way — S&R have become leading spokesmen for the protection of endangered species. Mirage Resorts boss Steve Wynn is so grateful for their contributions to the property that he’s installed a giant sculpture (and too-kitschy-to-be-true photo-op for tourists) of his two star attractions on the sidewalk between the Mirage and Treasure Island.
In “The Magic Box,” Leonard (who also directed “T-Rex: Back to the Cretaceous,” “The Lawnmower Man” and “Virtuosity”) highlights the hardships Siegfried and Roy faced as children and demonstrates how their home lives might have shaped some of what audiences see today.
“Onstage, it’s the illusions that drive the show,” says Siegfried. “Our life stories are what drives the movie.”
Leonard points out, “I didn’t want to make a documentary on the greatest magic act on Earth, and neither did they. I wanted to make a human story of a spiritual journey, which everyone could connect to.”
FUTURE IS PART OF THE MYSTERY
Siegfried & Roy’s contract with the Mirage runs out in 2002, and no one is quite sure if they’re willing to stick around for a few more years. In anticipation, perhaps, Mirage Resorts boss Steve Wynn has lured impressionist Danny Gans away from the Rio and is financing the development of Broadway-style musicals and comedies.
If they do re-up with the Mirage, don’t expect many changes in their show, which is to magic what Liberace was to piano playing.
“People know what they want to see, and they’ll come back to see it,” Siegfried insists. “You wouldn’t change the Grand Canyon, and you can’t change Siegfried & Roy.”
Neither are they content to sit on the huge pile of money they’ve accumulated over the years. Among the charities they support is an orphanage in Romania, which Siegfried’s sister, a Franciscan nun, recently opened.
“We’re happy and proud to be a part of that,” he says. “We’re at a time in our lives when we can give something back, and that’s a wonderful thing.”
