FIVE IN FOCUS :: THE MAGICIANS

Several previous guests on the Magic Newswire podcast are among those being polled by FilmInFocus.com for their series Five in Focus. The site periodically asks creative professionals which films motivate and inspire them. Aaron Fisher begins the "Magicians in Focus" series and will be followed by , Jim Steinmeyer, Homer Liwang, Eric Mead, Max Maven, David Regal and Richard Giobbi. The site describes this episode :

It’s not so surprising that a form of theatrical magic that predates cinema is experiencing a resurgence these days. Sleight-of-hand, stage magic, and mentalism are all finding new audiences in live performance venues, on television, on the internet, and in recent magic-themed movies like The Illusionist and The Prestige. Of course, the relationship between magic and cinema is long and well established. Georges Melies, widely considered the inventor of special effects cinema, was a stage magician at Paris’s Theater Robert-Houdin, and America’s Harry Houdini was not only a special effects consultant to film but also a film producer and actor. To explore the nexus between magic and cinema, we asked a truly astonishing group containing some of the field’s top artists to tell us the five films that have inspired their own creativity in some way.