The co-writer/editor of BEING ELMO and the co-director/producer of SONS OF PERDITION move from Muppets and Mormons to magicians and mountebanks in this portrait of a man who’s made it his mission to expose charlatans… while keeping up to his own tricks.
Justin Weinstein and Tyler Measom explore the life and work of James “The Amazing” Randi, the famed octogenarian magician and mentalist who has turned his talents to exposing others who use similar tricks to take advantage of people. In the course of revealing their subject and his crusade, however, the filmmakers discover that Randi is implicated in a much larger, and more serious, deceit – his partner of a quarter century, Jose, is not who he says he is. Is Randi a hypocrite, aiding and abetting this fraud, or did the man who’s made it his business to unearth deception himself fall for this flimflam?
Weinstein and Measom have two weeks left in an already successful Kickstarter campaign for key production funding. They’ve already surpassed their initial $148,000 goal, and have set a new “stretch goal” of $250,000. For more information on the project, visit its website.
As signalled by the doc’s title, Randi’s story is intriguing on a number of levels that play with contradictions: he’s a man who has enjoyed an illustrious, international career by fooling people with acts of legerdemain, playing with the suspension of disbelief to entertain and profit – yet he’s gone on a crusade to end the careers of others who traffic in similar tricks because of their more lofty claims of actual paranormal abilities; his reputation has been built on exposing falsehoods, but he kept his sexuality a secret for nearly his entire life; and, of course, one of the film’s central concerns, the case of his lover, “Jose Alvarez,” and what Randi did or didn’t know. Measom and Weinstein have access to decades worth of archival material from Randi’s career to tell his story, and the master showman has been involved with what seems like more than a lifetime’s worth of adventures that should make for an engrossing film about not only how people fool one another, but, just as importantly, how and why people let themselves be fooled.
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what (not) to doc 