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New York Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
This Blood Drive Might Be a Way into Hollywood's Exclusive Magic Castle
There are a few established ways to gain admission to the Magic Castle, a clubhouse and restaurant in Los Angeles: being a magician member, knowing one or staying at the neighboring hotel. But those eager to see what lies inside have found another way in the door: donating blood. Such was the path for Justice Buckly, a 22-year-old student from Santa Clarita, Calif., who wanted to secure a reservation for a surprise dinner for his friends, and stumbled upon the tip on Reddit. 'I would not have been giving blood otherwise,' he said. Mr. Buckly was one of the 84 people who showed up to a Red Cross blood drive at the castle last month. As a gesture of gratitude, participants receive a guest pass to the club. (The Magic Castle doesn't advertise its blood drives as a way to gain entry to the club. But on social media, some users have popularized them as a way to score an otherwise hard-to-get visitor's pass.)
Los Angeles Times
04-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
The Magic Castle's training program for kid magicians is like a real-life Hogwarts
Anja Steyn has three disparate loves: puzzles, horror movies and magic. And during her show at the Magic Castle two weeks ago, she not only predicted the horror film someone was thinking of — she produced an almost-finished puzzle of the movie poster, with the last piece in the unsuspecting audience member's possession. 'Some of you might think it's fate. Some of you might think it's chance,' Steyn said. 'But either way, it's magic.' Judging by her talent, one wouldn't know that Steyn is only 17 and a member of the Academy of Magical Arts' Junior Society. Celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, the exclusive program — which counts Neil Patrick Harris ('How I Met Your Mother') and Christopher Hart ('The Addams Family') among its notable alumni — is shaping the next generation of magicians with mentorship, monthly classes and performance opportunities. Normally, the Magic Castle is only open to individuals 21 and older at night, but this week was the exception. During the annual Future Stars of Magic Week, the most-skilled juniors are invited to perform at the invite-only Hollywood club. Steyn, who joined the Junior Society in April 2023, flew all the way from Cape Town, South Africa, for the occasion. It was only her second time at the Castle, having made her debut during Future Stars Week in 2024. 'Future Stars Week has given me the chance to perform a lot more. 21 shows in a week — that's a lot,' Steyn told The Times. 'It's helped with gaining experience and gaining more knowledge. And also, you do get bragging rights to say that you're a member at the Magic Castle.' Junior Society chairman Steve Barnes and vice chairman David Doyle — who met through the Junior Society in 1985 — opened up the program to nonresident students during the COVID-19 pandemic. With help from the Jack Oakie and Victoria Horne Oakie Foundation, they obtained all the equipment necessary to make their monthly sessions available via livestream. Their goal is to 'flatten the world of magic and variety arts' and bring together kids of all backgrounds who are passionate about their craft, Doyle said. 'One of the coolest things about it is there's literally no judgment about anything, except if your magic sucks,' Doyle said. 'Everybody is accepted here.' When the 'World's Foremost Lady Magician' Diana Zimmerman started the Junior Society in 1975, almost 100 kids applied. They were all white boys. Today, magic still isn't the most inclusive art, but Zimmerman wants to change that. Of the Junior Society's 81 current members, nine are female. In addition to South Africa, students hail from Brazil, Canada, Italy, Japan, Spain and the United Kingdom. 'They love to perform and they love magic, and that is the unifying thing,' Zimmerman said of the junior magicians. 'And the other thing they have in common, and I really can't stress this enough, is how they believe they can do it. It's a belief that they can become anything they want.' Raised in Phoenix, Zimmerman, inspired by her love of fantasy and fairy tales, discovered magic at the age of 8. Her family didn't have a lot of money so she went door to door selling grapefruit to buy new magic tricks from Bert Easley's Fun Shop. Her first illusion was turning a penny into a dime using a matchbox. 'I didn't realize that girls weren't supposed to do magic,' Zimmerman said. 'Nobody told me I was a girl, I guess.' She joined a teen magic club at 11, even though she was two years under the age requirement, and won her first trophy at 13. By the time she won her third, she was told to stop entering competitions because it wasn't fair — she was beating all the boys. Still, practicing magic with other young people was a formative experience. 'It surrounded me with other kids that were like me,' Zimmerman said. 'Most kids that get into magic are very nerdy. We don't exactly have the football players.' Zimmerman moved to Los Angeles when she was 18 with $45 to her name, and even though she was too young to be a member of the academy, the board made an exception. The following year, she debuted at the Magic Castle, and to her surprise and delight, actor Cary Grant was seated in the front row. The unlikely duo quickly became friends and pitched the idea of a youth club to the academy. The young magician had already been pleading with the board to start such a program for years, but having Grant on her side sealed the deal. 'It's harder to say no to Cary Grant than Diana,' she said. Zimmerman ran the Junior Society for 20 years and passed the torch to the late Bob Dorian in 1995. Today, she's an advisor for the program and specializes in helping students develop their personal brand. Over the past 50 years, she's only missed six meetings. Jordan Meller, 17, taught himself magic at a young age by watching YouTube videos and visiting the Magic Apple store in Studio City. After learning about the Junior Society from his dad, he auditioned at 13 and made it in on the first try. 'It was kind of just me, until I joined the junior program,' Meller said. Unlike the Magic University — which offers magic classes for adults at the Castle — the Junior Society is designed for kids who are already far along in their training. Not only do members get to connect with other magicians, but they learn about brand development, website building and other business skills. 'This is not where a 13-year-old kid is going to come if they have an interest in magic or want to learn some magic tricks,' Barnes said, noting that most students have to audition multiple times. 'We consider it more like the Juilliard [of magic].' Although Barnes and Doyle don't practice magic professionally anymore, they believe their training was essential to their personal and professional growth. 'The goal for us generally is that magic is the foundation piece,' Doyle said of the Junior Society. 'And anything that they learn in this program, they can go on and apply to any other profession.' Today, Barnes owns an insurance company and Doyle is an Emmy Award-winning producer and executive vice president at Hearst Media Production Group. Junior Society alum Jason Latimer, 44, was named the World Champion of Magic in 2003 and now runs Impossible Science, a company that makes science education more accessible to children by framing concepts through magic. He chatted at the 50th anniversary reunion on July 22 with Collins Key, 29, who placed fifth in 'America's Got Talent' in 2013 and now runs a media production company, Keyper, with his brother. 'It's the reason why I'm able to do what I do,' Key said. Kevin Li was also at the reunion. The 28-year-old mind reader, who graduated from the Junior Society in 2020, described the program as his 'professional playground,' which gave him the skills he needed to pursue magic full-time. Today, he hosts private groups at the Castle and counts Michelle Yeoh, ASAP Rocky and Daniel Kaluuya among his high-profile clients. Meanwhile, 19-year-old Skyler Jade roamed around the party performing strolling magic with a deck of cards. A film and media student at UC Berkeley, she comes to the Magic Castle once or twice a month to refine her skills. In addition to a vast network of magicians, society members benefit from plenty of performance opportunities, said Aidan Corcoran, 18. Ten juniors also get paid to perform at brunch every weekend. 'I'd always loved magic, and I knew it was going to play a part in my future but I didn't know how,' Corcoran said. 'Joining this place made me realize I can do this full-time. That's an insane thing to even think now.' 'What the program is really about, and what magic really is, is magic. It is a way to allow kids that are mostly nerdy and shy to gain confidence, to gain skills that they normally would not get, because it teaches you to think differently,' Zimmerman said. 'It teaches you to think, 'I am possible.' Impossible is I am possible.'
Los Angeles Times
01-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Ella Berman's ‘L.A. Women' is a breezy retro novel with bite — and lots of familiar characters
Ella Berman's third novel, 'L.A. Women,' is set in Laurel Canyon between the mid-'60s and mid-'70s. It's a perfect place and time for a novelist looking to establish a tense atmosphere: The dreamy, free-love atmosphere slowly curdled into hard drugs and the Manson murders. Sunshine turned to smog. Joni Mitchell's sprightly 'Ladies of the Canyon' album gave way to the melancholy 'Blue.' A scene early in the novel captures the dynamic, as locals assemble for a party in the home of Lane, an acclaimed novelist and journalist, while the bloom begins to fall off the rose: 'They are here because their world was so vivid, so beautiful, that they are all somehow willing to settle for a ghost version of it.' That line comes from Lane's perspective, and she has reasons to be cynical: In 1975, her marriage is crumbling, her second novel has taken a beating with the critics, and her estranged friend and fellow writer, Gala, has gone missing. That last plot point is the novel's drivetrain, because her disappearance exposes so many things about the culture of the time: flightiness, despair, drugs, loss and fear. Before their split, Lane and Gala were at the same time friends and rivals. In the late '60s, Lane was a nationally famous explainer of California culture, hard-edged but with a literary bent. (Think Joan Didion.) Gala was the free-spirit hanger-on in the city's club scene, falling for a rock singer and happily dishing about her Southern California misadventures. (Think Eve Babitz, with a dash of Carrie Bradshaw.) Gala gave Lane some valuable tough-love advice about the draft of her first novel, which moved Lane to open some doors for Gala at big-ticket magazines. They covered different worlds. What would be the harm? Over the course of Berman's novel, it becomes clear the answer is plenty. As the narrative shuttles back and forth between 1965 and 1976, Berman shows how messily entangled the two women's lives are, and that their influence on each other as writers is more porous than either wants to believe. 'L.A. Women' is in part a mystery novel, as Lane investigates Gala's disappearance. But she's questioning the sincerity of her motivations along the way. After all, her next book is a roman à clef about Gala, and writing about a woman who might be in dire straits would be exploitative. Or, rather, more exploitative. Gala's disappearance also prompts Lane to wonder what kind of fiction about her old friend would be most accurate. Is she a fallen starlet or a woman reinventing herself? She observes that one version of Gala 'would end up like so many L.A. women before her — violet and vomit-streaked in a stranger's bed at the Chateau, or maybe she would buy a baby grand piano and move to the coast to start over, bright-eyed and sober with a new sense of wonder for the world.' Resolving that question is as key to the book as Gala's location. In the meantime, Berman sets plenty of scenes in some of L.A.'s most famous landmarks: the Magic Castle, Musso & Frank's, the Chateau Marmont, and, hey, look, it's painter Ed Ruscha driving down Wilshire Boulevard! Such cameos feel a little tacked-on and obligatory, candy-colored as a Hockney painting. But the novel's truest setting is an emotional one, anyway; Berman's gift is for revealing the ways that attachment warps into envy, and how we rationalize or ignore those emotions even while they consume us. Berman suggests that, in some ways, the culture pushed both Gala and Lane into becoming adversaries. Though their writing styles are distinct, they're framed by others as rivals, particularly by men: 'Isn't that what most men wanted — to flatten women not into individuals with needs and wants and requirements, but into a vague, out-of-focus mass?' Men who fail to follow the rules wind up in the city's cultural thresher as well: The women's mutual friend, Charlie, a high-powered music-industry power broker (think David Geffen) has his status threatened once his homosexuality becomes an open secret. 'L.A. Women' is in many ways a breezy book, gentle about its crises and suggesting early on that a happy ending is in the offing. But thematically it has teeth. Media culture, Laurel Canyon culture, gender culture all conspire to keep Lane and Gala from being what a writer needs most to be: honest. For all of her storied flintiness, Lane strains to keep her feelings about Gala at a distance, and Gala refuses to acknowledge that she needs Lane to anchor her recklessness. But admitting to that sort of need requires a decade of emotional work, and the novel's strongest moments show how deep the struggle can run. 'Writers are always selling someone out,' the Lane-like journalist Janet Malcolm once famously wrote. The reasons for that are myriad: money, attention, a good story, status. 'L.A. Women' captures that range with admirable sensitivity. But at its core it grasps that the challenge is more fundamental: How we can treat the people close to us more as human beings and less like commodities. Or, as Gala puts it: 'It was infinitely more satisfying to be somebody rather than somebody's plus-one.' Athitakis is a writer in Phoenix and author of 'The New Midwest.'
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Vogue
21-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
With His New Show, Ta-Da!, Josh Sharp Finds the Magic—and the Music—in a 2,000-Slide PowerPoint Presentation
Vogue: I want to start by asking you about the origins of this show. When did you begin writing and working on it? Josh Sharp: It's been a few years, and a couple of paths converged. The concept of doing it with the slides was something I started a few years ago, but I was just doing it for 10 minutes. And then it just fleshed out from there and became 20 minutes, and then 30 minutes, and then 40 minutes. A good two-thirds of it is stuff written just for this show, and another third is the random old stand-up bit that's like, 'Oh, this actually fits in this thing.' So it sort of depends on where you define starting. The show is called Ta-da! and involves some elements of magic. Have you seen any magic shows lately? I love to see magic shows. When I'm in LA, I always go to the Magic Castle. I try to see the good ones: I loved [Derek DelGaudio's] 'In & of Itself.' Asi Wind is incredible. Every year there's a good magic show and I go see it. You worked on this show with Sam Pinkleton. How did that partnership come to be? And what does direction look like with such a personal show? There's a reason why everybody loves Sam—and it's that he's the best. We knew of each other and were friendly and had talked about other little projects, but then, when I really had this version of the show and I was doing it at comedy clubs, I invited him. And honestly, I just thought that he was way too busy to do this. But then we talked for like an hour after [the show], and I remember being like, 'Wait, just vibe-checking: would you direct this?' And he was like, 'Oh, I'd love to direct it.' So for a while, it was just a lot of conversations about it, because I was continuing to develop it in the comedy club space. And then, in the months leading up to the theatrical run, he was so good at assembling our team. This is my first time doing this type of theatrical run for a stand-up show—that sort of canonical act where the stand-up comedian plops down in an off-Broadway theater for a few months. But I directed one for my friend Michael Cruz Kayne, this show called Sorry for Your Loss that was at the Minetta Lane two years ago. So one of my favorite things from that side was just getting to build out this team of designers who are, like, cool, stunty theater professionals you can hire to just make your show more impressive. And Sam is so good at that. This is all to say: it's been freaking rad.
Los Angeles Times
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Teacher, magician, performer: Gonçalo Fino de Sousa brings magic to every role he plays
There are three Gonçalo Fino de Sousas. On weekdays, he takes the form of an excited calculus teacher with derivatives and integrals galore. He shifts personas on Friday nights, donning a suit and just the right amount of melodramatic flair for a weekend of pure magic. In between the two, there is a hidden version of Sousa, flitting between his passions to find his next adventure. There's no doubt about it: Gonçalo Fino de Sousa was born to perform. Born in Portugal, Sousa made his debut on stage at a piano recital when he was four years old, years before he became a magician. 'At the time, my feet didn't even touch the floor when I played,' Sousa said. 'My mother would show me the photo time and time again as my first experience on stage.' Sousa soon found a new outlet for his creative artistry: magic. Fervently searching up YouTube tutorials, he found his undying love for the craft. 'Then, I was living and breathing magic tricks day in and day out,' Sousa recalled. 'In Portugal, there wasn't much of a magic community — I think I was one of 12 Portuguese magicians.' Sousa regards that time as an era of comfort, where he was free to perform for the sake of performing. His daily routine consisted of blowing the dust off his magician's table and creating tutorials as well, tracking the progression of his proficiency. These videos served a second purpose: they were also how he learned English. 'I was having the time of my life performing on the ground in front of my iPad for the internet void,' Sousa laughed. His target audience shifted from online viewers to a live, tangible crowd when he attended a cultural exchange and English program the summer he turned 12. 'It was my first big show, at their talent showcase,' Sousa said. 'There were kids from Germany, Austria and all around the world.' Sousa felt like a performer for the first time. 'This was when I first felt the butterflies on stage, and the high after,' he said. In the summer of 2015, Sousa left Portugal's crystal shores for the promise of California, finding himself at the center of the Hollywood scene. It was in the heart of Los Angeles that he found his next big dream: to perform for the Magic Castle. As he went to watch his first live magic demonstration, he envisioned himself on stage. With the applause ringing in his ears, he made up his mind — he was going to audition. The first time he auditioned, he was rejected. His failure was accentuated in big, bold letters, with the text 'Thank you for trying out for the Magic Castle' scrawled in type across the paper. But Sousa was not resigned. He auditioned again. 'I still keep the rejection letter with me, as remembrance,' Sousa said, drawing out the envelope from his pocket. 'Because really, it changed my life.' Sousa was accepted to the Magic Castle on his second attempt. He was overjoyed. 'That was my first intro to the real magic world,' Sousa said. 'Suddenly, I was 16 years old and part of the most exclusive magic community in the world.' Then, COVID-19 hit. The global pandemic abruptly halted all live performances, leaving the industry in limbo. Sousa took this time to refine his work. 'Every morning I would read, and every afternoon I would write. Every day I would learn, learn, learn more magic.' He even took this opportunity to start his own podcast with friends, 'Ungimmicked,' analyzing and discussing performance theory, scripting and the philosophy behind magic as a performing art. As the performing world slowly whirred back to life, Sousa was ready. He dabbled in magic consulting, creating the 'magic behind the magic' with the production and presentation of shows. 'This was really my first teaching role,' Sousa said. 'I was consulting for kids who wanted to audition for the Magic Castle.' Going back to the start of it all, Sousa even orchestrated his own magic show titled 'Stepping Stool,' a nod to the stool next to the piano bench as he dazzled his first audience. Now, Sousa has found yet another sea of inquisitive faces — this time, in the classroom. He notes how attendees to his magic show and the students in his math classes share similarities, both wanting 'to be simply entertained for an hour.' For his plans now, Sousa refuses to be limited. 'I plan as far as lunch tomorrow,' Sousa admits. 'I don't want a career; I want careers. I have dreams, I have goals and I spend each day chasing those for happiness.' But for now, let the lights shine and the curtains open. Gonçalo Fino de Sousa is ready to perform. Related
