OOC # 39
And in further "I'm doing what today?" news...I spent a couple of hours, a couple of days ago, changing out cables on a lighting control for some LED-neon tape (lack of research on the director's part...he ordered LED tape from one company, a DMX-capable controller from another company, but didn't bother to look into how one connects to the other...luckily, between extra parts that had been delivered and an old project at the park that got changed after the initial purchases of equipment had come in, the park electricians were able to cobble together a way to use some cables they had in storage to get our problem cleared up...but they only modified one controller, and a handful of connector cables. So, I copied their work on the one to make the other viable for us). Today, I finished getting it installed and connected it to some LED tape that Macyn had run around the front edge of the stage...
Except when Macyn laid it out, he was envisioning power coming from the other side of the stage. So I had to peel up all of it, flip it around, tape it back down, and then get it connected to the controller. But it worked! And as I moved on to another project, I heard a loud sound from the stage and a bunch of startled cries, looked up to see the choreographer looking in my direction with a distressed look on her face, before she called my name with an equally distressed voice...
They broke a cable on one of the illusions (one that was built back in 1992, one of the ones with the dubious history...) We broke the other one when we first started working on trying to refurbish it, so I already knew, more or less, how to fix it...but I was NOT expecting to replace a cable today (or any day, really). But I got my 'miracle worker' status refreshed...it broke just before they went on their dinner break, I had it fixed almost an hour before they got back...had to make a couple of tweaks to get it dialed in, but yeah...they lost maybe ten or fifteen minutes of rehearsal time over it, and she was thinking it would be down for an entire day. Figured out what happened and how to make sure it didn't happen again. Five years ago, I'd have been like, "Ummm...well, I ~think~ I might be able to figure it out, but it's really outside my skill range..."
Told a few people, "I did NOT have 'stringing a new cable in Death Drill on my bingo card for today!"
--Also found out a few more details about the 'dubious circumstances' under which the former owner had perished...that illusion and its brother have a whole soap-opera backstory all their own! The owner lived in Vegas, was doing shows there, and decided he was going to relocate to Branson, MO, and negotiated the sale of his house. Before he moved, he was found dead, partially consumed by a tiger that had escaped from the tiger habitat he maintained...and the guy he'd arranged to sell the house to claimed that, since the paperwork had already been signed, the property and everything on it was his (and it was nobody else's business whether he had paid or not, since the only other party to the contract was dead and therefore couldn't contest the claim). The magician's family decided it wasn't worth fighting over the house...but they donated all the tigers to zoos and animal parks, and they loaded up all of the illusions and put them in storage...and then apparently endured years of shady magicians coming out of the woodwork and offering them, like, $20,000 for ALL of the stuff (having someone build just one of these illusions would easily be a $50,000+ prospect, and while they didn't know what fair market value was for all of it, they did know that these guys were trying to rip them off...)
They reached out to the guy who used to work with the magician, basically doing all the kinds of weird repairs and improvements that come up (a more intricate and advanced version of what I do) and asked if he knew anyone working in magic who wouldn't try to screw them over on it...and he suggested our director...who, when contacted, told them he couldn't afford to pay them fair market value for it, but did offer them SIGNIFICANTLY more than anyone else had...between that, and wanting the illusions to be back on stage again, they made the sale. So, the one I fixed tonight was involved in at least two lawsuits brought by David Copperfield (the first was against the guy who made it, because Copperfield didn't want him building illusions for anyone else--the guy basically said, "Screw you, I've got enough money, I'm not making illusions for ANYONE. So there!" That ended that lawsuit (Copperfield nominally won, because the guy stopped making illusions for other people...but it cost Copperfield his primary illusion-builder). The second lawsuit was against the magician, claiming that the illusion was a copy of one of Copperfield's...didn't hold up in court, Copperfield's used a gigantic buzzsaw blade and this one uses a steel auger, and Copperfield cuts himself in two and then puts himself back together, where in this one, the magician has the auger run through him, and then the box opens up to reveal that he's not there and he reappears somewhere else in the theater.)
And I'll admit...there's an odd sense of satisfaction to taking this 32-year-old piece of history and getting it back in good operating order again. It's a really cool illusion, and it is at the same time one of the most complex and one of the simplest pieces we've done. I told the techs, the first day, "Working on a show like this...you will never watch a magic show the same way again. You may not realize how they're doing the bit, but you recognize the bit, and instead of being impressed with the 'magic', you become impressed (or annoyed) with the skill (or lack thereof) they display in performing it.