Eric weisz5/26/2023 ![]() It did not take long for it to become clear just how unqualified Houdini was for his new career.Īnyone who has seen silent films, particularly movies from before Charlie Chaplin made the transition from shorts to making feature films, knows that screen acting was almost always completely unnaturalistic. His first acting job was playing Quentin Locke in the serial The Master Mystery, a rather loopy story about an agent for the Justice Department who takes down a criminal cartel that has in their arsenal both gas weapons and a robot. ![]() Functionally it was a gender-inverted version of the silent film trope of the damsel in distress being tied to railroad tracks. To more effectively play to Houdini’s reputation, the heroes he played would invariably end up in some sort of extreme restraints, like a locked case or chains. Today that might not sound so high for a world famous film star, but since movies were still in their infancy at the time it was effectively unprecedented. Starting at the top, he was paid $1,500 a week by Rolfe Photoplays, which at the time was roughly $23,000. Technically Houdini’s film debut had been in 1901 when he performed a series of escape tricks for Merveilleux Exploits du Célébre Houdini Paris, but 1918 was the year of his first film where he attempted to pretend he was someone other than himself. ![]() By 1918, he announced he would be abandoning the stage work that had served him so well for decades and start devoting himself to becoming a star of the silver screen. ![]() For various reasons, though, Houdini himself did not consider that enough. Is there another magician of such renown that he has entire television shows devoted to him near 90 years after his death? Born in Hungary as Eric Weisz in 1874 (his famous stage name was a slight tweaking of the name Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin, possibly the most famous magician of the 19th century and the person who codified the familiar stage magician costume still used today), by 1899 Houdini had emigrated to the United States of America and began the career that would make him the most famous stunt magician in the world.
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