Is magic cool? If you trust Barney Stinson, the answer is 'yes'. If you've ever seen Gob do his act, the answer is harder to say. For the sake of this news item, we're going to say that magic is indeed cool. But you know what? The guys who made The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters don't need magic to be cool. They'll make it cool with Make Believe. This isn't to say they'll imagine it being cool, but that their upcoming documentary Make Believe, which follows 6 young, aspiring magicians in hot pursuit of the title of Teen World Champion will.
With King of Kong, the producers of Make Believe (Ed Cunningham and Seth Gordon) made a video game, long forgotten from the public attention, interesting. Nay, they made it exciting. As we watched two hardcore gamers duke it out for the high score, they made us feel something for the achievements of two men who'd dedicated their spare time to the perfection of an art. Granted, the art in this case was mashing buttons and moving a joystick to help a little man made of pixels jump over barrels tosses by an irate gorilla with a princess fetish. Hey, you have fine art, they have hand eye coordination in simplistic pixelated worlds. To each his own.
Thus, it should be no wonder that we're somewhat excited to see what they do with six magic teenagers (who never once attended a magic school housed in a castle, we assume) and some cameras. It's kind of like Spellbound but with magic (and probably less spelling), but the idea is that we get to see the duality of these kids' lives: one half as the successful magicians on the rise and the other half as high schoolers whose friends and enemies we're guessing know that they like magic. High school's hard enough, it's even harder when people know you're an aspiring magician. The other challenges faced include the prospect of living the (not so) luxurious and (not so) rich life of a magician. It's kind of like being an aspiring writer, except you're a hit at parties and when you drink there's more tricks involving fire and fewer emotional outbursts of how they're a misunderstood genius.
Here's a little blurb on how the film came to be...
Executive produced by Ed Cunningham and Seth Gordon (the duo behind 2007’s acclaimed The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters), Make Believe was initially a passion project for its creators, who for four years mulled over the idea of a documentary set in the highly distinctive world of magic. The right story for Make Believe finally presented itself when producer Steven Klein (a former teen magician and current member of Los Angeles’ famous Magic Castle) eyed three teenage boys in a magic shop who could barely make eye contact with anyone...until a deck of cards transformed them into consummate showmen. Klein returned to pitch Cunningham and Gordon on the idea of teen subjects, and the producing team then handed the wand to Tweel, who brought his own coming-of-age vision to the project.
Like the boys in the magic shop, the film’s six subjects are remarkably assured and dedicated entertainers. Offstage, however, they face the diverse obstacles of adolescence: loneliness, high parental expectations, the pressures of impending stardom, abject poverty, and the deep desire to fit in. With great humor, honesty, and heart, Make Believe reveals an enduring world that audiences know little about while it also explores a time of life no one ever forgets.
However good the film ends up, it has to at least top this:
