tional rope-a-dope magicians use, suggesting one thing—See
these rings? Solid metal, right?—before doing another.
I ask where his ideas come from. His answer, at first, is
that he doesn’t really like the question. “For years and years,
I thought it was presumptuous to say, ‘Here’s how you create
things,’ ” he says. “I always hate reading that stuff.”
Only when I press does he relent.
“My secret,” he says, “is that I keep a messy notebook. It
has to be all three things: That you keep it, that it’s messy, and
that it’s a notebook.” A spiral-bound Strathmore Sketch pad
sits on the table between us, and he f lips through it, pausing
just long enough for me to glimpse the pages. There are care-
ful sketches of rotating, hinging mechanisms, drawings of
altered cabinets and wardrobes enveloping phantom figures
and annotated with measurements and enigmatic notations.
Two pages depict a giant industrial fan—clearly an illusion in
which the performer passes unharmed through the spinning
blades—but many of the others are impenetrable.
Steinmeyer’s job is to “think of something completely
impossible, then figure out a way to apparently accomplish
it”—and that process involves intense revision, sometimes
over several years. “An idea branches,” he says. “You start
working on something and you go, ‘Oh, it would really be
good if it was like this.’ And you pursue that for a little while
and you go, ‘Yeah, that’s not right.’ Well, those”—he points
to a stack of notebooks—“are so when I abandon something,
I can go back and find it. There are no dead ends.”
For example, the Mary Poppins illusion originated as an
unrelated jolt of inspiration: a table that employs angled
mirrors to conceal items within its folds. “I remember
thinking that was a really good idea, but I had no use for it
at the time,” Steinmeyer says. Into a notebook it went, and
years later he excavated it for the play.
A trick has to tell a story, and each story includes layers
of deception. “There are three scripts in a magic show,” he
explains. “There’s the script where you ostensibly say what’s
happening, which is often a lie. Then there’s the script of
what you’re actually doing, so you’re saying one thing and
doing something else. And then there’s the script of how
you’re maneuvering the audience through the act.” The story
should be both familiar and impossible. Audiences should
recognize the trick. “You want that thing where people go,
‘Ohhh, they’re about to divide a person into three pieces,’ ”
Steinmeyer says.
Once magicians manipulate audience members toward
certain expectations, those expectations can be subverted,
and the audience can be fooled.W
hile attending elementary school in suburban Chi-
cago, Steinmeyer went home every day for lunch,
f lipped on the TV, and watched “Bozo’s Circus,” a
variety show sometimes featuring touring magi-
cians. Steinmeyer’s older brother, Harry, had a drawerful of
abandoned magic props, and when Jim was about 6, he says,
“I found that drawer.”
Jim’s bounty: a P&L Change Bag (turn one item intoanother, or pull something from an empty bag), an Ireland
set of cup and balls, and a collection of mystifying instruc-
tion books. Harry taught Jim that magic was about more
than props—you had to engage the audience with a story—
and between this tutelage and the television and Chicago’s
booming local magic scene, a fascination took hold.
Steinmeyer immersed himself in Chicago’s magic-shop
subculture, popping in on Saturdays, hanging around, and
talking to other magicians. Before long, he developed what
was known as a “medicine pitch” act, in which he played
an old-timey snake-oil salesman and incorporated tricks
into demonstrating his various cures. The act won a few
local awards.
When Steinmeyer was 13, his father died, leading to
what he describes as “a hell of a year.” As the family wrestled
with grief, his mother encouraged him to attend a magic
convention in Michigan with his friends, to plug into some-
thing that might distract or excite him. Steinmeyer saw a
performance by George Goebel, a veteran magician with
a grand-scale stage act. Rather than perform for a small
circle of spectators, the tuxedoed Goebel stretched his act
across the entire stage, employing costumed assistants
in larger illusions like levitation and sawing someone in
half. “That’s when I became interested in stage magic,”
Steinmeyer says. “It was that performance with that guy.
I was a 13-year-old kid who just lost a father... And it was
like another door opening on an interest I already had, and
opening in some bigger, grander way.”
In the following years, Steinmeyer dropped his own act;
what he really loved, he realized, was conceiving ambitious
illusions—the f lashbulb of an idea popping inside his head,
the mental calisthenics of how it might work, the sketch-
ing and spitballing. In college, he started pitching tricks to
Doug Henning, arguably the world’s most famous illusionist
during the 1970s. Henning eventually bought a piece from
Steinmeyer called “Modern Art,” an illusion in which the
performing magician stands inside a picture frame but is
split in half when the frame is moved—their legs stuck in
place while their head and torso slide with the frame. Hen-
ning liked the way “Modern Art” spun off a trick called “The
Zig Zag Girl,” in which the performer divides an assistant
into thirds. “It was very much of its time,” Steinmeyer says.
“Because Zig Zag was so fresh in the ’70s, things that felt like
that were attractive.”
Two other Steinmeyer illusions soon made a Hen-
ning TV special, and Henning eventually offered him a
job helping launch Merlin on Broadway. The job was sup-
posed to last six months; Steinmeyer kept it for seven years
before moving on to Disney Imagineering. These positions
had their rewards, he says, but he struggled with the com-
promises that came with corporate productions. He knew
that if he wanted to design illusions from a molecule of an
idea in his notebook to something that grew and emerged▶ Steinmeyer with the box used for one of his versions of the sawing-in-half
illusion. His tricks regularly befuddle others in the magic industry. “Magicians
are actually pretty easy to fool,” he says.40 November/December 2020