[WikiEN-l] Exposure of magic on Wikipedia

[Daniel P. B. Smith]

> From: "Nina Stratton" <ninaeliza at gmail.com>
>
> People don't pay for the "magic" per se, they pay for the  
> showmanship. In my
> opinion, revealing the mechanics of a magic act in no way detracts  
> from that
> particular act's commercial viability. Struggling magicians, on the  
> other
> hand, might be of another opinion.

Good point. This is a view from the outside, and I don't know what  
really happened in the movie industry, but up to perhaps the 1970s  
Hollywood tried to avoid publicizing how special effects were done,  
in the mistaken idea that it would kill peoples' pleasure in watching  
the film. Disney pretended his artists worked freehand when animating  
Snow White and Prince Charming, without mentioning rotoscoping.

As recently as 1974, the movie "That's Entertainment" showed the  
sequence from ''The Royal Wedding'' where Fred Astaire appears to  
dance on the walls and ceiling with some coy statement to the effect  
that "They're still arguing about how it was done." How it was done  
is obvious, and I expect audience would have been quite interested in  
hearing how Fred Astaire met the challenge of dancing on a set that  
was rotating in a vertical plane, would probably have enjoyed seeing  
pictures of the machinery, but, no, they thought that would "spoil" it.

I'm not sure just how or when that changed. I seem to recall that  
Lucas published a lot of material for Star Wars fans explaining how  
motion control worked; perhaps that was the breakthrough. The  
magazine Cinefex, entirely devoted to exposing the technical secrets  
of special effects first came out in 1980 and is still going strong.

I see no evidence at all that widespread diffusion of special effects  
"secrets" has done anything but ''increase'' peoples' interest in the  
films that feature them.