Michael McNamara’s The Trick With The Gun, which makes its Toronto theatrical premiere tonight (Thursday November 19) at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema, is a documentary about the classic magician’s illusion known as the bullet catch.
The bullet catch is very simple: an associate loads a bullet into a pistol or rifle in full view of the audience, aims this loaded weapon at a stage magician and fires. The magician catches the bullet in his teeth or his hand, and everyone is very impressed.
It’s a great trick, when it works. When it doesn’t, you tend to end up with a dead magician and a really difficult insurance claim.
The Trick With The Gun follows two friends – stage magician Scott Hammell and his designated associate, television producer Chris Gudgeon – as they prepare to perform the bullet catch for a Toronto audience. As the weeks stretch out, McNamara’s camera starts to notice a few key differences between the two: Hammell is hyper-attentive to every last detail, as you’d expect for a guy who’s literally putting himself in the line of fire for a stunt, while the older Gudgeon is a little more casual about his responsibilities.
The film seems to delight in exploring the tension that develops between the two men as the event draws closer: patience frays, tempers rise, conversations grow clipped. Is it a performance for the camera? Would that even make sense, given how serious the bullet catch is? And what does it mean for the night of the show?
McNamara intercuts his character study with a charming animated history of the bullet catch, commemorating the magicians who performed it – and charting their mortality rate. It’s a trick that seems to invite bad luck, as we see in the example of Raoul Curran, who successfully did a bullet catch only to be shot by an overeager audience member.
McNamara, Hammell and Gudgeon will appear at the screening to introduce the film and do a Q&A afterwards (is that a spoiler? I think it might be a spoiler) and there will be live magic performed right there in the theatre.
If you can’t make it, The Trick With The Gun will be available for rental and purchase on Vimeo On Demand tomorrow (Friday November 20) you can pre-order it right now. The home version doesn’t come with any live magic tricks, of course … but there’s no risk of a ricochet, either.
