The fliers and advertisements that soon started papering theater lobbies and appearing in newspapers around the country promised a culmination of his stage show’s peaks: Working out of the studio’s office complex on the corner of Sunset and Vine, the magician plotted his masterpiece, which was to be titled The Grim Game. He signed on with Famous Players-Lasky, the home of Mary Pickford and Rudolph Valentino, and in April 1919 he relocated to Los Angeles with his wife, Bess. To really make an impression, he knew he’d need to participate in the studio system, to make a feature-length blockbuster, rather than a small-time independent production. Billboard deemed it a “cracker-jack production” that “will thunder down the ages to perpetuate the fame of this remarkable genius.” Financially, though, it was a nonstarter it took Houdini four years in court to recover his earnings.
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(Houdini claimed to have designed the villain himself.) The series was well-received. Earlier in the year, to test the waters, he’d starred in a fifteen-part serial, The Master Mystery, featuring a robot with a human brain who could shoot lasers out of his fingertips. Like the movies themselves, Houdini had emerged from vaudeville, and he understood film’s appeal intuitively. “I think the film profession is the greatest, and that the moving picture is the most wonderful thing in the world,” he told an interviewer. Still, Houdini was always looking for new frontiers, and he believed that Hollywood was the next step. He was a living legend, and a world-class egotist: he named his pets after himself printed his initials on his pajamas, his bathroom tiles, and his cuff links and signed most of his trick blueprints “H. He’d spent years diving handcuffed into ice-cold rivers, locking himself in jail cells, maneuvering his body in and out of sealed crates and prison vans and (once) the belly of a beached whale. Already, the magician was roughly as famous as any American performer could be in his era.
In 1919, a year after he’d startled America by vanishing a four-thousand-pound elephant named Jenny onstage at the New York Hippodrome, Harry Houdini arrived in Hollywood to make his first feature film.
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