MAGIC, 1400-1950, is a book on the art of magic featuring 500 years of magic’s dazzling visual culture as a performing art. Read more information and leaf through a sample of the book on the TASCHEN website.

Our latest exhibition delves into the Bullet Catch. It traces the feat through several of the different variations performed throughout history along with a detailed story concerning the recent and fantastic demonstration by David Blaine and Bill Kalush of the Carl Skenes’ method. Additionally, we have included a translation of one of the earliest known mentions of the feat, as well as a number of photos and videos.

The Bullet Catch: Written by Ricky Smith

It was late evening on my first night in New York when my new employer, Bill Kalush, said, “I should probably tell you that tomorrow we are flying to Florida. I am going to shoot David.” This statement was quite startling, of course. First, it was totally out of the blue; we were at dinner and speaking about totally unrelated subjects. Second I had only just arrived in the city that morning and was expecting to be there for ten days. Further, David is, of course, David Blaine and Bill looked dead serious when he mentioned that he was going to shoot him. I thought, “What have I gotten myself into?” Luckily I found out that it was going to be a part of David’s latest television special and what they were going to be doing was a very old magician’s stunt called the Bullet Catch. This was going to be exciting.

The next day we met at the Conjuring Arts Research Center, luggage in hand and started heading to the airport. As we were walking, Bill received a phone call, turned around, and a black Lexus RX, a small SUV, pulled up to the curb beside us. Out popped David Blaine from the back seat. He was holding a poster which he was excitedly trying to show to Bill. It was quite stunning and featured a number of very cool details. We put our backpacks into the back of the car, I jumped into the front passenger seat, and we headed off. David and Bill were speaking adamantly about the show coming up and everything they had to do to prepare. In hindsight, I should have paid more attention to the conversation, since I apparently would be involved with a lot of what was going to be happening the next couple of days, but instead I found myself looking at the city I had come to visit, but had hardly seen, through the windows of the car as we passed it by on our way to Florida.

Arriving in Florida late in the evening, we met up with some of the crew members and went to Applebee’s for dinner. Everyone was in good spirits, and it was cool to watch as the wait staff and others began to recognize David and point him out to others. When we left a couple of the waitresses followed us out to see if they could get a photograph with David, and he was obliging. He even invited them to the event which was going to happen the next day.

By the time we left it was quite late, so we decided it would be in our best interest to go directly to the hotel to get a good night’s sleep. We went to the front desk to get checked in; I was excited because they had complimentary cookies, very awesome. Then David asked Bill if he had brought the gaff with him. Bill said, “Yes” and proceeded to remove a couple of items from his backpack. I was not sure what method they were going to be using and was curious, so I decided to take a look at some of the apparatus. It was not what I would have expected at all. There was a tiny cup and a mouth guard. I was at a loss. What could these items possibly be used for? Surely we were not doing anything that crazy?

You see, I was familiar with the basic premise of most bullet catches and the most common practice is to not actually fire a real bullet at the target and, even with the latter precaution, many people had still lost their lives performing this demonstration of super human ability. In fact, the history of the feat is quite fascinating, and a review of some of the more interesting occurrences may be helpful in order to appropriately frame the circumstances at hand.

Please continue reading this article at The Conjuring Arts website.