How Magician David Copperfield Made the Statue of Liberty Disappear (1983)

In April, 1983, 50 mil­lion tele­vi­sion view­ers watched the illu­sion­ist David Cop­per­field make the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty dis­ap­pear, straight into thin air. If you’re north of 50, you per­haps remem­ber the spec­ta­cle. How did he do it? 40 years lat­er, the YouTube chan­nel Mind Blown Mag­ic Illu­sion demys­ti­fies the large-scale mag­ic trick, explain­ing how Cop­per­field dis­tract­ed the audi­ence, rotat­ed the stage, and shift­ed Lady Lib­er­ty out of view. That’s appar­ent­ly the gist of the illu­sion. How­ev­er, in the com­ments sec­tion on YouTube, one com­menter adds a lit­tle more impor­tant detail:

You missed the most impor­tant mis­di­rec­tion. He had a heli­copter with a bright spot­light shin­ing on the stat­ue for a con­sid­er­able length of time dur­ing which he apol­o­gized to the audi­ence and said they were hav­ing “tech­ni­cal prob­lems.” Even­tu­al­ly the cur­tain came across and the stage began to revolve imper­cep­ti­bly slow­ly. How­ev­er the heli­copter moved in sync with the stage. The beam of light appeared to be sta­tion­ary in rela­tion to the stage. When the cur­tain was lift­ed they saw the heli­copter in the same place but with no stat­ue. The beam of light also helped black out the back­ground. Oth­er­wise the audi­ence would have seen a dif­fer­ent sky­line. Pure genius!

For Open Cul­ture read­ers, it’s worth men­tion­ing that the leg­endary film­mak­er Frank Capra (It’s a Won­der­ful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Wash­ing­ton, It Hap­pened One Night) played an unlike­ly role in the pro­duc­tion. In an inter­view with Judd Apa­tow, Cop­per­field recalls how he enlist­ed Capra to help write the script for the episode:

So then I said [to myself] “Now the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty is going to dis­ap­pear, but I’ve got to make this have more mean­ing.” So I went to vis­it Frank Capra, one of my idols, and did a kind of Judd Apa­tow inter­view with him. I said, “I’d like the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty to dis­ap­pear, but I want to do it as a les­son in free­dom, how valu­able free­dom is and what the world would be like with­out lib­er­ty.” And Frank Capra looked at me and said, “David, I love your idea, but here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to try and it’s not going to work; it’s not going to dis­ap­pear.” And I said, “Mr. Capra, I can’t do that.” You know? [laughs] And I got to watch Frank Capra, in his eight­ies, in action.

You can watch some of the orig­i­nal 1983 footage below. Enjoy!

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