Ricky Jay is to card tricks what Bobby Fischer was to chess — an incomparable performer. Jay, arguably the greatest sleight-of-hand artist working today, will be profiled by PBS in its American Masters series on Friday, Jan. 23 at 9 p.m. Ricky Jay: Deceptive Practice, directed and produced by Molly Bernstein and Alan Edelstein, is the first magician to be accorded that treatment by PBS.
Jay, whose real name is Ricky Jay Potash, is enamored by cards. Comparing them to “living, breathing human beings” and friends, Jay seems to like nothing better than to produce extraordinary effects with a deck of cards, be they Queen of Hearts, Nine of Clubs or Six of Diamonds.
As he shuffles cards, he leaves you with a sense of wonderment and magic. Call it magic, if you will.
“Much of sleight-of-hand is the duplication of natural action,” he says at one point in the documentary. Of course, he doesn’t elaborate. Jay, the subject of a lengthy profile in The New Yorker, has no intention of revealing his secrets.
Magic has been an integral part of his life since his late grandfather, Max Katz, an accountant from Austria, took him under his wings. “I was around magic all the time,” he recalls, saying that his earliest family memories revolved around magical tricks.
Jay turned his first trick on a TV show when he was four years old, prompting admirers to call him “the youngest magician in the world.” He left home, for good, at the age of 16, presumably because his parents opposed his plan to become a professional magician. He worked in resorts in New York state before heading west to California, where he now lives.
Jay appears to have been influenced by some of the greatest masters — Dai Vernon, Charles Miller, Al Flosso and Max Malini, all of whom were legendary figures in the game.
Much of the film is composed of old clips from Jay’s appearances on talk shows and in night clubs and movies. Jay has had cameo roles in a succession of movies, including David Mamet’s House of Cards.
Jay is clearly a master of his craft.