Stealing Magic

On piracy, accountability, and a documentary

This one’s a little different.

Most of these posts start on a drive to a gig or from a gig. I’m typically in the car and something’s rattling around in my head and that I can’t shake until I say it out loud. This one started on the drive home from the city on a Saturday afternoon, and I wasn’t coming from a show. I was coming from a movie.

My old boss and friend Andi Gladwin premiered his documentary, Stealing Magic, at the Tribeca Film Festival this past weekend. I got to catch the second New York screening, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. So here we are. Time to put my film critic hat on and use my college degree for once.

I want to talk about the film, what it meant to me personally, and why I think it matters not just for people in magic, but for anyone who makes things for a living.

What the Film Is About

Stealing Magic follows Andi and his business partner, George Luck, two of the many people behind Vanishing Inc., one of the most respected magic companies in the world, as they spend years tracking down one of the magic community’s most notorious pirates. The target goes by Erdnase’s Magic Store, and if you’re in magic, you already know the name and the website. You know the damage. But you may not know the frustration.

If you’re not in magic: piracy in this world is someone taking instructional videos and manuscripts that magicians have spent years developing, and selling them for their own profit at extremely discounted prices. The creator sees nothing. And in a small industry where a single well-selling product can represent months of a person’s income, the impact is real and it’s personal. The film tracks Andi and George as they try to figure out who is behind it and what, if anything, they can actually do about it.

The film is funny. It’s tense. There are real stakes, real frustrations, real moments where you think they’re close and then the whole thing slips. It’s a genuine crime investigation film and the kind that pulls you along even if you have no prior investment in the subject matter.

The film is only ninety minutes and it goes fast.

I Thought I Already Knew This Story

Here’s the thing. I worked at Vanishing Inc. for a stretch of time, and during that time I was around for a lot of the early chapters of this movie. I heard Andi talk about the pirate problem. I thought I had a pretty solid handle on what had happened.

I did not.

What I had was the first half half of the film. What unfolds is the second half. The full arc of what they went through, where it went, what they actually uncovered, how it ended is something I had no idea about. Sitting in that theater, I kept thinking: I was there for this and I still didn’t know this. That’s a remarkable thing for a documentary to do to someone who was a peripheral part of the story. It’s also a good reminder that working alongside something isn’t the same as understanding it. I saw pieces while the film shows you the whole picture.

The Warehouse Scene

There’s a moment in the film, and I won’t say much about the context, where they briefly show footage of the Vanishing Inc. warehouse fire. A fire that happened while I was at the company. I’d never seen the footage before.

You see Andi opening the doors to the warehouse. You see the ash and the rubble. The thousands of tricks that were burnt away. And even though I knew it had happened, even though I’d heard about it at the time, watching that footage in a theater was something different entirely. It hit in a way I wasn’t prepared for. The film made me feel it. That’s what good documentaries do. They take things you think you already understand and show you the weight of them.

Why Piracy Actually Matters

I want to stay here for a minute, because before seeing this film I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t fully feel the gravity of the piracy issue. I understood the legality of it. I knew it was wrong. But as a performer rather than a creator of magic products, I hadn’t really sat with what it means to someone who has put a year or more of their life into developing an effect and then watched someone sell it for ten bucks out of a fake storefront in another country. The film changes that.

You hear from creators directly and empathize with their frustration, helplessness, and in some cases, the very real financial damage it caused them. And you realize that this isn’t a victimless crime. Someone made something and someone else is selling it without permission and keeping 100% of the money. That’s it.

What makes it even more painful is how little recourse there is. The magic industry is small. Most creators are individuals or tiny operations. The legal infrastructure for pursuing this kind of infringement is not built for them. And yet Andi and George pursued it anyway. For years. That’s what the film is really about, underneath the piracy investigation: two people who decided that the right thing was worth doing even when it was hard, even when the outcome was uncertain.

That’s not a small thing.

A Film Magic Has Never Had

I’ve seen a lot of content about magic. Specials, documentaries, YouTube deep-dives, interview series. Most of it is about the tricks, the secrets, the mechanics. Which is fine. That’s what people usually want.

But Stealing Magic is not about any of that. It’s about the people who make magic their life’s work, and what it costs them, and what they’re willing to fight for. And I don’t think the magic world has had something like that before. Not at this level, not told this well, not with a director like Matthew Testa who treated the story with the seriousness it deserved while also keeping it extremely entertaining.

The Q&A after the screening had Andi, George, and Matthew onstage together. You could feel how much the project had meant to all of them and how long they’d been carrying it. Andi is not a filmmaker by trade. He’s a magician and a businessman who decided that this story needed to exist and then figured out how to make it exist. I’m really proud of him for seeing it through.

Who Should See This Film

If you’re in magic: obviously! It’s about your community, your industry, and the people who are trying to protect it. You owe it to yourself to understand what actually happened with this pirate, and this is the most complete account of it that exists.

If you’re not in magic but you like crime documentaries, investigative journalism, or films about people going up against institutions with no guarantee of winning: also yes. The magic context is accessible because you don’t need any prior knowledge of the industry. The story works on its own terms. And if you make anything for a living, I think this film will mean something to you. Because it’s fundamentally about the question of what happens when someone takes what you made and profits from it, and whether anything can be done about that, and what it costs you to find out.

Right now the film is doing several festival screenings, with premieres in Washington coming up soon. I hope it lands on a streaming platform at some point so that it reaches the audience it deserves. It will.

One Last Thing

Driving home after the screening, the thing I kept coming back to was that the things we’re closest to are sometimes the hardest to see clearly. We think proximity equals understanding. It doesn’t. Understanding takes time, and the willingness to look at the whole picture rather than the part we happened to be standing next to.

Andi and George spent years looking at the whole picture. The film is the result of that.

Go see it when you can. Til next week, keep driving!

Jason