Directed by Frank Oz and written and performed by Derek DelGaudio, In & Of Itself is a filmed stage show – part magic act, part storytelling monologue. DelGaudio takes the audience on a wide-ranging journey that cleverly combines illusion and probing questions about how we define ourselves and how others define us.
But today we’re not talking about any of that. Instead we’re going to focus on its use of magic – one trick in particular. About halfway through the show, DelGaudio engages in some old fashioned close-up card tricks. And one of those tricks makes for such a clear demonstration of how to escalate that we had to take a break it down here.
The Set-up
As Christopher Nolan worked so hard to show us, narrative often works like a magic trick. Act 1 is the set-up; Act 2 the trick as we exploit the promise of the premise; and Act 3 the pay-off, as we unite all those elements into a cohesive whole. In & Of Itself just makes that simile literal, combining magic with its narrative.
But for that chain of narrative to work, you need escalation. To stay in the same mode, to do nothing new with your trick, risks boring the audience. Do something impressive and it amazes me; do it again and you bore me.
At one point during his card routine, DelGaudio successfully pulls out every spade in the deck while blindfolded, dropping the other cards into three separate piles. Up until this point DelGaudio has been letting us in on the broad strokes of how card tricks work. He shows us the work he put into mastering the manipulation of a deck, the ten-thousand hours to be so polished. He lets us feel like we’re in on the trick with him.
The Escalation
But as he shows this impressive feat of having correctly pulled each spade, he tells us something. He had an audience member, at another performance, ask why he hadn’t put the spades in order. A joke, but it sets a new expectation. So DelGaudio picks up the pile of spades, flips them facedown, and deals them back out in order. A new round of applause!
Here DelGaudio has taken the original trick, set clear expectations of a new way to dazzle, and then meets them confidently and in style. He found a new way to impress that builds and riffs on the original trick. He could have done something completely different to impress us, but that would require starting over. Losing all that narrative momentum. Instead he harnesses the work of the first trick to quickly execute a second, more improved version.
The Pay-off
But the trick’s not done. DelGaudio, like all good storytellers, knows that you need a beginning, a middle, and an end, even just for a quick card trick in the middle of a magic show. He has now wowed us with all the spades, then all the spades in order. Each time he makes the effort to show us the work, so that we can be impressed by this feat. And then?
He flips over each of the remaining three piles of facedown cards – and each one is a complete suit, in order. The trick that he’d worked so hard to pull off, first getting the same suit, then getting them in order, he’d already finished three times over at the start of the whole sequence. Hot damn! The surprising but inevitable conclusion to the mini-narrative that he’s established.
The Take-away
Honestly, it feels like an unending list of lessons you can take from this lesson in escalating a sequence. In fact, I’m going to have to break them out:
Show your work
Part of why this trick is so effective is that DelGaudio makes it look hard. Clearly any step of this whole thing he could knock out with ease. But by blindfolding himself, and questioning whether he can pull it off, it makes each reveal feel earned. Do the same for your characters! Don’t go easy on them. Let us see them work hard at each step and escalation, so the ending feels earned.
Set expectations
DelGaudio clearly communicates at each step what he is about to attempt. This helps the audience – now we know where to look, and that we should be impressed by. But it also helps DelGaudio, keeping us focused where he wants us to be. Do the same in your script! Tell us what to expect, so we can track the character’s progress easily – and so we’re looking at the thing you want us looking at.
Establish rules
Hand-in-hand with communication, this one. Rules don’t get said aloud (except for the blindfold), but we implicitly understand them because we know what magic tricks are. DelGaudio, with just a deck, his hands, and his training, will execute a series of three tricks for isolating and organizing different suits without his looking at the cards. Imagine if he he’d sat down and started this process, and then a team of four came on to help him go through the deck and get everything organized for him. It would achieve the goal of the trick, but it wouldn’t be satisfying. It would feel like he cheated. So for your sequences and set pieces, ask yourself what the rules are, whether you’ve said them out loud or they’re implicit in the scenario, and make sure you follow them.
Stay on theme
Similarly, DelGaudio stays within the established theme of suits & order as he builds the trick. Another hypothetical – imagine he’d done the first two parts the same, and then flipped over the remaining three stacks to reveal that they’d been replaced with Pokemon cards. While impressive, it wouldn’t feel satisfying. It would be outside the theme and focus established so far by the trick. Keeping that unity of theme is what allows the final beat to feel both surprising and inevitable.
Pace yourself
Like I said at the start, DelGaudio clearly could have just dealt the deck into four stacks, flipped them all over, and each one would have been organized by suit and in order. And that would have gotten some applause. But DelGaudio chose to pace himself, building up to the reveal of how he’d organized the other three stacks. Because of all the above elements, once DelGaudio finally reaches the climax of this little set-piece, it feels far more impressive earned. So don’t rush your set-piece! Make sure you’re giving yourself time and space to build to the coolest moment, the highest peak. Doing so gives it a frame of reference so we understand just how cool it is, like DelGaudio pulling just the spades at the first step so we feel extra amazed that he already did it with all three remaining suits.
Go Deeper
Honestly, that’s just scratching the surface of what you can take away from this trick. It’s impeccable in its classical structure. And the same ideas can translate across any sequence with a beginning, middle and end – whether it’s a joke, or a horror scene, or the arc of the movie. So give it a watch and see what you can take away for your writing!