To really make an impression, he knew he’d need to participate in the studio system, to make a feature-length blockbuster, rather than a small-time independent production. Billboard deemed it a “cracker-jack production” that “will thunder down the ages to perpetuate the fame of this remarkable genius.” Financially, though, it was a nonstarter it took Houdini four years in court to recover his earnings. (Houdini claimed to have designed the villain himself.) The series was well-received. Earlier in the year, to test the waters, he’d starred in a fifteen-part serial, The Master Mystery, featuring a robot with a human brain who could shoot lasers out of his fingertips. Like the movies themselves, Houdini had emerged from vaudeville, and he understood film’s appeal intuitively. “I think the film profession is the greatest, and that the moving picture is the most wonderful thing in the world,” he told an interviewer. Still, Houdini was always looking for new frontiers, and he believed that Hollywood was the next step. He was a living legend, and a world-class egotist: he named his pets after himself printed his initials on his pajamas, his bathroom tiles, and his cuff links and signed most of his trick blueprints “H. He’d spent years diving handcuffed into ice-cold rivers, locking himself in jail cells, maneuvering his body in and out of sealed crates and prison vans and (once) the belly of a beached whale. Already, the magician was roughly as famous as any American performer could be in his era. Houdini Tribute.In 1919, a year after he’d startled America by vanishing a four-thousand-pound elephant named Jenny onstage at the New York Hippodrome, Harry Houdini arrived in Hollywood to make his first feature film. Houdini & Bess w/ Oscar Teale exposing slate writing fraud. Haversat & Ewing Galleries auction starts January 25. Today the Seay Building is included in the National Register and The NJ Registry of Historic Places. Edward Seay who served as eighth president of Centenary from 1948 until 1976. Years later the main building would be named in honor of Dr. The old cornerstone of the original building was placed beside it, so today one can visit the structure and see not one but two cornerstones, one dated 1869 and the other 1900.īy September 1901 the new buildings were put into use, even though not all construction had been completed. On Decemthe cornerstone of the new building was laid by Dr. Mediums used this method to allegedly receive messages from the dead. Left: Oscar Teale, Harry Houdini, and Harry’s wife Bess Houdini exposing a practice known as slate writing. When Houdini died, Oscar Teale served as one of his pallbearers and also designed Houdini’s cemetery monument in Queens, New York.Ībove: Oscar Teale, Harry Houdini, and fellow magician Julius Zancig. Teale has written books about magic, one of which is in the collection of Centenary’s Taylor Memorial Library. Oscar Teale was also very interested in magic and was a good friend of Harry Houdini. From Jefferson Street the optical illusion is of a single, massive structure taking up an entire block. To limit the damage fire might pose in the future, he separated the north and south dormitories (for young men and women, respectively) from the main administration building, which still stands on the same footprint as the original school. Teale, a prominent architect of churches and homes in the New Jersey and New York area. The man who was eventually awarded the contract was Oscar S. Members of the Board of Trustees were determined to rebuild and asked several architects to prepare plans and bids. After the fire of 1899, Centenary was in need of a new administration building.
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