Michael Close isn't the only one who consulted for 'Nightmare Alley.'
From the December 16th Instagram post by The Evasons:
Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley is finally out! We chatted about our involvement with the film recently with our friend Michael Jons. Check out the video interview…
From the December 16th article "Oscar-Winning director Guillermo del Toro Calls on The Evasons for Advice for his Latest film 'Nightmare Alley'" by Glenda Fordham at Fordham PR:
Without giving anything away, what did the Oscar-winning director ask of you?
Guillermo said that he was a huge fan of magic, and a member of the Magic Castle (private club in Hollywood, which we are also members of). He felt it was important that he remain true to the original story, and to also be respectful of magic history. Our task was to read the script (and every revision that followed) to provide notes about any scenes that pertained to methods, psychology and the performance of mentalism. On the first phone call, Guillermo told us about his love and respect for magic. He was sensitive about exposure of secret methods, and he didn’t want to reveal any more than necessary in his movie, while keeping the storyline as authentic as possible. He wanted our perspective, as experts in the field of two-person mentalism, to advise and give insight line by line, scene by scene. Anyone who hasn’t studied what we have studied, to the depth and degree that we have studied and performed, has no idea what is possible with two-person telepathy. Some things in his original script sounded great and made for an interesting story, but just weren’t practical for a mentalism team to actually perform on stage during the era when the story takes place. Nightmare Alley was originally a novel by William Lindsay Gresham published in 1946. It has always had a degree of controversy among magicians and mentalists, yet it’s a film that we all love because we can relate to it in so many ways.
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