NEWS

** A pre-Halloween screening of A Magical Vision took place in conjunction with a performance by Eugene at Magic Chicago on Thursday, October 30th. The sold out show was huge success--stay tuned for upcoming events and screenings!

** Michael and Eugene Burger visited Chicagoing with Bill Campbell on October 26th to talk up the film in preparation for the screening at Magic Chicago. The segment also featured Benjamin Barnes and Robert Charles of Magic Chicago. Watch a podcast of the show here! (select the October 26th episode) View photos from the taping here!

** Michael Caplan recently returned from the Kidding Around: The Child in Film & Media conference at the University of the District of Columbia, where he presented a paper on teaching storytelling and visual literacy to young children. In addition to documenting his experience creating a parent/student art project at a Montessori school classroom, the paper and presentation outlines the use of Comic Life software to create storyboards. Read more.

** A Magical Vision premiered at the Gene Siskel Film Center on Friday, September 12th. Despite the rain, more than 150 people--film people, magic people, friends, wonderful strangers and, of course, Mr. Eugene Burger--attended. We began with a trailer for our movie now in production, Algren, and then premiered the newly completed A Magical Vision. The reception was great--now we're looking forward to the October 30th screening with Eugene at Magic Chicago!!

**Listen to Michael Caplan on Chicago Public Radio's Eighty Forty-Eight, broadcast originally on Friday, September 12th. Michael answered questions about A Magical Vision in anticipation of the film's world premiere at the Gene Siskel Film Center that evening.

**Michael Caplan will present at Muhlenberg College's Theory and Art of Magic Conference on Performing Magic on March 18th-22nd, 2009. Among the conference's other presenters and performers are Eugene Burger, Robert Giobbi and Max Howard.

** Our latest and greatest project, Algren, is a feature documentary that will revive Nelson Algren, author of The Man with the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side (among others), as the under-celebrated voice for America’s voiceless, and explore his life as an artist whose compassion for humanity—and the underdogs whom he regarded as the "true" America— is a message of universal relevance and timelessness. Algren was a man whose work is and was too readily eschewed in the canon of American literature.