Was Tony Curtis’ 1953 Houdini or Adrien Brody’s 2014 Houdini miniseries the first biopic to acknowledge Houdini’s film career? Let’s look at the evidence:

The Tony Curtis film originally was going to feature a recreation of Houdini’s death defying plane to plane mid-air transfer and wing walk from his 1919 film, The Grim Game. This is significant in that all the movies so far made about Houdini’s life and career have ignored his stint as a silent movie star in Hollywood. But here is evidence that the 1953 film did not ignore this aspect of Houdini’s life. It just wound up on the cutting room floor.  My question is, where is this footage today?  [John Cox]

In 2012, I went in search of the lost plane to plane transfer and discovered some interesting things about the Tony Curtis movie. Click on the link above. Well in the Houdini miniseries, the footage did not end up on the cutting room floor.  We see Houdini (Adrien Brody) and Bess (Kristen Connolly) sitting in a theater watching actual clips from the 1919 movie, The Grim Game, along with some shots of Adrien Brody hanging from a rope of one of the planes. Brody makes the following comment: “I’m on the ground the whole time; it’s fake.  It’s all Hollywood”.   Connolly says: “Look at the bright side Harry, it’s good publicity for the real thing”. As it turns out, Houdini was on the ground the whole time, while his stunt double, Lieutenant Robert E. Kennedy, hung from a rope and attempted to perform the plane-to plane descent before the planes collided in mid-air and came crashing down to the ground. The 1953 Houdini movie did not ignore this aspect of Houdini’s career, but the 2014 History’s Houdini miniseries is the first to actually portray it on the final product.