Capital Times Madison Wisconsin Wed Jun 30 1920

The Terror Island ad above claims:

He has leaped, manacled off the Eiffel Tower and the Brooklyn Bridge, releasing himself before reaching the ground.

One of the FACT versus FICTION questions from the Houdini Miniseries Quiz was:

Houdini once jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge?

and the answer was:

Fiction, he leapt off Detroit’s Belle Isle Bridge, among others, but never New York’s favorite landmark.

Well, what about the Eiffel Tower? According to a Grim Game Ad, I blogged about a couple years ago:

As an instance he was once handcuffed, tied and sewn in a canvas sack, and thrown from Eiffel Tower, Paris.  Halfway down Houdini was out of the manacles and the sack and clinging to a parachute.

Of course that same Grim Game Ad also claimed:

He was thrown from Brooklyn Bridge locked in a steel safe.  He came up in one minute.

So take the ads for what they are.

Magicians interest in the movies was spurred by special promotion of The Grim Game for the magic community.  Full-color four-page advertising inserts were published in the magic magazine M-U-M to accompany the release of The Grim Game [August 1919 pages 17-20 and September 1919 pages 29-32].  A special screening of the film was arranged for the Society of American Magicians (SAM), which gave The Grim Game its official endorsement and pledged that its members would help promote the film around the country [Sphinx September 1919 page 162].

At the 1919 SAM screening of The Grim Game, Thurston gave a speech in which he pronounced the film “one of the most wonderful things I have ever seen” and called it Houdini’s “greatest work” [quoted in Sphinx September 1919 page 162].

Houdini followed up The Grim Game with a second feature for Famous Players-Lasky entitled Terror Island. There was also some spectacular ads that accompanied the release of Terror Island in April 1920, that we will take a look at next week.

Source

• Magicians and the Magic of Hollywood Cinema during the 1920s by Matthew Solomon