Las Vegas Weekly

March 10, 2009 · 9:28 AM

New Tom Hanks film has ties to The Amazing Kreskin and Robin Leach

By Robin Leach

The Amazing Kreskin and Bernadette Peters.

Photo: www.amazingkreskin.com

The new Tom Hanks movie The Great Buck Howard based on a fictional Las Vegas mentalist may well have been inspired by or modeled after the real-life antics of my friend The Amazing Kreskin! One of the scenes in the movie is similar to a stunt that I once filmed for my old TV show Lifestyles of the Rich & famous with Kreskin, who performs regularly here in Las Vegas.

Before I get ahead of myself, though, let me tell you about Buck Howard the film. It’s the story of a mentalist extraordinaire who in younger times appeared as a miracle marvel on The Tonight Show 61 times, but now in old age he’s discovered that the trickery has disappeared and the fans have vanished. Emily Blunt plays the role of a publicist, and Tom Hanks’ son Colin plays the assistant, with Tom producing and acting as his on- and off-screen dad. Tom Arnold also stars in the film.

I invited Kreskin to appear on Lifestyles and my ABC late-night TV series Nightcap -- and on both appearances he dumbfounded the audience and me. For Lifestyles, he challenged me to “get lost” anywhere I wanted in Manhattan and he would find me. I chose to swim underwater in a rooftop health club pool -- and, believe it or not, he found me using his powers. The odds were impossible, yet he’s never lost that challenge. On Nightcap, we hid his paycheck in an envelope on the set. Believe it or not, he found that, as well!

Kreskin says when he first saw the rough cut of Tom’s film last year, there were 32 incidents of mentalism included that he’d featured in his act over the years. He said the writer had originally worked for him in the 1990s and that the Hanks family had insisted he was fine with all the mentalism and magic used in the film.

The comedy drama that also features Martha Stewart, Conan O’Brien and Jon Stewart as themselves is set for a March 20 release, and Kreskin says the one thing the film can’t show is his hypnotic phenomena because that’s all mental and in his mind. “They can’t get a camera inside my brain, so that simply can’t be shown on film -- so I’m not worried about it diminishing my skills!”

Share This