It is dark outside and I am sitting alone at home, a silent phone to my ear. I had been promised that I would finally get to speak to the man known to his fans and friends as the Amazing Johnathan, but the minutes tick past and the streetlamps come on outside my window. In his heyday, the Amazing Johnathan was earning $3m a year and had a stage charisma as outsized as his tricks, which included appearing to snort an entire jar of cocaine, and seeming to plunge a spike through his tongue. But tonight, as the PR tries frantically to put my call through to him, there is only silence at the other end of the phone. The Amazing Johnathan has disappeared.
“Yeah, welcome to my club,” laughs Ben Berman when I tell him about my failure to speak to the man born John Edward Szeles. Berman is the director and co-star of The Amazing Johnathan Documentary, which has already been compared to Catfish and Exit Through the Giftshop, which is pretty impressive, given this is Berman’s first feature-length movie. But perhaps the most impressive thing is that he was ever able to film the Amazing Johnathan at all.
“There were so many times when I was supposed to film in Vegas, or we’d agree to be in this state on that day – and then it turned out that he and his wife were out of town that weekend. It was really hard,” Berman says. Yet he spent two and a half years with the Amazing Johnathan. How could he bear being toyed with like this?
“I like his sensibility, all that darkness and irreverence. There were many problems caused by him, and as painful as it was, I knew it would be valuable for my film,” Berman says.
It is fortunate for Berman that he was able to see the bright side because to say the magician caused him “many problems” is like saying Noah and his ark encountered some bad weather.
Originally, Berman set out to make a short, straight film about the Amazing Johnathan, now aged 61, confronting his mortality. Since the 1980s, the Amazing Johnathan had been a staple on American TV, making guest appearances on talkshows where he would do tricks such as appear to swallow his own eyeball. He was fun and funny, not cheesy like David Copperfield but not po-faced like David Blaine. At the beginning of this century he landed highly lucrative gigs in Las Vegas, and his wild-eyed, leonine face stared out from billboards across the Vegas strip.
“I lived in Vegas in 2005 for a few months and I’d see the Amazing Johnathan in adverts out there,” says Louis Theroux, a fan of Berman’s documentary. “There are certain people like that in Vegas – magicians, hypnotists, singers – and you think, are these people famous anywhere else? But he obviously wasn’t a normal magician.”
Then, in 2014, the Amazing Johnathan disappeared.
“I was told I have a year to live,” he announced during a talk that year. The audience, assuming this is another of his pranks, start to laugh, but he stops them: “Not a joke,” he says, his voice cracking.
But after three years of waiting to die at home, the Amazing Johnathan was still alive and desperate to return to the stage. That was when Berman turned up. Except, as he captures in his movie, that is when the problems started. Because, as well as the difficulty of trying to film the Amazing Johnathan – who is either awol or smoking crystal meth in his bedroom – it turns out there are two, or maybe three, other documentarians also making a movie about the Amazing Johnathan.
On top of that, Berman begins to wonder if the Amazing Johnathan is dying at all. After all, the evidence is right in front of us, lying in the pool, high on meth, three years after he was given a year to live. A friend warns Berman: “Can you trust anything a magician says?”
Berman increasingly turns the film on himself, asking why he wants to make this documentary anyway, and whether he is disappointed that maybe the Amazing Johnathan isn’t dying, and, if so, what does that say about him? He also confronts the other documentary crews.
“When you make a documentary, you are often aware of a journalist or director circling the same subject, and you either abandon the subject or ignore it. But you definitely don’t feature the other team,” says Theroux. “I’m in favour of showing things you’re not supposed to see, like sound recorders, or someone tripping. But saying you’re having to work around other crews, that’s amazing. So I thought it was very bold of Ben and we get the sense of Johnathan as this supreme hustler and rogue.”
To say any more would commit hideous spoilers, but let’s just say that much remains unexplained – including, most notably, whether Berman smokes meth with the Amazing Johnathan when the magician makes that a condition of them continuing to make their film.
“Well, you don’t see me do it, so legally we’re in the clear!” Berman laughs. “Such a big theme of the movie is trying to determine what’s truth and what’s illusion, and there are still some things I don’t know. So I’m going to stay cryptic on that.”
Berman also asks himself if there is something in his past that draws him towards this (possibly) dying magician, and so, with Johnathan now apparently out of the picture, he interviews his own, utterly delightful father, Doug.
“When Ben pointed the camera at me, I was thinking why would anyone be interested in me, and that the project could be ill-fated. But he was able to tell a very entertaining story with it!” Doug tells me by email.
Endearingly, Doug edits my questions during our interview “to avoid spoiling some of the plot for your readers”. It is reminiscent of how his son deconstructs his own documentary as he is creating it, unpicking the morality of documentaries such as the one he is making.
“I realised pretty early on that the movie was taking on a structure that wasn’t traditional and, instead of seeing that as a negative, I decided to lean into it. I like that it became a documentary about documentaries,” says Berman.
Berman says his influences in the film range from Albert and David Maysles (Gimme Shelter, Grey Gardens) to Andrew Jarecki’s All Good Things, with its twist of a final act. Theroux mentions Michael Rubbo’s Waiting for Fidel, in which the subject of the documentary never turns up, as well as Nick Broomfield’s Driving Me Crazy, in which the documentarian is repeatedly frustrated in his effort to make the film he wants to, about a musical show in Munich.
“Sometimes it takes a non doc person to bring something to the genre that refreshes it. Like with Anvil!, which Sasha Gervasi made, and you can see that he’s not a documentarian but a feature-film writer looking for a third act,” says Theroux.
As Berman says, much remains opaque by the end of the film, and just as I am thinking the Amazing Johnathan will remain mysterious to me, after various failed connections, I suddenly find myself speaking to him late one night.
“I like the documentary, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not really about me – it’s more about Ben,” says the distinctive irascible voice down the line.
But why did he have so many documentary crews following him around? Was that just to mess with Ben?
“Well, no one yet has made the documentary I want! And wouldn’t you want as many documentaries as possible?” he replies, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.
He is not, he says, going to die any time soon, “which makes me look like a big liar, but I’m not.”
Shouldn’t he stop smoking all that meth if he’s so ill?
“I’m not going to stop taking drugs now because I’m dying – that’s the stupidest fucking reason ever to quit drugs!” he barks.
The Amazing Johnathan has to go to the doctor now so I ask one last question: why has it been so hard for me to get hold of him?
“Oh I just got the time wrong before,” he says.
Sometimes the mysterious truth turns out to be wholly prosaic.
The Amazing Johnathan Documentary is released in the UK on 19 November. Louis Theroux will host a Q&A screening of the film on that date, to be simulcast nationwide across the UK
