Magician '' Jay first performed in public at the age of seven, in 1953, when he appeared on the television program
Time for Pets. He is most likely the youngest magician to perform a full magic act on TV, the first magician to ever play comedy clubs, and probably the first magician to open for a rock and roll band. At New York's
Electric Circus in the 1960s, he performed on a bill between
Ike and Tina Turner and
Timothy Leary, who lectured about
LSD. He quickly developed a following among magic aficionados, and a reputation for sleight-of-hand feats that baffled even his colleagues. In his 1993
New Yorker profile of Jay,
Mark Singer related the following story from playwright
David Mamet and theater director
Gregory Mosher: Three of Jay's one-man shows,
Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants,
Ricky Jay: On the Stem, and ''Ricky Jay: A Rogue's Gallery'', were directed by Mamet, who also cast Jay in a number of his films. A collector and historian, Jay was a student and friend of
Dai Vernon, whom he called "the greatest living contributor to the magical art." He collected rare books and manuscripts, art, and other artifacts connected to the history of magic, gambling, unusual entertainments, and frauds and confidence games. Jay opposed any public revelations of the techniques of magic. and left the series at the end of the first season.
Consultant As an expert on magic, gambling, con games and unusual entertainment, Jay was a consultant on Hollywood projects for many years, beginning with his work on
Francis Ford Coppola's production of
Caleb Deschanel's
The Escape Artist. Other early work included teaching
Robert Redford how to manipulate coins for
The Natural and working with
Douglas Trumbull on his
Showscan project
New Magic (1983). In the early 1990s, Jay and Michael Weber created a firm, Deceptive Practices, providing "Arcane Knowledge on a Need-to-Know Basis" to film, television and stage productions. By offering both vast historical expertise and creative invention, they were able to provide surprising practical solutions to real production challenges. Among many accomplishments, they designed the wheelchair that hid
Gary Sinise's legs in
Forrest Gump, the glass that "drinks itself" used by the gorilla in
Congo, and an illusion "in which a man climbs to the top of a ladder of light and vanishes in midair" for the Broadway production of
Angels in America: Perestroika. Other projects they worked on included
The Prestige,
The Illusionist,
Sneakers,
Leap of Faith,
Wolf,
The Parent Trap,
I Love Trouble,
The Great Buck Howard,
Heartbreakers, and ''
Ocean's Thirteen''. Additionally, he worked with libraries and museums on their collections, including the Mulholland Library of Conjuring and the Allied Arts and the
Museum of Jurassic Technology in
Culver City,
California.
Lectures and exhibitions Jay authored numerous articles and delivered many lectures and demonstrations on such subjects as conjuring literature, con games, sense perception, and unusual entertainments. Among his presentations: • "Sleight and Shadow", at the New York
Metropolitan Museum of Art • "Belknap Visitor in the Humanities" lecture on the relationship between magicians and mediums, at
Princeton University • "Doing Likewise: Imitation, Emulation, and Mimesis", at the New York Institute of Humanities, hosted by
Jonathan Miller. • "Hocus Pocus in Perfection: Four Hundred Years of Conjuring and Conjuring Literature," the Harold Smith Memorial Lecture at
Brown University. • "Splendors of Decaying Celluloid", with
Errol Morris, Rosamond Purcell and
Bill Morrison at the New York Institute for the Humanities. • "The Origins of the Confidence Game", at the conference of Police Against Confidence Crime. • "Chirosophi: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Conjuring Literature," at the
Henry E. Huntington Library in
San Marino, California. • "Fast and Loose: The Techniques and Literature of Cheating", at the William Andrew Clark Memorial Library,
UCLA. • "The Mystery of Fasting Impostors," and "The Avant Garde Art of Armless Calligraphers", at
Amherst College. • "Sense, Perception, & Nonsense" at the
University of Rhode Island Festival of the Arts. • "Illusion as Truth", at the International Design Conference in Aspen (keynote address). • "Prose & Cons: The Early Literature of Cheating", at the
New York Public Library (Pforzheimer Lecture Series) and the
Chicago Humanities Festival. • "Magic & Science", at the
TED Conference in
Monterey, California. Jay also lectured at
Harvard University,
USC, the
Grolier Club, the
Hammer Museum,
Getty Center, and
Town Hall Theatre in New York City. In 1999 he guest-curated an exhibit at the Harvard Theater Collection entitled "The Imagery of Illusion: Nineteenth Century Magic and Deception." Exhibitions of material from his collections have been mounted at the Hammer Museum, the
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts,
University of California, Davis, the Christine Burgin Gallery, the
Museum of Jurassic Technology, and UCLA's
Clark Library. He loaned material to the Getty Center for their exhibit "Devices of Wonder" the
Skirball Museum, the
Huntington Library, the
Whitney Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art for an exhibit entitled "Wordplay: Matthias Buchinger's Drawings From the Collection of Ricky Jay" in 2016. == Documentary film ==