Amazing Randi has a secret surfacing
In the blink of an eye, the love of the Amazing Randi’s life — the man he had shared a home with for nearly 25 years — vanished.
In 2011, federal agents showed up on Randi’s doorstep in Plantation, Florida, looking for his partner, José Alvarez. They said they needed to talk to Alvarez about identity fraud, handcuffed him and hauled him away.
Randi recalls, “I was totally bewildered by it, and I’m in the business of bewildering people. I didn’t know which way to turn. It was the hardest moment of mylife.” For the better part of his 86 years, Randi — born Randall James Hamilton Zwinge — has been making a name for himself as the most daring escape artist since Houdini. But in the early 1970s, he decided his expertise could be put to better use and set out to expose psychics, faith healers — anyone who made a profit while claiming to have “supernatural” powers.
A leader for skeptics
This was the story codirectors Justin Weinstein and Tyler Measom set out to tell when they decided to make a documentary about Randi. They wanted “An Honest Liar” to focus on Randi’s role as the leader of the “skeptic movement.” It would explain how he had uncovered frauds such as Peter Popoff, a televangelist who used a hidden earpiece to “cure” the ailments of his followers.
“An Honest Liar” turns out to be a very different story, one that reveals Randi had engaged in a deception of his own. A camera crew had been following Randi for a year when Alvarez was arrested. In fact, Weinstein was set to travel to Florida on the morning of the raid when he received a panicked call from Randi: “There’s been an emergency,” he said.” Don’t come.”
But Weinstein went, seeking an answer to the question that would become the center of the film: Just how much did Randi know about his partner’s true identity? Was he aware that the man he had lived with was not José Alvarez, a U.S. citizen whose identity had been stolen?
Randi had met Alvarez in 1986 at the Fort Lauderdale Public Library. Alvarez, who had fled his native Venezuela after being persecuted for his sexual orientation, was doing research for an art project. Randi saw Alvarez poring over space imagery and invited him to check out his Questar telescope. Magician and escape artist James Randi is the focus of the new documentary "An Honest Liar."
“So I went to his place, and he’d calibrated the telescope so that I could see Saturn with the rings,” recalls Alvarez, 53. “Then Saturn left the viewfinder, and I said, ‘It moved.’ Randi said, ‘No, the Earth moved.’ And at that moment I thought, ‘I want to get to know this man more.’ ”
They were something of an odd couple. There was a 33-year age difference between them. Randi looked like a wizard; he dressed like a professor-type, was bald and sported a bushy white beard. Alvarez was trim and fit, with thick, curly hair. But the relationship worked. Initially, Alvarez looked to Randi as a moral compass. But since the years started taking their toll on Randi, those roles have changed.
Randi suffered a heart attack in 2006 and three years later was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. Then in 2013, he had surgery for aneurysms in his legs and now walks with a cane.
A helpful untruth
Sitting next to Alvarez during an interview in Los Angeles, Randi seems sharp of mind as he rages against those who believe in the supernatural. Deep down, he must know that deception can be used for good reasons, at least sometimes. Authorities have ruled that Alvarez will not be deported, but in the scene where the filmmakers get to the truth, Randi shares what he knew about Alvarez’s identity — and then angrily insists that footage must not be cut.
“For him to lie about something in the Amazing Randi persona is wrong,” says Weinstein, “but deeper down, he knows that there are times when deception can be helpful.”
Alvarez says, “When you get to know him, you see what a caring person he is. The reason he does what he does is to help people who are being taken advantage of. He will go to any lengths to keep somebody safe from harm. And that’s what he did for me.”