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| Fame & Fortune: Magician Penn
Jillette |
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Bankrate: Was $50,000
what it was done for?
Penn Jillette: Really
hard to say. No one knows. It was my money, and I wasn't paying
attention.
Bankrate: But it was
in that ballpark?
Penn Jillette: Yeah.
And, huge amounts of money were spent to clean up the sound and
the video and make it so it could be released without embarrassment.
But I'm not counting that. I'm just saying, what it took to sell
it to Sundance was five digits. And it doesn't matter whether it
was $90,000 or $20,000, five digits is the important number there.
For a Nobel Prize, you only need the right number of zeros.
Bankrate: You have
so much going on: books, a TV show, DVDs, a radio show, CDs. Is
thinking up new avenues of business half the fun for you?
Penn Jillette: You
know, I never think in terms of venue. We've played Broadway twice,
and people would say, "Is playing Broadway some sort of dream
come true?" I would always say that I don't understand the
question. How can you have a goal be a venue? When someone says
to me, "When I was a kid, I always wanted to be in movies,"
I just go, "You didn't care what movie it was? Would you be
proud of being in 'King Kong'? Or would you wanna be in 'Being John
Malkovich'?" I loved our show, "The Penn and Teller Show,"
and I was thrilled to go to Broadway, but if you would have said
to me, "Penn, you can make the same amount of money, be the
same level of star and get the same critical acclaim, and we're
going to even the playing field every way we possibly can, but it's
not this show," I would have no interest at all. I had no desire
whatsoever to make a movie. We got the idea for "The Aristocrats,"
and it was a beautiful idea, so we did it. I get an idea for what
I want to do, then try to find the venue that it fits into best,
and sometimes I have to push and shove. I guess you can say that
on "The Aristocrats," I was pretty aware that the right
venue was the DVD, but I understood that in the business plan, putting
out a movie theatrically has now become the advertising for the
DVD.
Bankrate: It's amazing
how the business has changed that way.
Penn Jillette: Yeah,
it's beautiful. It's great. And it's amazing how the business will
keep changing, that's what's so good.
Bankrate: Considering
all you do, is any one thing your main thing?
Penn Jillette: I'd
say "The Penn & Teller Show." That's what I do.
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