I'm KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com. It's The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. And one of the great things about doing this show is you get to do it long enough. You get to make friends. And one of my friends is sitting right across from me, the performer, I'm not going to call him slight-of-hand artist or

illusionist, but the performer, stage, screen, television, and author the last time, in fact,

he was here, is here for this book, Dice. It's Ricky, J. Ricky, first of all, thanks so much

for being here. Thank you. Always fun. Well, we'll fix that. And you're here because the documentary Deceptive Practices that play theatrically is now making its premiere on American Masters.

Yeah, it's hard to believe.

It's actually pretty exciting.

Well, I like about the documentary.

It's about your relationship with your mentors and people who were former people.

And you even started off doing a bit to the camera.

You're quoting, if I'm not mistaken, Divernin, right, talking about cars being living, breathing people?

Living, breathing human beings, he says, yeah.

DiVernan was...

DiVernan and Charlie Miller, I believe, were the greatest sleight of hand artists of the 20th century and maybe ever. And I was incredibly fortunate that I got to spend a lot of time with both of them. And it's one of the great pleasures of this film for me was to be able to talk about them and then other people that I knew as kids.

But Vernon, I moved to California basically to be with Vernon. I grew up in Brooklyn and New York

and then high school and New Jersey and college in New York and then eventually came out here

just to be with him and then Charlie. Because I guess I wonder, and I like the idea that this documentary takes us to the people who you were attracted to, really,

who, in one way or another had this varying kinds of charisma.

And I just found that interesting, these guys who had this force of personality that you were attracted to.

Well, they were characters, and I can't say if my love of characters was instilled by them

or I already had it.

Well, I guess it must have been because, you know, I was meeting these people literally

when I was four and five years old because they were friends of my grandfathers.

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