There is a moment in the original Star Wars that changed filmmaking in ways most people do not consciously notice. Obi-Wan Kenobi, sitting in his modest dwelling on Tatooine, says to Luke: “I was once a Jedi Knight, the same as your father. He was the best star pilot in the galaxy, and a cunning warrior. I understand you’ve become quite a good pilot yourself. And he was a good friend. Which reminds me, I have something here for you. Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough, but your uncle wouldn’t allow it. He feared you might follow old Obi-Wan on some damn fool idealistic crusade like your father did.”
In those few sentences, Obi-Wan references a war, a friendship, a conflict with an uncle, a crusade, and an entire previous chapter of history that the audience has never seen and, in 1977, would not see for decades. The references are casual. They are not explained. They are dropped into the conversation as though they are common knowledge, as though the world existed long before the camera turned on.
This technique — the unexplained reference to a larger world — is one of the most powerful tools in storytelling. It creates the sensation that the story you are experiencing is not the whole story. That there is a before. That there is a wider context. That the characters have lives that extend beyond the frame. And it does all of this without requiring the storyteller to actually build that larger world. The reference alone is enough. The audience’s imagination fills in everything else.
I realized, sitting in a hotel room in Vienna with a script draft in front of me, that my magic performances had no Clone Wars. No unexplained references. No sense of a larger world. Every routine existed in a vacuum — self-contained, self-explanatory, beginning when the lights came up and ending when the applause faded. There was no before. There was no elsewhere. There was no suggestion that my character had a history beyond the stage.
The Flat Character Problem
This flatness was not immediately obvious. My routines were well-scripted, my backstories were developed (thanks to the exercises I had been working on), and my performances were getting consistently good reactions. But there was a quality missing — a quality that I could feel but not name — and the Clone Wars comparison gave me the language for it.
My character felt two-dimensional. Not because he lacked personality, but because he lacked depth. He existed only on stage, only during the performance, only in the present tense. The audience had no reason to believe he existed before the show began or would continue to exist after it ended. He was a character who materialized when needed and dissolved when done, like a video game avatar with no save file.
Real people are not like this. Real people reference things. They mention past experiences in passing. They allude to friends, mentors, journeys, mistakes, discoveries. They carry the residue of a lived life in every sentence they speak. And the audience — without analyzing it, without thinking about it consciously — can tell the difference between a character who has lived and a character who has not.
Building the Reference Catalog
I decided to build what I call a reference catalog — a collection of casual mentions, unexplained allusions, and implied history that I could weave into my scripts. The goal was not to create an elaborate fictional biography. The goal was to create the impression of depth by dropping a few carefully chosen references into the performance.
The first rule I set for myself: the references had to be rooted in truth. Not entirely true, necessarily, but rooted in real experiences that I could deliver with genuine conviction. I am not a good enough actor to convincingly reference experiences I have never had. I am good enough to take real experiences and hint at them without fully explaining them.
Here is an example. In my mentalism portion, there is a moment where I ask a spectator to concentrate. The old version of the script was purely instructional: “I’d like you to think of something and concentrate on it.” The new version includes a reference: “The last time I tried this at a conference in Salzburg, the volunteer was so focused I actually felt nervous. So do me a favor — concentrate, but do not concentrate too hard. I need to be able to keep up.”
Three things happened in that reference. First, I mentioned a previous performance — “the last time I tried this at a conference in Salzburg” — which implies a history of doing this. The audience now knows this is not my first time. I have performed before, in other cities, for other audiences. My character has a past.
Second, I mentioned a specific emotional experience — “I actually felt nervous” — which implies that this ability is not entirely under my control. It is powerful enough to make me nervous. It has consequences that I did not fully anticipate. This adds the precariousness that Derren Brown talks about — the sense that the ability is real but not entirely tame.
Third, I directed the spectator’s behavior with a reference rather than an instruction. Instead of “concentrate,” I told a micro-story that resulted in the spectator concentrating. The reference did the work of the instruction while also building character, implying history, and establishing stakes. One sentence, doing the work of four.
Types of Unexplained References
Through building my catalog, I identified several types of references that work in magic scripts. Each type creates a different dimension of depth.
The mentor reference: “My old friend who taught me this used to say…” or “Someone once told me that the hands remember what the mind forgets.” These references imply that your character did not develop in isolation. Someone guided you. Someone passed knowledge to you. There is a lineage, a tradition, a teacher-student relationship that the audience glimpses but never fully sees.
I use mentor references sparingly and carefully, because the temptation is to over-embellish. I do not claim famous mentors. I do not invent elaborate teaching relationships. I reference “someone who showed me this years ago” or “a friend who knows more about this than I do.” Vague enough to be honest, specific enough to imply a relationship.
The location reference: “The last time I did this in Innsbruck…” or “I first tried this in a hotel bar in Linz, which was either brave or stupid.” These references place your character in specific geographic locations, creating the sense of a performed life. You have been places. You have done this in other rooms, for other people, in other contexts.
For me, the location references are effortless because they are real. I perform across Austria — Vienna, Graz, Salzburg, Linz, Innsbruck, Klagenfurt. I genuinely have stories from different cities, different venues, different audiences. The location references are true. They just happen to also build character.
The failure reference: “I should warn you — this does not always work.” Or: “I once did this for a room of scientists, and let me just say the evening did not go as planned.” Failure references are the most powerful type because they create vulnerability and unpredictability. If the performer admits that this has gone wrong before, the audience believes the outcome is uncertain, which makes the successful outcome dramatically more impactful.
My failure references are genuine. Things have gone wrong in my performances. Not catastrophically, but enough to provide honest material for references that imply my abilities are real but imperfect. “This is the one that keeps me up at night” — a line I use before my closer — is not an exaggeration. The closer is the most demanding piece in my show, and every time I perform it, there is a genuine moment where the outcome is not guaranteed.
The unexplained event reference: “After what happened in Vienna, I promised myself I would always ask permission first.” This is the purest Clone Wars move. Something happened. I am not going to explain what. The audience will never know. But the reference suggests that my character has a history rich enough to include events worth referencing — events significant enough to change my behavior.
The Art of Not Explaining
The critical skill here is restraint. The references must not be explained. The moment you explain a reference, it stops being a window into a larger world and becomes an anecdote. Anecdotes have their place in scripts — I discussed them in earlier posts — but they serve a different function. An explained reference is a story. An unexplained reference is an atmosphere.
“After what happened in Vienna” is powerful specifically because the audience does not know what happened in Vienna. Their imagination fills the gap. Every person in the audience creates their own version of what happened, and their version is more engaging than anything I could tell them, because their version is personalized, shaped by their own fears and curiosities.
If I explained — “After what happened in Vienna, where I accidentally revealed the wrong card and had to improvise for three minutes” — the mystery evaporates. The reference becomes a story about a mistake, which is fine but ordinary. The unexplained version is extraordinary precisely because it is unexplained.
I set a ratio for myself: for every reference that I explain (turning it into a proper anecdote), I include two or three that I leave unexplained. The explained references provide concrete character development. The unexplained references provide the sense of limitless depth beyond the frame.
Testing the Approach
I tested the reference catalog approach at a corporate keynote in Graz, performing for about a hundred people from a technology company. I had woven five references into my thirty-minute set — two mentor references, one location reference, one failure reference, and one unexplained event reference.
The performance itself went well — the reactions were strong, the timing was right, the audience was engaged. But the interesting feedback came afterward. During the post-show reception, three different people referenced my references. “Who was the person who taught you that?” one asked. “What happened in Vienna?” another asked with a grin. The third said something I will never forget: “It sounds like you’ve been doing this for a very long time.”
I had not told them I had been doing this for a long time. I had not claimed decades of experience. I had dropped three unexplained references into a thirty-minute show, and the audience had assembled those references into a character with a long, rich, storied history. They had done the work. The references gave them the materials, and their imaginations built the structure.
The Catalog as a Living Document
My reference catalog is a document on my laptop that grows with every performance. After each show, I note any references that landed well, any that felt forced, and any new references that occurred to me on stage. The catalog now contains about thirty references — far more than I would ever use in a single show. For each performance, I select five or six that fit the audience, the venue, and the flow of the set.
Some references are permanent fixtures. “The last time I tried this” is a construction I use in almost every show, because it always creates the sense of a performed history. Other references rotate in and out depending on the context. A reference to a previous corporate audience works well at a corporate event but would feel odd at a private birthday party.
The key insight is that the catalog is not a script. It is a palette. The references are colors I can use to paint depth into any performance, adjusting the palette to match the canvas. Some shows need more warmth — more mentor references, more personal history. Some shows need more edge — more failure references, more unexplained events. The catalog gives me options without prescribing a formula.
What the Clone Wars Reference Teaches
George Lucas understood something that most storytellers learn the hard way: you do not need to show the audience everything. You do not need to build the entire world. You need to suggest that the world exists and let the audience build it themselves. The Clone Wars reference in the original film was a throwaway line — three words embedded in a longer conversation. But those three words created decades of speculation, fan fiction, and eventual feature films. The unexplained reference was more generative than any explained one could have been.
In magic, the same principle applies. You do not need to tell the audience your entire backstory. You do not need to explain every reference. You need to suggest that your character has a history — a real, lived, complicated history — and let the audience imagine the rest.
A few well-placed references, delivered casually, without emphasis, without explanation, create more depth than an hour of autobiographical monologue. They create the sense that the story the audience is watching is one chapter in a much longer book — a book they will never read, but whose existence makes this chapter richer, more textured, and more real.
My character is not just a performer on a stage. My character is someone who has been to Vienna and something happened there. Someone who learned from a mentor. Someone who once faced a room that did not go as planned. Someone who has been doing this in hotel rooms and conference halls and private events for long enough to have stories worth referencing and wise enough to know that the best stories are the ones you do not fully tell.