From the NEW YORK TIMES - He was 78 Years old, and I was personally a big fan of "Force Of Thought" among many other gems:
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Charles Reynolds, who described his business as providing “chaste, charming, weird, wonderful and supernatural illusions” — and who proved it by coming up with two entirely different ways to make an elephant disappear — died on Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 78.

The cause was liver cancer, said his wife, Regina, who is his only survivor.

Mr. Reynolds belonged to the circumspect, virtually invisible world of “backroom boys” who help magicians refine their acts. In “Merlin,” a 1983 Broadway musical starring Doug Henning, he figured out how to make a live white horse and rider vanish into thin air. In “Blackstone!,” a 1980 Broadway show, he helped Harry Blackstone Jr. bifurcate his wife with a buzz saw.

He was producer, director, magic creator and magic consultant for television, stage and film productions from Hollywood and Broadway to London, Paris and Hong Kong. He was chief magic consultant to Mr. Henning for all eight of his annual one-hour network magic specials. The first, in 1975, attracted 50 million viewers.

He shared magic with Jim Henson, Woody Allen, “Saturday Night Live,” the Metropolitan Opera and the organizers of a birthday party for Mickey Mouse.

He wrote or helped write a half-dozen books on magic, one of which provided insight on how to saw a woman in half with a rope. He was a major collector of things magical, including the trunk used by John Nevil Maskelyne, a magician whose tricks live on.

Mr. Reynolds’s expertise was as well known to magicians as it was unknown to the general public. Among many honors, he was the 2004 magician of the year and was named one of the 100 most influential figures of 20th century magic in a Magic magazine poll.

He lived in a little house in Greenwich Village crammed with magic books, mummy cases and antique posters, including a dozen of the American magician who went under the Chinese name Chung Ling Soo and who became an instant legend in 1918 when he died by muffing the trick of catching a bullet in his teeth.

Mr. Reynolds’s knowledge of magical history was deep and quirky. He could tell you all about one Professor Lamberti, a vaudeville and burlesque performer who did magic tricks in addition to being the “world’s daffiest xylophonist.” As a stripper squirmed behind the professor, he welcomed the audience’s applause as his own.

Mr. Reynolds said that since Victorian times there have only been a dozen or so real tricks, with limitless variations. Magicians succeed, he said, by manipulating people’s own assumptions — call it misdirection — and never by lying.

“People don’t particularly enjoy being made fools of,” Mr. Reynolds said at a seminar on theatrical illusion in 2008.

Charles Raymond Reynolds was born on Sept. 9, 1932, in Toledo, Ohio. At age 7, he went to the local Paramount Theater to see Harry Blackstone Sr., who estimated he had pulled a total of 80,000 rabbits out of his hat over his lifetime. Young Charles had a new hero and was inspired to acquire his first magic set, the Gilbert Mysto kit. He later worked in a magic shop.

“Like most boys, he was interested in magic,” his wife said. “But most of them grow out of it. He never did.”

Mr. Reynolds earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in theater from the University of Michigan, worked as a television cameraman, taught photography, worked as photo editor for the Ziff-Davis magazines, and did freelance photography and writing.

While working on an article on magic’s popularity, he met Mr. Henning, who asked him to be his consultant. Soon other magicians sought his help, and Mr. Reynolds was on his long roll. His almost preternatural knowledge came from reading, his wife said.

Along the way, he found time to help show that Uri Geller could not bend spoons with mental powers. He introduced Diane Arbus to the Amazing Randi, who in turn led her to some of the sideshow personalities she photographed so memorably. He once whipped up a trick for Harry Blackstone Jr. in a cab on the way to a live television show. He lectured at the Smithsonian.

How spectacular were Mr. Reynolds’s illusions? Here is what the younger Mr. Blackstone said as he and Mr. Reynolds plotted a new levitation act in Mr. Reynolds’s living room on a sunny August afternoon in 1988:

“I would like for someone at the end of the 21st century to say that the Reynolds illusion was created for Blackstone in the last years of the 20th century, and that nothing since has come close.”

Mr. Blackstone performed the levitation in Las Vegas on Labor Day 1996. Was it the best ever? Gay Blackstone, the widow of Harry Blackstone Jr., who died in 1997, thinks it was awfully good. She was the one who floated upward, as curtains on every side rose to reveal no visible supports, from either below or above.

As for the audience, she said in an interview, they had seen something spectacular that they could not explain.

His passing, though like for all of us was inevitable, is a great loss to the magic community. Although I certainly did not know him well, I had the pleasure of meeting him several times when I was involved in the production of the early World Magic Summits held in Washington, DC and had spoken with him as recently as this past September without realizing that he was ill. Despite being largely unknown to the general public he was -- and will remain -- truly one of magic's all time "greats." He will be sorely missed.

That list of credits is fairly accurate, except that the Vanishing Horse illusion was basically MacDonald Birch's and the Buzz Saw had been in Harry Blackstone, Jr.s act for at least 4 years before that Broadway presentation. He closed the first half of his traveling show with it.

Charles was really instrumental in making the Copperfield television specials as special as they were. He was the brains behind the Lear Jet vanish.

He was an amazing man.

And, as I am sure Bill will confirm, was a staple in Blackstone, Sr.s show decades earlier.

That's absolutely true.

Jr.'s elephant vanish was Charles adaptation of an old Edmund Speer illusion.

Charles was a remarkable man and will be missed.

Richard

Spreer.

I knew Chuck (as he was called then) when we were students at the University of Michigan. Both of us lived in East Quad, one of the three residence halls known as "quads" or quadrangles. We both volunteered for the East Quad student radio station, then known as WEQN (now part of WCBN, the Campus Broadcasting Network). As a DJ, Chuck produced and narrated a musical program. He introduced himself as "Chuck Reynolds, the son of Ra, the world's only living Egyptian God."

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