DAVID BLAINE'S MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR : WITH HELP OF HIGH-PLACED FRIENDS, STREET CONJURER GETS OWN TV SPECIAL.

Byline: James Ryan The New York Times

His friends think he's magic. And fortunately for David Blaine, he has friends in some very high places.

Blaine, 24, a virtually unknown street magician, has been given his own television special, which will be broadcast 8 p.m. May 19 on KABC (Channel 7) - in the thick of the May sweeps period.

In the one-hour special, ``David Blaine: Street Magic,'' Blaine, a Brooklyn, N.Y., native, takes on the road an act he honed on the sidewalks of Manhattan, in trendy downtown hangouts like the Bowery Bar and Cafe Tabac and among celebrities such as Woody Allen and Spike Lee.

Unlike the smoke-and-mirrors set pieces and sequined assistants associated with Las Vegas-style magicians like David Copperfield, Blaine's bag of tricks consists primarily of a deck of cards and a handful of quarters.

``I'd like to bring magic back to the place it used to be 100 years ago,'' Blaine said recently during a break from editing at a small production house in Santa Monica. ``I like the way Houdini brought magic to the people on the streets, genuinely.''

Blaine's prime-time debut, some would argue, has less to do with his magic skills than with his mastery of self-promotion. The pressures of competing for a dwindling market share, especially among younger viewers, have recently led the networks to some unusual programming.

But the multimillion-dollar risk that ABC is taking with Blaine, especially given the quasi-documentary format of the special, is due in no small part to relationships he was able to forge with network executives, including Ted Harbert, who approved the project last year when he was chairman of ABC Entertainment (he resigned in January).

It was the uniqueness of the magician's presentation - he performed for executives in their offices - that persuaded Harbert to give Blaine, who has performed professionally only a couple of times, his big chance.

``We've seen magic specials before,'' said Harbert. ``This is a different way of presenting what may very well be the same kind of tricks. It's more accessible. He's taken a craft that's been around for hundreds of years and done something unique and fresh with it.''

Hip-hop Houdini

What Blaine possesses that is so unusual for a magician is a streetwise urban appeal. From his faded gray T-shirt, saggy black pants and Adidas sneakers to his close-cropped hair and low-key delivery, Blaine embodies the antithesis of the slick illusionist. Call him a hip-hop Houdini.

Stephen Chao, a former Fox executive who was chosen to produce Blaine's special, puts it this way: ``He's the only magician I've seen who wasn't a geek.''

The central belief at the center of Blaine's approach is that magic in its simplest form, when performed for people on the street, has universal appeal. In the special, he demonstrates this by traveling across America, from New York to Dallas to San Francisco, guessing numbers and performing levitation and mystifying card tricks.

Wandering out onto a sun-bleached Santa Monica sidewalk with his deck of cards recently, the magician approached three European backpackers who were engrossed in a map. Blaine possesses the dark, probing eyes and low, measured voice of a hypnotist. A typical opening gambit is, ``Can I show you something?'' People generally say yes.

Taking him for a panhandler, the backpackers were wary at first. But a moment or two later, all three had closed around him in a tight circle. Blaine never asks for money.

``I just like them to smile,'' he said. ``The reason for magic is to enlighten people or make them happy, or let them forget their problems for two minutes.''

Magic introduction

Blaine, who spent his early years in Park Slope, had a mother who was a teacher and a waitress and a father who was a Vietnam veteran and, the magician says, ``taught me to play chess when I was 3 and then vanished.'' He says he was introduced to magic at the age of 4 by a teen-age cousin. He was soon climbing on tables and performing for any adult who would pay attention.

At 11, he moved with his mother to Passaic, N.J. It was there during his high school years, when he cared for his mother after she became ill with cancer, that Blaine developed his talent, but he kept his hobby a secret from his peers at Passaic High School.

After his mother died, Blaine moved to Manhattan, where he slept on friends' couches and began frequenting downtown clubs to meet celebrities and industry power hitters, including music agent Jon Podell.

With the backing of the agency Podell works for, International Creative Management, Blaine was able to perform tricks for - and gather the endorsements of - high-profile magic aficionados like Allen and Lee.

``David's card tricks are absolutely the top level you can go,'' said Allen, who had Blaine perform tricks for cast and crew on the set of his recent movie ``Everyone Says I Love You.''

Blaine met Lee in 1995 at the premiere of the director's film ``Clockers.'' Lee was impressed enough to agree later to shoot the promotion for Blaine's special, which was to have appeared in January but was rescheduled several times.

Blaine's other high-powered friends from the entertainment world include Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman of Miramax, and actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who appears in the special. Blaine is currently dating another successful young New Yorker, singer Fiona Apple.

Just how these celebrity connections were made is a matter of some mystery. Blaine, perpetuating his self-made, up-from-the-streets image, leaves the impression that he found his way into show-business circles and approached the stars on his own. In truth, in the cases of Allen and Lee, at least, the hand of ICM was at play, one of his agents said.

Here come the critics

All this attention has not gone unnoticed by other magicians and the people who work with them. Blaine has more than his fair share of critics among professional magicians, a clubby group that he insists he wants no part of.

One professional magician insisted that Blaine's best tricks could be had ``for about $30 at a Times Square magic shop.''

``If he were a pianist, he would be running scales,'' said Jamy Ian Swiss, a magician and columnist for Genii, a magic magazine. ``His only skill is removing money from a wallet and handing it to a person behind the counter.''

Though Blaine admits to browsing for magic books at illusionist mainstays such as Tannen's magic shop in Manhattan, he gets defensive when the originality of his tricks is questioned.

``One thing I'm a purist about is cards; it was a mistake to walk in there even,'' he said. ``I learned a lesson: You have to be super-careful about everything.''

The general attitude among magicians is that there are many other sleight-of-hand artists more deserving of a prime-time special. Swiss maintained that ABC executives had had ``the wool pulled over their eyes.''

Harbert responded in this way: ``David combines great talent with charm and personal presence. If there's a more deserving magician out there, I suggest they get a better agent.''

Though his simple but stupefying tricks frequently elicit responses like ``he's not natural'' or ``he's the Devil,'' Blaine is the first to insist that he is a magician, not a mystic or a guru. He is more mysterious when it comes to explaining how he can tell people how much change they have in their pocket or what cards they are thinking of, likening it to that ``feeling you get when you know who's calling you on the phone.''

Normally forthcoming, Blaine is much less so when it comes to revealing how much he earned for the ABC special. He insisted that apart from his getting a one-bedroom apartment on Gramercy Square, his lifestyle hasn't changed.

``I like living simply,'' he said. ``How can you focus on your work if you're worried about all the other stuff? You have to stay somewhat simple.''

What Blaine is focusing on next, he says, is a one-man show, originally slated for a warehouse in the meat-packing district, that the Nederlander Organization is now producing. Looking farther ahead, he hopes to perform the kind of mystifying public stunts that earned Houdini a place in history.

``You will see it on CNN and the news, but I'm not going to do it to cash in,'' he said. ``To me, credibility and having it be believable is more important than getting paid for it. If I can make some money along the way, I'm not going to complain.''

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PHOTO ``The reason for magic is to enlighten people or make them happy, or let them forget their problmes for two minutes,'' says David Blaine, whose ABC special airs May 19.