MAGIC MAN

Jim Kirk and his CorporateMagic magicians want to help North Texas put its best foot forward

By Steve Pate

Jim Kirk freely confesses he lies around in bed these summer nights, scheming up ways to make the North Texas Super Bowl in 2011 unlike any in NFL history.

Oh sure, he’s quick to point out that the NFL and the North Texas Super Bowl XLV Host Committee are calling the shots.

“That’s a very creative group over there — Bill Lively and Kit Sawers and Tony Fay and everybody — and they’ve got some great ideas,” Kirk said of the Host Committee. “Frankly, in some instances I would say we’re taking some of their ideas and we’re providing the manpower to make it really come alive.”

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, consider just how creative the wild, wild world of Jim Kirk and his Dallas-based CorporateMagic outfit really is.

Case in point: Nashville, 25 years ago, even before Kirk owned 50 percent of CorporateMagic and Gaylord Entertainment owned the other half, as they do now. What Gaylord did own was the sprawling Opryland Hotel just outside Nashville, Tenn.

A major U.S. communications company had hired Kirk and CorporateMagic to put on their annual banquet at the Opryland Hotel. Kirk was standing in the ballroom one day, eyeing the far wall, when he said to hotel management, “I’d like to bring a ship in here, but of course your doors aren’t big enough to get it through.

“If I tear that wall down and bring a ship in here and tie it in the back corner, and have water surrounding it on both sides and air shooting past the audience so it looks like there’s a river right down the middle of the ballroom, ummm…If I tell you that I will rebuild that wall exactly the way you have it when we’re through with the production, will you let me do it?”

The hotel’s response?

“The first thing I remember,” Kirk recalled these many years later, “is there was great heartache.”

But days later, a river ran through it. Ship and all.

Kirk looked back on that moment the other day and frankly confessed, “Not every hotel will do that…It’s hard enough to get them to let you move a chandelier.”

This is the man, and his magical business machine, that will help the Host Committee put on, he estimates, 60 to 70 Super Bowl-related events in the coming year, ranging from large press conferences to elaborate luncheons to whatever.

CorporateMagic has 22 employees, most in North Texas, some in Nashville where Gaylord Entertainment is based. They don’t dally in small ideas.

Another case in point: The storied, century old Rose Bowl Parade has begun to lose some of its luster. Who you gonna call to dust off the old queen of parades? CorporateMagic. Look for the coming New Year’s Day parade to be dressed all fetching in 21st Century aplomb, replete with novel major productions. Furthermore, CorporateMagic has already planned ways to spice up the 2011 Parade, so much so that even Captain Kirk confessed, “It’s going to be crazy.”

Probably the company’s strongest ties locally have been with Dallas Cowboys game days, both at the old stadium in Irving and now the new wonder in Arlington.

“There will be some really cool things coming up for the regular season opener,” Kirk promised. “It’s going to be neat, as well as halftime on Thanksgiving Day and other events.

“The Cowboys have their own in-house production crew who make their Game Day take place. We design from the creative standpoint the various production pieces that are going to happen on the field prior to the game and also at halftime.”

Sporting events are a different type of magical animal.

“The real difference is two things,” Kirk said. “One is the venue. When you’ve got 100,000 people in a cavernous place, that’s different from going to the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center. So you have to know how to address the technical challenges there.

“And two is the timing issue. A halftime is a very specific amount of time. When you do concerts, you don’t have that problem. If a concert starts a few minutes late because people were backstage getting ready, or if it goes over, okay. But when it comes to a sporting event, the time restrictions are very exact. So we spend a lot of time being able to construct what’s happening backstage, to have things ready to get on the field and off the field incredibly quickly.

“It’s pretty easy to design things that can be wild and exciting and ‘whiz bang!’ on the field. But to do those and get them off the field and get ready to play, that is the real creative challenge.”

This will not only be North Texas’ first-ever Super Bowl, it will be the first Kirk has worked. For a Highland Park grad who began his college days at TCU and finished up at SMU in the early 1970’s, Super Bowl XLV is a love affair.

“Oh my gosh, this is our moment,” Kirk said. “It’s one thing to go to somebody else’s house for dinner or to have dinner at some big mansion some place. It’s another thing to have dinner at your home, to put your best foot forward, to be able to show off for folks.

He added rather emphatically, “Here’s the deal. We have some extraordinarily talented people in North Texas. And a lot of the time they are using their talents for projects that are being done in New York, or in Los Angeles, or in Dubai, or in Toronto. And it’s rare that all of this talent is able to roll up their sleeves and do something here, at home. There’s a whole lot of people that are already starting to feel the excitement and energy of just that fact — that now we are getting ready to show everybody else what we can do here, instead of going there and doing it there for other people.”

There’s one other factor that pushes Kirk.

“Besides getting the Super Bowl to be a huge, prideful moment for North Texas,” Kirk said, “is this goal of wanting to bring North Texas together. Bill Lively (the Host Committee’s President & CEO) has convinced me of that fact. He wants Dallas and Fort Worth and all the municipalities all around to work together in ways we’ve never worked together prior to this.

“Several of the things that we are working on to design and bring to the table are built around that very premise. How can we try to bond Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington, Irving, our part of the world, very, very closely? So a lot of creative firepower is being put into ways we can accomplish that.”

And now you know why Captain Kirk and his magical brain stay up into the wee wee hours of the morning.

“That is happening every single night,” Kirk assured. “It started when they first began talking with us. My true passion in life is being able to create moments for people to be able to enjoy, to make them laugh or cry or sing or shout.

“Some people get off playing football. Mine is passion for production, seeing how we are able to touch people and move their hearts. So when we get the opportunity to think of something this big, you bet I think about it all the time.”

Now if Jerry Jones just won’t mind moving that west end zone back a little more, maybe blowing out that wall…just for a little while.