Historical Story

Getting together to work on this paper, we both expressed that part of the allure of Houdini and the history surrounding him was the consequent artistic style, shown through movies like The Illusionist and The Prestige. That sort of raw, sepia glamour was something we wanted to communicate in our screenplay. We tried to do that specifically with the reference to the poster, and the scenes onstage and backstage. 

The historical sources also had a big effect on our story. Just as Josh Neufeld, the author of the New Orleans graphic novel After the Deluge, drew from real sources and people to write his story, the tricks Houdini performs are historically accurate and many of the things the announcers say during his performances are taken from real accounts that we found in online reprints of newspapers and other sources. For example, the description of the Milk Can trick was historically accurate, and the phrase “Failure means a drowning death” came directly from an advertisement of Houdini’s trick from that time. We wanted to do this to make sure we got the syntax correct for characters from that time, but more specifically to add to the grandeur of the event. The way they spoke for performances was very over-inflated, but delightful, and made the mood we desired more palpable through the screenplay. 

Samuel, the main character in our story, was based off of Sarah’s real-life ancestor Samuel Markel. Family history accounts tell of Samuel living in London during the time of these events and actually meeting Houdini, who teaches him some simple tricks. While we did fabricate and embellish upon these records to make our script more histrionic, the simple story of him is real. We based the structure of our script off of Neufeld’s graphic novel, as the characters in his story are also real, living people acting in a (now) historical context. Neufeld’s story provided us with a good example and starting point of how to appropriately create a dramatic story with real-life people in a historical setting.

Lastly, we tried very hard to have Samuel be very affected by the history he was living in. The performance of Houdini defeating The Daily Mirror’s challenge is quite a rousing thing to read on its own. But after we read it, we asked ourselves “How would this affect the bystander?” We thought of how Houdini’s desperation and ill health after the challenge would be terrifying to an aspiring escape artist—and so it was with Samuel. In a similar vein, we tried to limit the history Samuel experienced as well. While Houdini actually goes back out on stage after the Mirror Challenge (once he’s gathered himself) and gives a moving speech, we decided that Samuel would not experience this—just as a bystander may have missed that bit of history in real life.