Kely Lyons discusses what it took to turn Hindsight: The Day Before from a television show into an audio drama
Kely Lyons took on the momentous task of transforming a script that was initially written for television and transforming it into an audio drama. Her success was a huge accomplishment, and Kely Lyons took on a writing credit and the director's chair to make the story work. She explains how she pulled it off, what drew her to this story, and why the audience will love it.
Culturess: What inspired your ideas for Hindsight: The Day Before?
Kely Lyons: Mostly, the pandemic. My producing partner, Mark Haynes, and I had just started the company just about six months before Covid hit, and we had two television series in development that obviously weren't going to go anywhere because the entire industry shut down. So, I said, 'You know what? I think we have to re-invent ourselves a little bit here. So, why don't I take one of the things you wrote a couple of years ago.' He wrote a pilot for Hindsight a couple of years ago, and I took the seed because that sparked me, and anything that I do is generally going to have some kind of connection to real-world problems and social justice and what we're all experiencing now politically and culturally and economically, and this really seemed to fit. So, I just started researching Harry and Bess Houdini, and I realized there's a story there that's never actually been told before, and really, I took a lot of liberties with their story, but they were very interested in getting to the middle of certain things that were happening to them in their world politically and economically and socially, and that became the basis for it.
Harry was incredibly passionate about stopping what was going on with make-believe mysticism and psychics, and people were simply taking advantage of other people's pain and difficulties to try and reap money from them and essentially bamboozle them into giving mystics and psychics and people who simply were not being true about their abilities, and they would literally walk in and take all these people's money in order to pretend that they were connecting them with their dead loved ones. He was incredibly upset. At one point he even went to Congress and testified to Congress to get these people taken off the street. There were a lot of unsavory business practices that were happening that used these psychics, these so-called make-believe psychics, to get their business ends taken, like accomplished, like a real-estate deal, unscrupulous realtors or land speculators would send a psychic into a building and get people very upset about the fact that it was quote, "possessed" and that they had to get out. The psychic would try to get rid of the malignant spirit, and when that didn't work, convince the people to leave the building or leave their house or leave whatever these people, these realtors, wanted and pennies on the dollar they would get paid. Then the land speculators would come in and take for their own purposes.
So, this was quite a cottage industry in the early 1900s, and it's just one of the many things that we can highlight. It's very interesting when you're writing, and you wanna do something that has some thoughtful consideration or thoughtful connection to the world we live in today. You can find all sorts of things that are completely linked to an experience we're having today, whether it be religious, or social, or economic, but you also have to be entertaining at the same time. Writing, for me, is very entertaining. I have to entertain myself and keep my interest going. So, it was the connection between Harry and Bess, the fact that they truly loved each other but ultimately disappointed each other, and the fact that they were both passionately interested in what was going on in their world at the time. They were both incredibly intelligent people and devoted to debunking anything in the spiritual practice that was not actually connected to reality that had a hint of malpractice to it.
Culturess: What goes into directing an audio drama?
Kely Lyons: I had never done an audio drama before, so I was absolutely terrified. I literally didn't know how to write it, didn't know how to budget it, didn't know how to schedule it because I'm used to just visual stuff. When I sat down to write it, I thought, 'Okay, there's absolutely no visual references here. But, I still have to convey all the information that you would ordinarily convey in a visual project.' Learning how to do that was a real trick, and it was absolutely fascinating to figure out how to do because your mind automatically goes to, 'Okay, the character's gonna say this line, and it means a world, it means a 360-degree world, but no one can see what they're talking about. So, how do you convey that? I think we did that pretty well.
Another thing that's fascinating about audio is how you convey to the brain what is going on with only sound, and we happened to have an absolutely brilliant sound designer and engineer, Ted Bonnitt. He's our editor, and our sound designer, he was in charge of the recording when we were doing production. He literally understands how to hack the brain with a sound in order to make you think that you're experiencing something.
So, it was a combination. It was figuring out how, just with words, convey everything that was going on in the screen inside your head and then augment that with all the various sound effects and editing effects to basically create a movie in your brain. No visuals. You can close your eyes, and you're experiencing absolutely everything that the writer and director and sound designer wanted you to experience, and it's multi-layered, and it took us a year how to figure out how to do the editing on this. We did this differently than most other people do it. We actually had a studio. We had props. We had staging. We staged it like a play so the actors, normally the actors, would sit in a circle with headphones on, and they'd just read off a music stand. That wasn't gonna work for us because we really wanted the sense of movement. We edited it in atmos, which means you have 360 degrees of possibility of where the sound is coming from. So, what we did was, we set up a stage, the actors basically came in their pajamas and slippers because you have to be really quiet when you're doing that, and they loved it because no hair, no make-up, no wardrobe, no stopping for camera set-ups, which they were so used that when they were first doing it, they would stop and say, 'Oh, oh wait. We don't have to stop to reset the camera. We're just going ahead.'
So, they would act it out. We would block the scene like you would in a theatre production. They would go through the scene. They each wore loud mics. We had boom mics that followed them around, and we had a big ambisonic mic that followed them around and picked up absolutely everything. So we had many different streams of audio to choose from when we went to edit, and so far, we haven't heard of anybody else that's doing it. But that was the challenge, how to create a movie inside your head just with sound, and so far, I think people are saying that we've done it. It was a challenge and fun, and I lost my terror as we were going along because I realized we were actually figuring out how to do this.
Culturess: Hindsight: The Day Before was originally meant to be a traditional television show. What went into altering the script and concept so that it could become an audio series?
Kely Lyons: The concept was quite traditional, and I think we took it and made it very non-traditional. It was kind of a procedural. It went back and forth between two worlds, between the early 1900s and now, 2024. I augmented that to make the division between the two worlds obvious in its difference but understandable in the fact that many things that were problems and social ills, and things that people confronted in the early 1900s, we're confronting now. We call them different things. They have slightly different dynamics. But, the human element remains the same. People all want essentially the same thing no matter what historical period or age you're in, and that was a large part of changing the original kernel of the idea into something that is very relatable now and, quite frankly, could hold my interest as a writer and a director, and to turn it into something that the actors could completely relate to too, in two different worlds, that was a big part of the process.
Culturess: How did you go about casting for this project?
Kely Lyons: We had a fantastic casting director, Russell Boast. I did not have anyone in my mind who I was writing this. I try not to do that because you can get your heart broken too easily when the actor or actress that you set your heart on and write to is just not interested at all, and I've had that happen enough times that I just don't do that anymore. I had seen Santiago Cabrera in quite a bit of stuff, and just one day, I thought, 'Gosh, who the heck is going to play Gabe Strasser, the Professor, and Harry Houdini and be completely believable in both situations and his name popped up, Santiago Cabrera. Taylor Loeb, who worked with Russell Boast to help us cast, I mentioned him to her one day, and she said, 'Oh! I know his manager. I know him. Why don't we just put the script in front of him.' And it was like a miracle. He was the first person we approached, and he said yes, and I've been so incredibly grateful ever since because he has this amazing ability to change like a chameleon, basically. He has been extraordinary, and keep in mind, that he's only using his voice. The fact that he can do that and just be so completely believable throughout the entire thing has just blown my mind and made me incredibly grateful that he decided to sign on to this project, and we've really had that with every actor who's come aboard. We had a couple of instances where actors had to drop out for scheduling or health reasons or something like that, and every single time that happened, Russell came up with someone who was so perfect that now we can't think of it any other way.
Sibongile Mllambo, who, we're in love with her, I had a list of actresses in my head, who I was thinking about to do this, and Russell went to every one and they all for one reason or another said no, and then he put a tape of Sibongile in front of me, and I said to him, 'Russell, next time just don't let me go through all that silliness of trying to cast other people if you know someone that can do this just show them to me first.' She has been just astonishing. Her depth and her ability to connect with what the character is going through, again, only with her voice, is just thrilling, same as Santiago's.
Then, John Goodman, who is a friend of Ted Bonnitt's, our engineer, and Ted said to me at one point, 'What do you think of asking John Goodman to do this?' I said, 'Are you kidding me? Yeah.' So, he did. John did the most extraordinary thing. He was shooting Gemstones down south in the U.S., and Ted said, 'Can you do this?' and said, 'Yeah. I'm coming back from Righteous Gemstones on Thursday. You pick me up at the airport, take me to your studio, and we'll do this.' He got there, he had already read the script. He'd had it for a very short period of time. Within two takes, he had the character of Oliver Wendell Holmes nailed down, and literally, as we were watching him do this, we were completely blown away. It all worked together. Every single character has come together in a way that I couldn't imagine.
When you do something in film or television, and now that I've experienced audio, with audio as well, you have no idea how you are sitting there at your desk. So you're the first term, the script is the second term, the third term is adding everybody else to it, and you have no idea what they're gonna bring to it. When they bring to it what the people working on Hindsight brought to it, you are just, me anyway, you are just gobsmacked at the levels that they bring to those words on paper. It's always thrilling. I mean it's thrilling visually when you do it with film and television, but it's as well, it's thrilling what other people bring to the words on paper when you finally get there and do it. When you have people that are as skilled as the actors who have participated in this, Alan Rickman once said when he directed one film, I think, he said, "If you have the right actor, directing them is just standing back and letting them do their thing," and it's the most extraordinary thing, and sometimes it's so incredibly easy you're overflowing with gratitude because you don't understand how you got this lucky. So, it was a dream directing this cast for audio, truly.
Culturess: What techniques did you use for audio?
Kely Lyons: We did not do the usual, which is sitting around in a circle with music stands and headphones on. We staged it like a stage play. Everyone was free to move. We blocked it like a stage play. When they moved, the mics all moved with them. So, they could just be natural. If they had to hop out of a carriage and run up the steps and open a door and talk to somebody, they could just do it.
In one of the episodes, Harry and Bess go to a fancy dress ball at a mansion of a famous New York socialite, and you're there. They come down the steps, and literally they did these actions on stage. They come down the steps to the ballroom, they're announced, they go through the crowd. Everyone, everything moves, and every individual sound, because we have so many mics and so many audio streams to choose from, it sounds like you're there. We're able to make it sound like you're there. A lot of what we were experiencing when we first decided to do this, we listened to various audio dramas and various shows, and we realized what was happening was the actors were sitting around in a circle, and in post, they were whirling the sounds around them, the sound effects. And we decided we didn't want to do that. We decided that we really wanted the audience to feel like they were there, like Harry and Bess were over their shoulder and somebody else was in front of them, and somebody else was at two o'clock and somebody else was at ten o'clock, and it really worked. So, that was a technique we used. We really staged it like a play and caught every bit of the dialogue that we could, every bit of audio that we could. We added all the sound effects later. But, we had an authentic base to put the sound effects in. It wasn't an artificial overlay of things we were trying to put in just because we had to quote, "create movement." We did the movement.
Culturess: How did you tackle pivoting from a different medium than you initially anticipated for this project?
Kely Lyons: By really trying to figure out how to create a 360-degree world inside the audience's head only with sound, and that was a huge challenge, but it was a fascinating challenge. What you have to do, as you're sitting at your desk, is realize you have no visual reference, and as a film and television writer, your go-to is a visual reference because you say in the script when you're doing a video, ' the character flicked his eyes over to x,' and then the camera picks up what the "x" is. You can't do that in audio. You have to indicate via narration and the verbal responses, the audio responses from the character, what they are actually seeing at the moment, and it has to translate for the audience. So, it was like working in a different language and only one language. So, you don't have visual; you only have sound. It was a real learning curve but a good one, a fascinating one. I loved it. I can't wait to do more. The actors, just because they could come in their pajamas and slippers, didn't have to worry about anything; they didn't have to worry about how they looked, and they were completely free. They told us they felt they could play, and they loved it.
Culturess: Which character was the most interesting to write?
Kely Lyons: Oh gosh, I love them all. Every single one. I mean, Harry and Bess are the most challenging because they are the through line. There is a time travel element that we've tried to make as real and believable as possible, and that disjuncture, starting with Gabe Stasser, the Professor, who is the original character, and translating to Harry and Bess, that is the trickiest to write because I love supernatural stuff and science fiction, but anything I watch like that has got to be grounded in some kind of reality that I can really buy into. If it doesn't, it just doesn't hold me. So, we had to do this in a way where the translation, the movement, from one era to another, from one historical period to another, with the same basic characters, I had to believe in it. I think we came up with a way that makes it believable. So, that was the challenge. Those two were the most challenging characters, but all the other characters were just the most fun to write as well.
Culturess: What went into building the thrilling tone?
Kely Lyons: The stakes. In any drama, you have stakes. When you raise the stakes, that raises the drama and the tone. Just as a dramatist, you understand how to do that by taking your characters, understanding what's important to them, and then raising the stakes as high as required to get the effect. If you're using real-life dynamics like real-life social situations, everything in this world can be dangerous. Walking down the street can be incredibly dangerous. You can raise the stakes on somebody who's just taking an afternoon stroll. So, what's important to the character, what do they value, and what happens when you put those things in jeopardy one way or the other? Again, it has to be a real-world jeopardy. It can't come out of left field. It has to feel genuine, and like it could rise out of their situation, and then I believe it, and the audience will believe it.
Culturess: What was the most exciting part of working on this show?
Kely Lyons: Everything. Every part of it because I've never done this before, so I was alternately terrified and excited and gratified. But, I guess the most exciting thing was, first of all, the actor's response to the script and their work on it, was thrilling because we could see it coming to life in front of us, and you never know. You're sitting in your little room, and you're spewing words out of your head, and I always think, 'Either they're gonna think I'm completely crazy, or they're gonna buy it. I don't know which is gonna happen this time.' So, to see them go at it and really take hold of it, and really make it theirs is incredibly exciting, and then to start exposing it to people as a finished product for the first time and to hear their reactions, it's like a high. You don't get too much else in life that's like that. It's like winning the prize but the prize that you have set out for yourself, and we did.
When Mark and I first met with Ted Bonnitt, we said to him, 'We want to make an audio drama that we haven't heard before. We wanna make it so good that people will not be able to put it down. The best-sounding audio drama that we can possibly manage.' And he took up the challenge, and Mark took up the challenge of producing it, and I took up the challenge of writing and directing it, and I think we've done what we set out to do, and we've been incredibly lucky to have this fantastic group of performers and technical people who helped us get there.
Culturess: What are you most excited for the audience to take away from this?
Kely Lyons: I'm excited for them to be immersed in a world that they have to imagine by only listening to audio, and what we did was we tried to fill that world out for them with sound, and if people can do that, if they can really concentrate, we made the episodes not long, I think the longest episode, I think, is twenty minutes so there's not like a big heavy lift. You can listen to it when you're doing your exercise when you're on the treadmill. You can listen to it when you have twenty minutes in the car. If you get the full experience, if you are so immersed in it that you jump if somebody in the real world taps you on the shoulder, we've done our job.
Hindsight: The Day Before premiered on Monday, July 22nd and is available on all podcast apps.
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