DreamWorks Buys J. Michael Straczynski’s Voices of the Dead script

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

Did you ever want to see a movie about Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle teaming up to solve some crime? Well, you’ll get to see it since Dreamworks bought a certain script from J. Michael Straczynski (CHANGELING).

The studio purchased Straczynski’s original screenplay, VOICES OF THE DEAD which is a thriller that gets into the real-life relationship between magician Harry Houdini and Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle. I vaguely knew about their friendship before, but never really did any background reading into it.

Heat Vision tells a bit about the relationship and the script:

“Houdini and Doyle, who was a leading Spiritualist at the time, met in 1920 and became friends for a while despite long-running arguments about the existence of the supernatural. Doyle included a chapter in his book The Edge of the Unknown that claimed that Houdini had psychic powers, while Houdini often used his acts to debunk fraudulent claims about the spirit world. Straczynski’s script creates a fictional account of the two teaming up with a psychic to solve a set of murders in 1920’s New York.”

So who should play Houdini and who should play Doyle?