A Central Illinois writer Friday will release the premiere episode of his pulpy crime thriller audio drama series that is political, historical but ultimately an intimate story told on a big scale.
An audio/radio drama is an aural story told with no narration but instead entirely through dialogue, sound effects and music. While still popular around the world, the medium’s popularity never recovered in the United States after the rise of television in the 1950s.
Imprimatur is a five-part series that will release a new episode at midnight every Friday from Aug. 28 to Sept. 25 on most audio streaming platforms, such as Spotify, Audible, Apple Podcasts, Podchaser and iHeartRadio. Episodes will be 60 to 90 minutes and will be divided into chapters.
The drama takes place in 1944 Chicago. While World War II is fought overseas, the United States Office of War Information needs propaganda at home.
Two radio writer-producers for the Imprimatur Broadcasting Company start off willingly retelling embellished stories of real World War I heroes. They quickly get more than they bargained for when one WWI veteran is found dead and another, now a rich gubernatorial candidate, is accused of an atrocity. The two radiomen must decide whether to be complicit in the propaganda-laced cover up or risk their lives and tell the truth.
Newton Holt – the 29-year-old writer, director, producer and editor of Imprimatur – said one can play with multiple different ideas in a six-hour story. One theme is what does someone need to do to be a good person in a world where everybody decides the meaning of good. Another theme is moral isolationism and a person's responsibility to their fellow man.
“One of the questions at the heart of the show is what are you willing to risk to help people who may not help you?” Holt said. “What are you willing to do to serve the common good and how responsible are you, your rhetoric, for other people getting hurt?”
Origins
Holt’s dad being a musician, there was a lot of artistic energy in Holt’s house growing up. Holt wrote a novel when he was 11 and a few more after that. They are terrible and should never see the light of day, he said.
He later acted in high school plays at Morton High School; continued to write prose fiction; wrote and directed two plays during his undergrad; and managed Pekin Community High School’s theater program from 2019-2022, where he directed two plays, two musicals, an audio drama of It’s a Wonderful Life, and produced and edited seven student short films as part of a school film festival.
When he left the contained ecosystem of high school and college theater and had to fend for himself and find creative work, he found prose opportunities in online publishers like The Forge and Full House Literary before finding his way into audio dramas.
Holt was 10 when he first heard an audio drama but was probably 20 or 21 when he heard what they are capable of doing in the modern, streaming age.
In recent years, Holt wrote freelance radio stories for an L.A. audio production company called Tandem Productions. He sold 12 scripts to them. He also pitched and wrote for them a 10-episode dark comedy sitcom over the course of two-and-a-half years.
None of that has been produced yet, but Holt has learned a lot about the capabilities and limitations of the medium through the experience.
Besides his love for audio dramas, Holt’s choice behind making Imprimatur audio-based instead of a movie or visual show was two-fold: Film is much more expensive, and Holt pursues what he can get in front of audiences quickest.
“Since I always came from [a] shoe-string budget and duct taping things together, my mentality is always about producibility,” Holt said. “The good thing about radio drama is that there is a much smaller gap between ambition and what you’re capable of as an indie producer.”
For Cody Cornwell, a 33-year-old Peoria theater actor who plays the main character, Noah, in Imprimatur, the power and abilities of audio dramas go back a long way.
“It honestly just harkens back to our primal instinct of wanting to listen,” said Cornwell.
Imprimatur started as a two-and-a-half-hour play Holt wrote and directed during his senior year in college in 2016-17. He said there was a pressing and prevalent fixation on truth and fake news and their malleability during that time and President Donald Trump’s first term.
Holt was not fully happy with some of the play’s writing, and the story and its world stuck with him. As the U.S. entered a similar era where truth is pliable and “completely burnable,” Holt said it felt pressing to revisit Imprimatur even if it was not a direct response to that as much as it was an exploration of American mythmaking.
Real world allusions do creep in when the two main characters must decide whether to tell the truth and say how they really feel or put their noises back to the grindstone and keep “glamorizing this guy, who’s representative of other similar powerful figures who are stained, let’s say,” Holt said.
What's behind a story?
Holt first thought to make the war Vietnam. For him, it was a more complicated, gray war without clear good and bad. Whereas he felt WWII had obvious villains and justifiable actions from the U.S.
The more he researched it, though, the more he realized WWII was just as complicated. It saw the U.S. not just demonize the enemy but produce stories and propaganda saying U.S. society was racially harmonious and superior. Its democracy was superior.
“Obviously, there were definite bad guys, there was real evil that we were combating,” Holt said, “but how we create a national identity in order to defeat an enemy, that’s really complicated and can be really gross.”
Holt admits Imprimatur is a pretentious title but one he thinks works for the show.
“Imprimatur is a term that’s often used with the Catholic church but is used colloquially as well, which is basically the official stamp of approval,” Holt said. “What is truth as ordained by a higher authority, and the story that we’re telling deals a lot with who gets to control the truth, who gets to tell the truth, who defines the truth.”
It is tricky, Holt said, to show, not tell, your story’s themes and messages. When making a story about America, Holt thinks a writer really has to go to bat but also present the experience as a fun story with themes Trojan horsed in.
“If you can find a way to literalize big ideas – in a way that doesn’t come off as allegory, which can be really grating – then I think you can tell big stories, but it’s a real tightrope,” Holt said.
Holt does not know if he completely nailed that approach, but he thinks he made the story fun and pulpy enough to allow him to say something with it, too.
Writing, casting and production
Holt wrote the first two episodes of the new version of Imprimatur in the spring and then summer of 2025, not necessarily thinking the production would happen. Needing help to fund the project, Holt applied for the Illinois Arts Council’s Creative Project Grant in June 2025. He was awarded a $12,000 grant in August during the same week he found out he was expecting his second child.
The writing deadline became an intimidating scramble as he wanted to write, record, edit and complete everything in nine months, before his son was born. He quickly realized that would not be possible and altered the recording scheduled.
By November, Holt put out a casting call for the whole state, receiving 60 to 70 submissions for the lead role alone. Lots of Chicagoans auditioned for the parts, but the best candidates tended to be Peoria community theater actors.
Holt puts that down to the tougher Chicago acting scene that does not allow an actor to perform and practice their craft as often as someone from Peoria, who may get multiple substantial community theater roles a year.
“It was just really exciting to see how much talent there is here,” Holt said.
Cornwell thinks Peoria is a strangely slept-on talent pool with phenomenal actors, painters, physical artists, musicians.
“It’s weird for me that people don’t know more about us,” Cornwell said.
Holt did not intend to make the project so Peoria-area focused, because he got an Illinois grant, most of the characters are from Illinois, and the story takes place in Chicago.
But if a talented Peoria actor with a good reputation auditioned, Holt gravitated to them. If that actor knew other skilled area actors, then there were even more locals who could be involved.
“People are going to listen to this from all over, but what matters to me is that people [in] this community, in my community, like it and listen, as well,” Holt said.
The final cast featured a wide range of experience: Peoria theater actors; a member of the Screen Actors Guild; an actor very much part of the work grind with roles in short films, commercials and theater; and another was not only an actor but a dramaturge.
While Holt received many auditions from voice heavy actors, most of his cast were not versed in audio productions. Actors able to modulate their voice were important, but Holt felt actors with too much focus in voice work might have been more heightened than he wanted.
Holt looked for actors with more of a theater background, because while the story is a bit pulpy, it is still naturalistic. He also did not want actors recording lines separately. While he said that is a fine practice, he wanted actors who could work together in a room like they might in a play.
Cody Cornwell had long been interested in voice work but had never done a purely voice-centered role. Cornwell did not approach the part or prepare for it any different way than he would a theater role, but with any step into a new medium, he said there is learning.
“It’s like jumping into a dark lake, and you don’t know what you’re going to bring up with you at any given point,” Cornwell said. “And I think I found a new appreciation for tempo, if anything.”
There were no rehearsals but instead table reads where the actors would read out each episode as a group and discuss the story and characters. Around the time Holt finished writing episode four, four of the leads – Cody Cornwell, Riley Smith, Jeramie Glass and Tommy Rosecrans – met in Holt’s basement to workshop a few scenes and toss around ideas, many of which made their way in the final script.
Besides that, Holt and the cast used first takes as rehearsals. Subsequent takes would precede with talks where different interpretations of scenes and characters would find their way into the recordings.
Recording took place over four days in late-January at Illinois Central College’s black box theater recording space, with one floating day in late-February for any pick-up recording.
Collaborating
Holt did not run a dictatorial set. He freely discussed with actors their characters, the story and the contexts of all those that might change how an actor approached a scene.
“Sometimes the complexity of that and the dissonance between my version and [the actor’s] version is what’s going to give that character some life, and it’s going to make him feel realer than if I dictate every second of him,” Holt said.
Still, Holt worked with some professional actors. He knew he could not ask them to rewrite a scene they were struggling with, because writing is a specific, separate job in that career actor’s world.
It is a balancing act, Holt said. He wanted to create a collaborative atmosphere, but he had to be careful when he invited collaboration or else he might come off like he did not know what he was doing.
“Basically, what I’ve learned is always pitch something,” said Holt. “It might not always be the best solution, but if I float something, even a bad idea, so that there’s a baseline, then other people can collaborate, and there doesn’t feel like there’s no plan.”
If Holt did not know the answer to an actor’s question, he may have punted the problem until after a meal break or until the floating day to give him time to think about it or make a small rewrite to a scene.
Holt might also discuss it with the actor. Cornwell said they would sometimes talk between takes about changing a character’s goal in a scene or emphasizing a different syllable to alter the intention of a moment.
“A lot of the characters were different from how I conceived them in my head but were made infinitely better by the personalities and the ideas of the people that were coming in,” Holt said. “No one that was in the cast felt like they were there to just fire off a job. Everyone felt like they wanted to make the product better.”
Cornwell keyed in on his character’s ambition.
“My character, Noah, is very driven and knows what he wants and is this silver-tongued kind of guy,” Cornwell said. “I think, without also spoon-feeding it to the audience, I wanted to kind of show how that hubris – while also being an amazing, driving force for my character and almost reinforcing everything he does at a certain point – can also really injury you. Ambition can give, but ambition can equally take away, as well.”
The destructive power of ambition weaved in with background societal issues like race and poverty were major themes and messages Cornwell was excited to help tell.
Holt talked down his talents as an actor, saying it was more his knowledge of the experience of an actor than it was the craft of acting that helped him in directing. Holt knew to be empathetic.
“It’s work,” said Holt. “Not that it can’t be joyful work, it can’t be exciting work, but it is work. And if you walk in with that mentality and you want to treat people like they are professionals and that I think is helpful.”
This was Holt’s first real experience with the start and stop nature of recorded storytelling. He had to be a caretaker to the actors — who sometimes performed intense scenes — and figure out when actors needed breaks to refresh.
It was also a balancing act between actor personality types. Holt learned to give actors what they needed.
“And everyone is very, very different,” said Holt. “So, some actors want to talk a lot about the scene beforehand. Some want to feel through it, and that’s just not an experience that I had coming from theater, which is so rehearsal based, where you’re all stumbling through everything. You can’t intellectualize too much [in theater], because they’re pragmatism to you got to do this a bunch.”
Working with sound
Holt’s sound engineer and mixer, Jeremy Moser, has been interested in sound production since high school, when he and friends would make short films where he would add in music and sound effects.
Moser works full-time as a studio engineer at Peoria’s Northwoods Community Church. Lots of his experience is with music. He produced an album for the church and an August EP for a local artist. He has also recorded podcasts and audio books. Newt connected with Moser through a mutual friend.
Imprimatur was Moser’s first experience with working sound on an audio drama. He said Holt did much of the sound design, while Moser mostly balanced and mixed the sound.
Moser learned a lot from Holt about working with sound in an audio drama. There was one moment where Holt used a pad synthesizer under the music to add tension. It is a sound element someone would not notice unless they knew it was there, but the moment it was taken out, all tension was lost.
“He has shown me all these tips and tricks of the audio drama world between sound effects, landscapes, music beds,” said Moser. “[It] has really opened my eyes. It’s been a wonderful learning experience to learn from him on some things.”
Moser said there was not much of a learning curve in terms of the technical side or how to record but more in the creative side.
“It’s tide very closely even to some of the other projects I’ve produced musically,” Moser said. “You create a space that they’re in, and so you think about ‘Is this a big space? Is this a small, intimate space?’”
Holt said Imprimatur was a massive project made easier and doable by talented people like Moser, who has not just been a hired gun but a trusted collaborator of Holt’s. Moser is a big part of why the show works, said Holt.
If Holt came to Moser with a technical question or problem, Moser would always have an answer.
“He had experience with all that and could explain to me and to the cast the science behind what we were doing,” Holt said, “the way that the microphones pick up sound that allowed them to feel like they were more informed in what they were doing and able to do their job better.”
In some ways, Holt’s inexperience directing audio dramas helped him. At times, he would just follow his passions, like with a montage scene in the first episode.
“Montage in audio is an insane thing to do, and I just had this bullish confidence that it was going to work,” said Holt, “[and] that I wrote it in a way that you didn’t need to know where everybody was at any given moment, you didn’t need to know even always who was talking. You just needed to catch this passage of time, and if I pitched that to anybody in audio drama, they would be like, ‘That does not work in this medium.’”
Holt has never heard anything like that montage in an audio drama, and he thinks it is an incredible sequence. The success of the scene, said Holt, is partially thanks to his composer, Thomas Rankin, who wrote “insane” music for it that mixed in different styles that allows the audience to always tell when a scene changed.
“There’s a couple different things in the show that I’ve not heard audio dramas attempt or do, and that’s not a slight to them,” said Holt. “And it’s not like I’m Orson Welles for doing this.
“It’s more just like I think that the show can operate in a really cool and interesting space that not a lot of other audio dramas are working in, because I sometimes had this kind of dumb, bullish belief I could make a thing work.”
Reception
Time will tell, Holt said, how the audio drama community will respond to Imprimatur. He said the community tends to be more genre focused. While Imprimatur “dances in genre,” Holt said it spends time in “a more contemplative, playish, literary mode,” which is uncommon in audio dramas.
“[The audio drama world is] well aware of people can click away so easily, and so you can’t really bore them with that kind of stuff, but I had this feeling that I was going to be right about it,” said Holt.
There is something for everyone in the audio drama world, Holt said. There is narration heavy work, romantic stories, horror.
“There’s stuff that is extremely well produced but a little soulless, and there’s stuff that is made on shoeboxes and duct tape that is some of the most moving stuff you’ll ever hear,” Holt said.
Holt thinks what people get with most audio dramas and what they will get with Imprimatur is an entirely human-made product that is telling a human story, because Imprimatur, at the end of the day, is a way to tell an intimate story on a big scale.
Despite any confidence in his work, Holt does not know for sure how it will be received.
“I think the audiences will follow me and tune into it,” Holt said. “They may not. We’ll see, but that’s one of those things where, if it works, it will be because I’m dumb about it and not following the collective wisdom of a lot of much smarter people.”
The future
Holt does not rule out film for a future project, but he said his next couple ideas would be difficult to do in that medium because of cost and scale. He thinks indie films show their budget much faster than audio-only stories.
“I would do film,” Holt said. “I love film, and I have ideas for things I could relatively cheap that wouldn’t feel cheap, but for now, I really just want to stick to how can I make something where the production matches my ambition for the project as closely as possible.”
That may mean another audio drama, a film or a book.
“My career would be a lot better if I just locked in and got really good at one thing,” said Holt, “but I just follow what makes the most sense for me.”
