A Star Trek Vet Almost Made Octavia Butler’s Kindred Before Hulu

kind, the time travel drama that premieres on Hulu this week, marks the first time Octavia Butler’s popular science fiction novel has been brought to the screen — but it’s not the first attempt. Nearly 40 years ago, Andreea Kindryd, a veteran of original interstellar travel TV series, hustling in Hollywood to make a movie version that brings the story of Dana, a young black writer who travels back in time to a Maryland plantation and meets her own ancestors, to audiences. to the theater. The story of her unsuccessful attempt to adapt the book sheds light on why Butler’s work took so long to hit the screen.

Kindryd worked on interstellar travel as an assistant to acclaimed writer and producer Gene L. Coon, going through the scripts and giving Coon her notes about them, as she details them in her upcoming memoir come your own code conversion. Kindryd told Polygon: “I tried to get into the film industry and it didn’t work. She felt as if the creators who were working in Hollywood at the time intended to create a respectable image of Black people, and “[her] things that are too strange for them. When she was writing a special script for a Black sitcom at the time, she decided to let one of the kids steal stuff and the show’s creators were horrified.

Image: Huntington Library/Doubleday

After encountering many hurdles in her attempt to become a full-fledged producer, Kindryd moved to Australia in the 1970s to produce documentaries. But in the early 1980s, she moved back to LA and stumbled across an article by Octavia Butler. The discovery won’t lead to an adaptation, but it will start a lifelong friendship.

When Kindryd Read Butler’s kind, she was intrigued by the way the novel depicts “white people’s inability to see what is right in front of them,” and how white people will cling to their own power, regardless tell them how much they have to pay. “It told me. And I fell in love with Dana,” the book’s protagonist. “I just feel, everyone must see this.”

Kindryd tried to contact Butler’s people to find out if there were options for the book, but was thwarted until a friend suggested contacting Butler directly. As it turned out, the two women lived on the same street, a few blocks apart. Kindryd calls Butler up and befriends her, taking her to visit Kindryd’s friend Rosilyn Hellerwho became the first female vice president of a film studio.

Unfortunately, the rights to kind was optional by actress Talia Shire (rock) with her husband, Jack Schwartzman, who recently produced the Peter Sellers car being there. Kindryd said: “I couldn’t understand why she chose it. But she’s sure that “it’s not in their hearts, and they’re easily discouraged.” She’s determined to work on setting things up so that when the option expires, “I’m ready to move on.”

Kindryd has never had direct contact with Shire and Schwartzman. “I was even more insecure then than I am now,” she said. And as a producer of Black women, she said, “there are no footsteps to follow. I’m in uncomfortable territory. But I’m still trying, in my own way.”

However, Kindryd and Butler quickly became friends, sticking together because they were both outsiders. “She doesn’t feel like she really belongs anywhere. She was just like me,” Kindryd recalls. Butler’s mother and Kindryd’s grandmother were both housekeepers, so “[they] they both grew up the same way: at the white lady’s house, in the kitchen, with a book.” Both spend all of their free time at the library, which is still where Butler spends her time. According to Kindryd, Butler doesn’t have a car, so she travels around LA using public transportation, where she is regularly harassed.

Kindryd tells her friend that whenever the option for kind lapsed, she wanted to be the first to know. She doesn’t have anything specific to offer Butler, but she wants to do her best to achieve something.

Malcolm Ali’s photo/WireImage

Image courtesy of Andreea Kindryd

In 1984, Kindryd visited Zimbabwe and came up with an idea. Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980, and white settlers were leaving the country in droves – but then prime minister Robert Mugabe wouldn’t allow them to bring money out of the country. And meanwhile, the country has huge plantations that look absolutely gorgeous. Kindryd met with a government minister who knew her friend, Roberta Sykes, and they came up with a plan: they could shoot a free movie at one of these plantations and encourage leather settlers White invests money they can’t take with them, in the hope that eventually, all the profits will be recouped abroad.

Kindryd liked the idea of ​​using the legacy of colonialism to fund a film about the Black experience. When she told Butler about the idea, “She thought it was funny. She loves it.”

But when she returned to LA and pitched the idea across town, the producers and studio executives both turned her down. A movie was just shot in Kenya, live-action adaptation of Sheena, queen of the jungle, and “it doesn’t work at all.” A disastrous experience filming in Africa means the entire continent is now banned, because, as Kindryd put it, Hollywood is “a flock of goats one after another.”

In the end, Kindryd returned to Australia, but she and Butler kept steady correspondence — Kindryd still kept the letters Butler sent her, in which she complained about rejections from publishers she didn’t understand. categorization of her works. “This is the kind of shit I got on kind over and over again,” Butler wrote in a letter. When Kindryd returns to the United States, she will stay at Butler’s house, where Butler has a giant bathtub even though she hates bathing.

Kindryd has made another attempt to lay the groundwork for a kind adapted in the late ’80s. She knew a relative with actor Alfre Woodard, who was successful and nominated for an Oscar for the 1983 film. diagonal creek, so she asked them to transfer the book in case Woodard wanted to star in it. Woodard is said to have never received the book as her friend felt the book’s subject matter was inappropriate due to the aforementioned respectability politics. Coming from the middle class Black, the one you found kindThe subject matter is annoying, Kindryd said. “We just don’t want to talk about those things.” Years later, Woodard starred in a popular audio adaptation of kind.

Unlike Kindryd, it took Hollywood decades to appreciate Butler’s work, which critics hailed as ahead of its time. Kindryd said: “That’s what makes her so frustrating. Especially in her later novels Parable of the sower and The Parable of the TalentsButler can see that the things she’s writing are starting to happen in real life.

“She’s ethical and she has very strong values ​​and she’s not afraid to say, ‘I can’t finish this book, let me pay you back,'” Kindryd said. She is very true to herself and her values.

Kindryd never gives up hope of seeing kind on the screen. In fact, her connection to the book and Butler was so deep that when she grew tired of using her ex-husband’s last name, she reached out to her friend. When Butler died in 2006, Kindryd renamed the novel the title in tribute, except for the slightly different spelling. “I changed my name in honor of Octavia, to keep her close to me.”