relationship, the time-travel drama premiering this week on Hulu, marks the first time Octavia Butler’s seminal sci-fi novel is brought to the big screen — but it’s not the first attempt. Almost 40 years ago, Andreea Kindryd, a veteran of the original star trek TV series that strove in Hollywood to assemble a film version that would faithfully bring to cinema audiences the story of Dana, a young black writer who travels back in time to a Maryland plantation and meets her own ancestors. The story of her unsuccessful attempt to adapt the book sheds some light on why it took Butler’s work so long to make it to the big screen.
Kindryd had been working on it star trek as assistant to famed writer-producer Gene L. Coon, reviewing scripts and giving Coon her notes on them, as detailed in her forthcoming memoir code exchange. “I tried to get into the film industry, but it didn’t work,” Kindryd tells Polygon. She felt that the creatives working in Hollywood at the time were keen to create a respectable image of Black people and “[her] The stuff was too weird for them.” Back when she was writing a script for a Black sitcom, she decided to steal one of the kids from the store, and the show’s creators were horrified.
After encountering too many obstacles in her attempts 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 Octavia Butler’s writing. The discovery wouldn’t be an adjustment, but it would start a lifelong friendship.
When Kindryd read Butler’s relationshipShe was struck by how the novel depicts “white people’s inability to see what is right in front of them” and the way white people hold on to their own power, no matter the cost. “It spoke to me. And I fell in love with Dana,” the book’s protagonist. “I just felt people need to see that.”
Kindryd attempted to contact Butler’s people to find out if the option for the book was available, but was stymied until a friend suggested contacting Butler directly. As it turned out, the two women lived on the same street, a few blocks apart. Kindryd called Butler, befriended her, and took her to visit Kindryd’s friend Rosin Hellerwho had become the first female vice president of a film studio.
Unfortunately the rights are on relationship was already optional by actress Talia Shire (Rocky) along with her husband, Jack Schwartzman, who recently produced Peter Sellers’ vehicle To be there. “I couldn’t figure out why she chose it,” says Kindryd. But she was sure that “it wasn’t in her soul and she would be easily discouraged.” She decided to work on setting things up so that when the option lapsed, “I would be willing to move on.”
Kindryd never approached Shire and Schwartzman directly. “I was even more insecure then than I am now,” she says. And as a black producer, she says, “There are no footsteps to follow. I’m treading on uncomfortable terrain. But I still tried, my way.”
Despite this, Kindryd and Butler quickly became friends and bonded over the fact that they were both misfits. “She felt like she didn’t really belong anywhere. She was like me,” Kindryd recalls. Butler’s mother and Kindryd’s grandmother were both housekeepers, so “[they] both had grown up the same: in the white lady’s house, in the kitchen, with a book.” They had both spent all their free time in the library, where Butler still spent her time. According to Kindryd, Butler didn’t have a car, so she used public transportation to get around LA, where she was constantly harassed.
Kindryd told her friend whenever the option for relationship decayed, she wanted to be the first to know. She had nothing concrete to offer Butler, but she wanted to do her best to get something going.
In 1984 Kindryd was visiting Zimbabwe and had an idea. Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980 and white settlers were leaving the country in droves – but then Prime Minister Robert Mugabe would not allow them to take money out of the country. And in the meantime, the country had huge plantations that looked absolutely gorgeous. Kindryd met with a government minister who knew her friend Roberta Sykes, and they hatched a plan: they could shoot a film on one of these plantations for free, and encourage white settlers to invest the money they couldn’t take with them. in the hope that any profits abroad would be recouped.
Kindryd loved 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 loved it.”
But when she came back to LA and pitched the idea around town, producers and studio execs shot her down. A film had just been shot in Kenya a live-action adaptation of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, and “it hadn’t worked at all.” A disastrous experience filming in Africa meant the entire continent was now off-limits because, as Kindryd puts it, Hollywood is “a bunch of goats following one another”.
Kindryd eventually moved back to Australia, but she and Butler maintained a constant correspondence – Kindryd still has the letters Butler sent her, complaining about rejection from publishers who didn’t understand how to categorize their work . “That’s the kind of shit I came up with relationship over and over again,” Butler wrote in a letter. When Kindryd returned to the United States, she stayed with Butler, where Butler had a huge bathtub, although she hated bathing.
Kindryd made another attempt to lay the foundation for a relationship Adaptation in the late 80’s. She knew someone close to actor Alfre Woodard, who broke out and received an Oscar nomination for 1983 Querbach, so she asked her to pass the book on if Woodard was interested in starring in it. Woodard reportedly never received the book because her friend felt the book’s subject matter was inappropriate due to the aforementioned policy of respectability. Coming from a middle-class black background, the friend noted relationship‘s theme distasteful, says Kindryd. “We just don’t want to talk about these things.” Years later, Woodard starred in an acclaimed audio adaptation of relationship.
Unlike Kindryd, it has taken Hollywood decades to acknowledge Butler’s work, which critics have lauded for being ahead of its time. “It was so frustrating for her,” says Kindryd. Especially in her later novels Parable of the sower and Parable of the TalentsButler could see that the things she was writing about were taking place in real life.
“She was ethical and had very strong values, and she didn’t mind saying, ‘I can’t finish this book, I’ll give you your money back,'” says Kindryd. “She was so true to herself and her values.”
Kindryd never let go of her hope of seeing something relationship on the screen. In fact, her connection to the book and Butler ran so deep that when she got tired of using her ex-husband’s last name, she looked to her friend. When Butler died in 2006, Kindryd changed her name to the novel’s title in homage, except with a slightly different spelling. “I changed my name in honor of Octavia to keep her close.”