A Star Trek vet nearly made Octavia Butler’s Kindred movie before Hulu

Kindred, the time-travel drama premiering on Hulu this week, marks the first time Octavia Butler’s seminal science fiction novel has been brought to screen — but it’s not the first attempt. Andreea Kindryd is a veteran from the original. Star TrekHollywood hustled to produce a movie adaptation of Dana. This would faithfully tell the story about Dana, a young Black author who journeys back in history to Maryland’s plantation and meet her family. The tale of her unsuccessful quest to adapt the book casts light on why it took so long for Butler’s work to come to the screen.

Kindryd worked on Star TrekCoon was the famous writer-producer Gene L. Coon’s assistant. She looked over scripts and gave Coon her notes. This is what she will recount in her memoir. Code-Switching. “I was trying to get into the film industry, and it wasn’t working,” Kindryd tells Polygon. She felt as though the creatives working in Hollywood at the time were intent on creating a respectable image of Black people, and “[her] stuff was too weird for them.” When she wrote a spec script for a Black sitcom at the time, she decided to have one of the kids shoplift, and the show’s creators were horrified.

Image: Huntington Library/Doubleday

Kindryd left Los Angeles in the 1970s in order to pursue a career as a documentary filmmaker. Kindryd encountered many hurdles in her quest to become a fully-fledged producer. But in the early 1980s, she moved back to LA and stumbled upon Octavia Butler’s writing. The discovery wouldn’t amount to an adaptation, but it would start a lifelong friendship.

When Kindryd read Butler’s Kindred, she was taken by how the novel portrayed “the inability of white people to see what’s right in front of them,” and the ways that white people will hang onto their own power, no matter what it costs them. “It spoke to me. And I fell in love with Dana,” the book’s protagonist. “I just felt, People have to be able to see it..”

Kindryd tried to get in touch with Butler’s people to find out if the option for the book was available, but was stymied until a friend suggested getting in touch with Butler directly. It turned out that the women were neighbors, living on the same block. Kindryd called Butler up and befriended her, taking her to visit Kindryd’s friend Rosilyn Heller, who’d become the first female vice president of a movie studio.

The rights to KindredTalia Shire (actress) had already offered it to her.RockyJack Schwartzman was her husband. He had just produced the Peter Sellers vehicle. It’s all about Being There. “I couldn’t figure out why she’d optioned it,” Kindryd says. But she was sure that “it wasn’t in their soul, and they would be easily discouraged.” She resolved to work on getting things set up so that when the option lapsed, “I’d be ready to move on it.”

Kindryd did not reach out to Schwartzman or Shire directly. “I was even more insecure back then than I am today,” she says. And as a Black woman producer, she says, “there’s no footsteps to follow. I’m in uncomfortable territory. But I was still trying, in my own way.”

Kindryd, Butler, and their shared outsider status made them fast friends. “She didn’t feel like she really belonged anywhere. She was like me,” Kindryd recalls. Butler’s mother and Kindryd’s grandmother had both been housekeepers, so “[they] both had grown up the same way: at the white lady’s house, in the kitchen, with a book.” They had both spent all their spare time at the library, which was still where Butler was spending her time. According to Kindryd, Butler didn’t have a car, so she got around LA using public transportation, where she was constantly harassed.

Kindryd said to her friend, “Whenever the opportunity for…” KindredShe wanted to find out the truth about her lapsed status. She didn’t have anything concrete to offer Butler, but she wanted to do her best to get something going.

Malcolm Ali/WireImage.

Photo credit to Andreea Jungryd

Kindryd went to Zimbabwe in 1984 and came up with an idea. Zimbabwe had won its independence in 1980, and white settlers were leaving the country in droves — but then-prime minister Robert Mugabe wouldn’t allow them to take money out of the country. The country also had vast plantations, which looked absolutely stunning. Kindryd met with a government minister who knew her friend Roberta Sykes, and they hatched a plan: they could film a movie on location at one of these plantations for free, and encourage white settlers to invest the money they couldn’t take with them, in the hopes that eventually, any profits would be recouped overseas.

Kindryd was fascinated by the idea that colonialism’s legacy could be used to finance a film about the Black experience. When she told Butler about the idea, “She thought it was funny. She loved it.”

However, she returned to LA with the idea and was shot down by producers and studio execs. The film was a live action adaptation. Sheena, the Queen of Jungle, and “it had not worked at all.” One disastrous experience filming in Africa meant the whole continent was now off-limits, because as Kindryd puts it, Hollywood is “a bunch of goats following each other.”

Eventually, Kindryd moved back to Australia, but she and Butler kept up a steady correspondence — Kindryd still has the letters Butler sent her, in which she complains about rejections from publishers who didn’t understand how to categorize her work. “This is the kind of shit I got on Kindred over and over,” Butler writes in one letter. When Kindryd came back to the United States, she would stay at Butler’s house, where Butler had a huge bathtub even though she hated taking baths.

Kindryd attempted to make another attempt at laying the foundation for a Kindred adaptation in the late ’80s. She knew someone who was close to actor Alfre Woodard, who had broken out and earned an Oscar nomination for 1983’s Cross CreekSo she requested that they pass on the book in case Woodard wanted to be a star. Woodard reportedly never received the book, because her friend felt the subject matter of the book wasn’t appropriate due to the aforementioned respectability politics. The friend was a Black middle class man. Kindred’s subject matter distasteful, Kindryd says. “We just don’t want to talk about those things.” Years later, Woodard starred in an acclaimed audio adaptation of Kindred.

Unlike Kindryd, Hollywood has taken decades to appreciate Butler’s work, which critics have praised for being ahead of its time. “That’s what was so frustrating to her,” Kindryd says. Particularly in her later books The Parable of the SowerAnd The Parable of the TalentsButler saw that what she had written was starting to take place in real life.

“She was ethical and she had very strong values and she didn’t mind saying, ‘I can’t finish this book, let me give you the money back,’” Kindryd says. “She was so true to herself and to her values.”

Kindryd was never able to let go her hopes of seeing the world. KindredIt was on the screen. In fact, her connection to the book and Butler ran so deep that when she had tired of using her ex-husband’s last name, she looked to her friend. Kindryd, who was a friend of Butler’s, changed Kindryd’s name to match the title of the book in tribute. However, the spelling is slightly different. “I changed my name in honor of Octavia, to keep her close to me.”