Respecting the Original Source: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Talks About ‘Kindred’
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins recently spoke with Script about the challenges of adapting the much-loved Octavia E. Butler novel.
A passage from prodigious science fiction/afro-futuristic African American writer Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred reads: “Better to stay alive," I said. "At least while there's a chance to get free." I thought of the sleeping pills in my bag and wondered just how great a hypocrite I was. It was so easy to advise other people to live with their pain. The novel involves time dilation synced with slave narratives. It’s a searing examination of slavery through the lens of a modern Black woman and addresses emotional, psychological, physical, and generational pain.
In the book, the story is set in 1976 and main character Dana, an African America writer, starts being transported from her Los Angeles home to a plantation in antebellum Maryland. Her stays become more extensive, and she becomes more involved with plantation life, which challenges her modern sense of freedom. Buttressing this experience is her interracial relationship, a storyline that scrutinizes race, gender, and the roots of being an American.
Butler described this as a “grim fantasy,” and it’s a heady, thought-provoking tome for sure, as all of her work is. The California native became the recipient of the MacArthur Fellow Genius Grant and won Hugo and Nebula awards during her prolific career. A bad B-movie, The Devil Girl from Mars (1954), inspired her to write sci-fi. After seeing it, she felt she could write something better than that and indeed she did. Her esteemed works include Fledgling, Parable of the Sower, Wild Seed, and Dawn, some of which are finally headed to the screen.
Obie-winner and Pulitzer Prize nominee Branden Jacobs-Jenkins took on the mighty task of adapting and developing Kindred for FX and is a first-time showrunner on the series. He executive produces the show with Joseph Weisberg, Joel Fields, Darren Aronofsky, and Ari Handel of Protozoa Pictures. It stars Mallori Johnson as Dana, Micah Stock as Kevin, Ryan Kwanten as Thomas, and Austin Smith as Luke. The highly-anticipated 8-episode series premiered exclusively on Hulu on December 13, 2022.
Branden recently spoke with us about the challenges of adapting the much-loved Octavia E. Butler novel.
How did you get into writing?
I got into writing through reading. When I was growing up, I was into books. I had a single mother who couldn't afford childcare. I remember reading something and being a little unsatisfied by it and I thought, 'I could do better than this.’ That would be the first time I thought I should actually try writing something. I would sit at my mom's computer while she was in a meeting or something and just start typing. I wrote a ridiculous story. My teacher found out about it. This must have been third grade. He wanted me to read it in front of everyone. It was my first taste of the stage. It was the first time I realized it was pleasurable to me.
What was your first paid writing gig?
In high school I would send little stories out naively to various publications and contests. I remember I placed third in a poetry contest, and I got $200. That was kind of a side racket for me for about three years. I had an internship at a newspaper one summer in college. I started out in journalism. The whole time I was doing that, I was nursing these ambitions to be a playwright. I wrote a play called Neighbors, which won the Princess Grace Award.
What's it about?
It was a piece of experimental theater that was about a blended interracial family who receive new neighbors one day who are in the form of archetypes drawn from black face minstrelsy. It was considered quite incendiary. It did well for me not just because it started to open doors for me in having a career and what I've become concerned with thematically for the next bit, even up until today.
How familiar were you with Octavia's work prior to Kindred?
Oh, enormously. She's amongst the things I was reading. I had a big phase where I was very into Ray Bradbury. I had this babysitter, Kim Heller, she was pre-med at Howard University. She and her dad had kind of a fandom about them. She told me I might like Octavia Butler and she went home and brought back these pocket-size editions, The Patternist books, Wild Seed and Patternmaster. I devoured them. It was the first time I'd ever seen brown people on the cover of a book like this. I was super-intrigued and got swept away. I tried to track down everything I could buy her in a pre-Amazon world where I had to go to a bookstore and hope they had what I needed.
Have you adapted material before?
In the theater I adapt all the time. It's considered part of my wheelhouse. I've worked on adaptations. The room I'm most known for is The Watchmen, which was its own radical adaptation of a source text.
What were the challenges of adapting such a revered text as Kindred?
Television's television and a novel's a novel. You have to make some choices anyway. To go from something that's told in the first person and is a very close, retrospective form of storytelling that's written in past tense and try to put it in present tense and ultimately quite omniscient.
Early on, I was talking to the estate, and I had this strong sense to set it in the present tense. Octavia's representative for the estate, Merrilee Heifetz, said Octavia would have wanted you to make this for today. I really took that to heart. I wanted to honor what she did in 1979 which is set in 1976, I wanted to set it in the recent past for the contemporary viewer. Making that choice necessitated a ton of other choices because then you're suddenly asking yourself about cell phones and the ease with which she gets this information. As a society, we know about slavery as opposed to in the 1970s. Gender codes and courtship codes. It began to be an act of translation ultimately.
What characters did you enhance or create for the adaptation?
I enhanced everybody. Everyone in our show appears in some form in our book. The one kind of major creation is the character of Olivia but even she was based on some readings of the old draft that I did. Octavia Butler's papers at Huntington Library. Once we sold the project, I spent a week or two out there reading everything thing I could. I was surprised to learn that she originally conceived of this book as part of that Patternist series.
This was a story ultimately about inheritance and tracking through generations. She cut Dana's parents out of that conception of it. I'm curious about walking it back. The show's called Kindred. Let's give her multiple entry points through that theme of family. Recognizing that the book is more than four decades old, I wanted to have more than one iteration of Black womanhood.
Do people have to read the book to understand the show?
I don't think so. We tried very hard to build something that's compelling. If you read the book and you're a little more patient with us, you'll see the ways we're expanding thematically.
What is the message that's being conveyed with Dana traveling between time periods?
Don't assume you know everything about the past. I think Octavia was really interested in humbling people before the notion of survival. It's so easy to judge people in the past but, A.) We're about to be judged by the people who come after us, B.) It's very hard work to be awake in the ways you may be complicit in something morally suspect...an economic system or a relationship. But also, she was inspired to write this book because in a class she taught, someone stood up and said something like, 'I would go back in the past and I would shoot all the house slaves.' Her mother was a domestic servant, so she felt something was at stake in that idea. You actually don't know how people are surviving what resistance they're doing day to day. A lot of us out here want to believe that our blood only runs with the blood of the oppressed but there are various stories. Taking a hard look at them will help you feel fuller and more actualized as a person as opposed to denying it and hiding it behind some kind of fictions you inherited without questioning.
Was this your first time being a showrunner?
It sure is! Every show is different. I think we were probably making a show in a very specific context. If this show had been made four or five years ago, I'd have different things to say. We were battling a historic public health crisis in some way. All the ways we dealt with resources and creative protocols people were still trying to figure out how to be efficient inside of. I think it's always difficult to be a leader of color, but also make work that centers people of color in a context that maybe isn't reflected in...that's not everyone's instinct.
In some ways, I don't feel like I had a normal first-time showrunner experience, which is...that's what I get! I have many lives. I'm a professor at Yale University. I have a history of running academic departments. I have a footprint in the theater. I feel like all of those different lanes of my life somehow contributed. I was pulling on all different sorts of skill sets. I think I did a good job...!
I feel changed, though. The kind of gift that’s making a television show, you’re working on a scale that’s hard to articulate to people. You are being brought into contact with so many talented artisans, craftspeople, and actors…it’s like a village shows up to help you bring something to life. It’s a very humbling and special experience. I get why people get addicted to it honestly.
What’s the difference between writing a play and television?
With a play, you own your own IP. This is expensive toy television, so you’re constantly asking for permission to execute your ideas which can be a bit of a shock to the system if you’re used to working in a space where you’re trusted as a creative to do what you want to do. We’ve been developing this since 2016 so this has been the longest I’ve worked on something in my entire life. Things can move slow and I’m super aware of how many projects don’t make it this far so I’m not foregoing this blessing.
What’s the Kindred writer’s room like?
I heavily weighed it towards those who locked into the book in some way personal. For me, it was about taking care of the property as much as possible as we tried to bring it into its next iteration. We were completely a Zoom room from beginning to end. It was an interesting way to try to make television with only four hours a day and really relying heavily on people working individually.
Whereas in a normal writer’s room, you’re getting those moments in the snack room, or some people are staying late. The board is all around you. Trying to adjust to a more virtual writing was a thing but we eventually got the hang of it. We’re looking forward to an in-person writer’s room for season two.
What do you look for in the writers you hire?
I look for people who have a confident sense of what story is. I think it’s very easy for people to think, 'Oh, I got to page 60 in my Final Draft document, I know what writing a script is.' But story is a skill. It’s a thing you have to work at understanding. There’s an actual craft to it. We’re oddly in this place where people assume that the fact you express yourself is enough. People don’t think enough about themselves as readers of story. Are you writing something that you would want to watch? We’re in this funny period where people want to be writers and don’t’ like writing. Or they don’t pay attention, they don’t watch television or movies but whatever they say is amazing.
The best writers know that writing is rewriting. A voice is a journey, it’s something that doesn’t come to you immediately. It’s a thing you work at and it’s OK to be humble to the form and get under the hood of what really makes the story work. That’s something I look at. I look at people who are readers, especially if you’re working on a historical drama, you can’t just wing it. You’ve got to have respect for research. You have to believe that it’s important to have integrity in your storytelling. There’s an ethics to what we’re doing, particularly in this sense where we’re telling the stories of people who didn’t get to tell their stories. When I’m reading scripts, I’m also looking for the writer to surprise me in some way or they did something I was jealous of. I’m reading as a reader; I want to be entertained.
What do you think are the biggest lessons you learned as a writer and a showrunner for Kindred?
As a showrunner, you have to do your due diligence. One of the handicaps you have coming from theater into television is that I didn’t spend enough time in the trenches to build out a network so when you’re hiring people, you’re depending on people around you to identify people, you’re depending on word of mouth. You’ve got to hire slow and fire fast. In any industry where there’s so much potential for prosperity and wealth, you can run into scam artists. You really have to make sure that the people that you hire are there because they believe in the work, and they want to do the work. Especially something like this, I was like, 'This is Octavia Butler’s Kindred, we cannot be acting like clowns out here. We’ve got to be respectful.'
As a writer, I think this process has made me more literal on the page, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. When you’re developing, but also in any other form, you’re auditioning on the page so much. You’re trying to prove to the execs that you’re a good writer. But the minute you hand that to a production department, it falls apart because these are people who are just trying to do their jobs. In a play you’re creating more of a literary text, I would say screenplays are really blueprints. There’s a fine line between being very exact and precise in your description and being overly precise.
Leave some room for surprise and for people to be creative themselves. Leave room in your imaginative playground for others to play with you. That takes a lot of trial and error and just learning through the process of production.
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Sonya Alexander started off her career training to be a talent agent. She eventually realized she was meant to be on the creative end and has been writing ever since. As a freelance writer she’s written screenplays, covered film, television, music and video games and done academic writing. She’s also been a script reader for over twenty years. She's a member of the African American Film Critics Association and currently resides in Los Angeles.
