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EMBRACING THE KINDRED

by Edward Gross

            What follows is a look at the short-lived Kindred: The Embraced TV series that aired at Fox. This article was written at the time of the show’s original airing.

            When Fox Broadcasting and executive producer Aaron Spelling gave John Leekley the opportunity to redefine the vampire mythos in the series Kindred: The Embraced, his first task was to discard much of what had come before in the cinematic history of the undead.

            "My basic feeling is that what people call the myth -- basically everything people know about vampires -- comes from this guy named Bram Stoker, who made it all up anyway," says Leekley, who serves as creator and executive producer of the series. "I find it's all very tired and very boring because it's all about funny accents, sleeping in dirt, crosses and garlic strings. It's become kind of comic and unintentionally funny. When that happens to mythology, mythology loses its power. The whole idea of mythology is to express the most powerful things we have in our life and the vampire myth just didn't have that power anymore."

            Leekley began researching the origins of the legend, and found himself looking back to the Middle Ages and before. There he found that vampires were referred to as "Kindred," and that the label vampire was affixed to those who lived outside of society's rules. "In very early times," he notes, "people invented vampires to represent creatures that had had their Ids set free. Once that mythology was set up, the church and the state could hunt those creatures down."

            As example, he points to the Spanish Inquisition where some people would be tortured until they confessed to being vampires, so that the church and state could tell the masses that this is what happened to those who lived outside of their rules, and that their fate could be your own.

            "I was very much intrigued by that," he explains, "and that led me to want to create a world that has as much elegance, sophistication, intelligence and passion as the world of The Godfather, because that was another subculture world. I was astonished when I saw that film as a kid, because it's an entire world outside of my experience. I wanted to create the same kind of thing. So like the five Families in New York, we have the five vampire clans living in San Francisco and they're entirely different from each other. That was the beginning. I saw a lot of power -- writing in metaphor -- in creating dramas in which people were defining what is and what is not human."

            Unlike the typical vampires lurking in Transylvanian castles, members of the Kindred are truly former human beings who retain their earthly passions, which are represented by the individual clans. The Torreadors are artists and lovers of creativity; the Ventrue are a Kennedy-like blue-blooded aristocracy; the Nosferatu, a subterranean and savage clan, some members of which serve as enforcers; the Gangrels, incredibly independent rockers and bikers; and the Brujah, essentially mobsters breaking the rules of both human beings and the Kindred. Beyond that, much of the series focuses on Julian Luna (Mark Frankel, last seen in Fox's awful Fortune Hunter), leader of the Ventrue who is also known as the Prince of the City and does his best to maintain a tentative peace between the clans. Luna ultimately finds himself forming an uneasy alliance with San Francisco Detective Frank Kohanek (C. Thomas Howell), who has learned the secrets of the Kindred but who is actually being protected by Luna because of a promise the vampire had made to a woman both men had loved.

            "The information she has shared is highly restricted and punishable by death," says Howell. "Because of their past connection, she comes to Julian and makes him promise not to kill me if she gives up her life for mine. He promises and the Kindred takes her life. Now we have a situation where the guy who killed my girlfriend has sworn to protect me and be my friend, and this is the guy I want to see dead more than anybody on Earth. The early episodes are about me battling with the fact that I want to expose these vampires and I want to kill them all. But because of the situation I'm put in -- having my life saved by this guy -- I slowly start to accept this clan of vampires and start to understand that they have every right to exist in nature along with the birds and the bees and humans. Essentially the show is about discovering how much the two of us are alike. Here we are heads of our society, making heavy decisions in terms of safety for society, going out with the same women, working the night beat. As much as we hate each other in the beginning, we come to realize very quickly that we're the same."

            A critical assault that Howell expects is from critics who wonder if Kindred is similar to such Spelling fare as Melrose Place or Beverly Hills 90210. As the actor sees it, such comparisons are inevitable as those are the types of shows that his "boss" makes.

            "But he specifically wanted to do something extremely different," Howell emphasizes. "He didn't want to make Melrose Place with teeth. He wanted to try his hardest to break off and do something different, and that's why I wanted to work with him."

            It's also why the series drew in filmmaker Peter Medak  -- director of such critically acclaimed films as Romeo is Bleeding and The Krays -- to helm the 90-minute pilot as well as the first one-hour episode. A long time fan of ghost stories and tales of the supernatural -- and enamoured with the notion of being involved with a series on the pilot level -- the filmmaker was drawn to the material. An additional attraction was the idea of helping to contribute to the early gestation of a series during his feature film "down time," bringing in his specific strengths as a director.

            "I think I definitely brought a feature style to the show," says Medak. "There are nice tracking shots and working with helicopters along the rooftops in San Francisco -- things which you normally wouldn't dream of doing on an episode of television because they don't have the time or money. It's also a wonderful challenge for a director to establish a style which then really makes the whole piece work. Even though there are fifty million opinions in television, on a pilot everybody kind of listens to what you're saying, so you can bring your own taste to it. THAT was really challenging. The only other TV I've done recently was four episodes of Homicide. Barry Levinson did the pilot for Homicide and I recently did another pilot myself. I guess the reason I did it -- and what I saw Barry do -- is that I saw how you can really get hold of the television medium like it's a steering wheel of a car and absolutely make a right or left turn and not do the conventional thing. That was the challenge of it and I hope it works for the audience. When I saw the finished product I said, 'Shit, it looks good,' which is nice because if one can do that and not be conventional -- to do something with class and quality instead of just close-ups and talking heads -- I think one has achieved something."

            For Leekley, one of the most creatively satisfying aspects of Kindred: The Embraced was the sheer quality of the talent that it attracted. Beyond the people in front of the camera and Medak, the pilot's editor, Ray Lovejoy, worked with Stanley Kubrick on such films as 2001 and The Shining; the director of Photography was John Leonetti, who had worked on Mortal Kombat and The Mask, and so on. "It was exhilarating, and from the pilot I knew we had created a world that people wanted to be in."

            Working with a network that is as genre friendly as Fox (The X-Files, Sliders, Alien Nation, Space: Above and Beyond, etc.) has been extremely satisfying to Leekley as well.

            "I could not be happier about the freedom I was given to rock and roll -- to do something that has never been done before," he says exuberantly. "Of course when you do something that there's nothing like, you're in a dangerous position. But I'd rather be there than doing just another cop show. If we gave you what you were waiting for, you would hate us for it. You'd be thinking, 'It's the same old shit,' and it would have no power. The whole crew and the actors are such a close group who are so passionate about this show. The films or shows I make, I don't tool for mass public consumption. I just do what I think rocks. If people are interested, cool. If not, I had a hell of a lot of fun and everybody involved feels as though it's the best work of their lives. All I can do is do the things that are way out there in my own creative life and go for it."

C. THOMAS HOWELL EMBRACES THE TUBE

          For a veteran of more than 50 feature films -- including E.T., The Outsiders, Soul Man and The Hitcher -- television and, more specifically, Kindred: The Embraced doesn't exactly seem the place that actor C. Thomas Howell would consider home.

            "The decision to do television came before the decision to do this piece," explains the 29-year-old actor. "Where I was coming from is the fact that I've done 50 movies and  have been fortunate enough to experience Spielberg and Coppola, and unfortunate enough to experience a lot of others. I just felt that the barrier between being a television actor and a film actor was gone; it went out in the '80s. With the help of video cassettes and cable, film actors ARE television actors. All of my films are running on cable now, so people are seeing more of my work on television than they do in a theatre. Doing feature films I was kidding myself that I was a feature film actor when I'm on television every night, so I finally said I would like to get  more people to see my work."

            Citing higher aspirations, Howell admits that he would love to get the opportunity to direct, and if Kindred succeeds it will probably afford him the chance to do so. "I wanted more responsibility and I feel there is a lot more responsibility that comes with being in peoples' living rooms every week. I have a three year old daughter as well and I wanted to be close to home with my family and not traveling all over the country. All of those equations went into this decision."

            He also saw the series as a chance to essentially put up or shut up, as he often found himself cynically watching television and tearing apart the performances of featured actors. Equipped with strong writers and "unbelievable" technicians, he feels that unlike a lot of series, Kindred has a lot going for it.

            "There's no way I could hurt myself career wise," he says. "It's not like I'm doing a sitcom. I'm playing a cop in San Francisco, it's shot at night, I'm chasing vampires, there's cool effects. There's basically sex, drugs and rock and roll ala Spelling, so you know it won't be too raunchy. But it is different, and that's important to me. Look at a show like ER -- which is a great show -- but how many people can burst through a pair of swinging doors having to amputate something and be like, 'Oh my God, help me!'? They're fantastic shows, but every fucking episode is the same. I just felt that I didn't want to get into that kind of experience. I wanted to have no idea what was going to happen next, and that's kind of where I'm at."

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