Blair Underwood goes for the greenlight: a six-year journey to develop and star in a film based on Tananarive Due's My Soul to Keep catches fire in a partnership with an enthusiastic studio. Here's the story so far in bringing one popular black novel to the screen.

"Ever since I was a kid, I used to cut out pictures from catalogs to represent characters in my stories," explains novelist Tananarive Due about how she visualizes the people who inhabit her fictional worlds. "I have to feel that I'm surrounded by a three-dimensional environment--that it's real. If there's a location, I want to see the location. If there's a person, I wanted to see the person." With her 1997 novel, My Soul to Keep, Blair Underwood's was always the face Due saw before her as she wrote about Dawit/David, the handsome, well-traveled 500-year-old Ethiopian immortal who dares to commit himself to a mortal passion, home and family with a contemporary African-American woman, risking the exposure of his immortal clan's secrets.

Now in a dream come true for Due, for the book's agent Janell W. Agyeman (of the Marie Brown Agency), and for its fans, not only is Blair Underwood himself preparing to play the lead role in the film adaptation, Underwood is also one of the film's producers. For the last six years, he's worked diligently with various partners until he found his way to the Fox Searchlight studio, where he and two coproducers, Nia Hill and De'Angela Steed of Strange Fruit Productions, landed a development deal announced last August. Fox Searchlight bought the script written by Frank Underwood, Blair's brother and partner in their ten-year-old production company, Eclectic Entertainment. The studio has meanwhile attached to the project director Rick Famuyiwa, whose most recent film Brown Sugar, Fox Searchlight had produced. (Previously, he had also directed The Wood.)

Famuyiwa is now polishing up Frank Underwood's scenario into his shooting script, a typical procedure for a writer/director like Famuyiwa. After the shooting script is signed off on by all the producers, Blair and his associates will be going for Fox Searchlight's still-to-be-flashed greenlight and confirm a production schedule when they'll actually start filming.

By now, author Tananarive Due has become accustomed to the vagaries of the Hollywood waiting game. When her first novel, The Between, was published in 1995, its film rights were optioned for a year, but no film was made. Still, Samuel Goldwyn Productions contacted her immediately about rights to her second novel, so she didn't even think about approaching Underwood at first. Then at an outdoor cultural festival in Florida, where she lived at the time, the former Miami Herald journalist ran into an old Knight-Ridder coworker, Alan Sorter, who happened to be working with Underwood on a video project called Sister, I'm Sorry. (This powerful 1998 docudrama focuses on healing past wounds experienced by black women in bad relationships with men; in it, actors play out very real situations and testomonies, concluding with an actual sermon by Pastor Donald Bell, which leads every man in the real-life congregation to stand in for any man who has caused a sister to hurt in the spirit of seeking forgiveness and reconciliation.) By this time, Due had all but signed her deal with Goldwyn, but she felt it wouldn't hurt to get her book into Blair Underwood's hands. "I jumped on it," she recalls, laughing.

Underwood, of course, came to prominence in the award-winning ensemble cast of the network TV series L.A. Law, but is also fondly remembered as Jada Pinkett's love interest in the big-screen caper Set It Off. Recently, he played a handsome professional baskethall team M.D. on HBO's Sex and the City. Having built a career in a Hollywood where few leading roles are tailor-made for black male actors, he says he was truly flattered when heard about the origins of the main character of Tananarive's second novel. When he finally received the book, he found himself immediately hooked after three pages and could not put it down. "I read the entire book and called Tananarive right then," he recalled in a telephone interview BIBR conducted with the actor and the novelist together.

He not only saw the potential for a film, but he also dreamed of directing it, in addition to playing the lead. "Thrillers are my favorite genre in movies. And because of the personal history I have," says the very down-to-earth Blair Underwood, "the power of My Soul to Keep as the ultimate love story also appeals to me. This brother lives forever, and he is serious about his love--until the end of time. I like the idea of projecting that on the screen." Underwood reveals that his own parents have been married "forever," and the handsome actor is a devoted spouse himself, married to Desiree, with whom he has three young children. "My Soul to Keep just has everything," he concludes, "I'ts got drama, suspense and thrilling dynamics interwoven with an eternal love story.

"But you know, Tananarive had already made the decision to let Samuel Goldwyn buy the option. And actually, that turned out to be best for me, because i wasn't ready just then," he admits. "I hoped and prayed that Tananarive would eventually get back to me, and she did-a year and a half later." Samuel Goldwyn had struggled to get a script they wanted to work with, Due reported, but when they didn't, they decided not to renew the option. All clear for Blair to buy it and develop the script with his screenwriter brother.

So brother Frank went to work on the screenplay, but meanwhile Blair also contacted actor/producer Tim Reid. "Tim has a studio in my hometown of Petersburg, Virginia," says the former self-described Army brat with Virginia roots. "He and his wife Daphne are friends of our family, and I admire him both personally and professionally. We thought we could produce this project together."

The high point of this early phase of involvement, Blair says, was the trip he made in 2000 to Ethiopia, to Lalibela, an actual thousand-year-old village, which is the ancestral home of Due's protagonist Dawit/ David. "I received an invitation from an international humanitarian organization to go to Ethiopia and do some work for them. I took it as an omen, and decided to go to Ethiopia a week ahead of my commitment and shoot some on-location footage." With a skeleton crew of nine, including a first assistant director who was an Ethiopian national working in Hollywood, Blair directed and edited a five-minute trailer (with music, but no dialogue) he has used to show potential financiers the quality of the film he was trying to make. "Even though it's an intimate story about a man, a woman and a child," observes Blair, "the film has to feel like an epic, because of the many generations Dawit has lived."

"When Blair came back," says Due, "my husband Steven Barnes and I were in L.A., and Blair set up in a backroom of the Magic Johnson Theater. And his footage was the first time I saw the ancient Christian church I had written about, carved from the stone earth, and it just took my breath away."

"It's like stepping back into time," adds Blair, I've never seen so much poverty as I saw in Lalibela, but I've also never seen so much joy in people's faces." He was also warmly affirmed and embraced by many of the Ethiopians he met, who often commented on his striking resemblance to their people.

Back in Hollywood, it was still tough finding financing, even with Underwood's personal commitment and his connections. Ultimately, he hooked up with the two enterprising independent producers, Hill and Steed, who had a close contact at Fox Searchlight.

At this point, Underwood had to make a difficult decision: "The studio asked me to make a choice between directing or acting. It took me a while to process their very credible arguments, that this type of film--a supernatural thriller/love story, with an all-black cast--has yet to make money in Hollywood. And when Hollywood film executives speak of supernatural, they are measuring it against Beloved, which financially didn't do well.

"All I wanted to do by directing the project was to protect the integrity of Tananarive's story. So my decision-making turned on the fact that as a producer and as the lead actor on the film, I could still have a critical impact. I realized I didn't have to direct this film to do that."

"The entire process of producing a film--a feature film with a studio--is new to me," says the veteran actor. "Ive done music videos and a short film, but this is my first feature." (Interestingly enough, the short film he produced and directed is called The Second Coming, about Jesus coming back to earth as a brother with long dredlocks.) He admits, "I've just begun to recognize the significance of "Tananarive's book getting to this stage in the film development process."

The greenlight Blair Underwood is going for could take another year, or it could take six months, or just a few weeks. "The studio is excited about it, and they've shown me they are committed to the film. A 2004 start date would be a beautiful thing," he surmised, but at press time, he really didn't know what the timing would be.

"Blair has that really vital quality that all creative people need of being able to roll with the punches," adds Due appreciatively. "Over the long years of this journey so far, if something didn't work out, he was ready to try another way. He always keeps his head," she notes. "We have a great working relationship. And anytime he meets someone who loves the book, he puts them on the phone with me so I can hear it. My husband and I live in a tiny logging town in Washington state-Longview, Washington, so I don't run into my readers on a daily basis."

"I'm such a fan of her work, and I know from my brother that writing is a solitary life," concludes Blair Underwood. "Tananarive's husband Steven is an amazing author, too. [Barnes writes speculative fiction and most recent novel, Zulu Heart, was published in hardcover by Warner Books last spring.] I tell them, 'You guys keep writing; I'm determined to get these movies made."