Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week writer and director Cord Jefferson won a BAFTA for American fiction. His screenplay adaptation of Percival Everett's aforementioned novel. It stars Jeffrey Wright and has collected five Oscar nominations altogether. Wright plays the frustrated writer offended by being pigeonholed by publishers and booksellers.

[video excerpt]

Monk: Yes, wait a minute. Why are these books here?

Ned: I'm not sure. I would imagine that this author, Ellison, is Black.

Monk: That's me. Ellison. He is me and he and I are Black.

Ned: Oh, bingo.

Monk: No bingo, Ned. These books have nothing to do with African American studies. They're just literature. The blackest thing about this one is the ink.

Brooke Gladstone: Then he comes across that blockbuster travesty "We's Lives In Da Ghetto."

Sintara: Too few books were about my people. Where's our representation?

Moderator: Would you read an excerpt?

Sintara: Yo, Sharonda. Girl, you be pregnant again?

Brooke Gladstone: Monk writes a parody that's pornographic on basically every level, largely out of moral indignation, but also because he needs the money to support his elderly mom who is drifting into dementia while navigating his strained relationship with his increasingly out-there plastic surgeon brother, played by Sterling K. Brown.

[video excerpt]

Monk: You gave her opioids to sleep?

Clifford: Yes. You ever seen a heroin addict? Those guys take naps standing up.

Monk: It's dangerous.

Clifford: Look, I'm keeping an eye on her. I'm a doctor.

Monk: So am I.

Clifford: Right. Maybe if we need to revive a sentence.

Brooke Gladstone: Cord Jefferson is no stranger to adaptations, having written one for a series like Station Eleven, based on a novel, and the Emmy award-winning show Watchmen, based on a graphic novel, but he started out as a journalist. Welcome to the show, Cord.

Cord Jefferson: Thank you so much for having me.

Brooke Gladstone: I was tickled to learn that one of your first forays into TV was on the Chris Hayes show in 2013.

Cord Jefferson: Yes, there was a surf competition in Huntington Beach, white teenagers are smashing out storefronts and looting and turning over porta potties and fighting in the streets. I wrote a satirical piece for Gawker, where I was working at the time, about the problem of white-on-white crime. It was essentially just a send-up of what at that time Bill O'Reilly would say, in wake of Black teenagers doing the exact same thing.

Cord Jefferson: These young people are learning this kind of behavior in lacrosse camps. They're learning this kind of behavior at college spring break.

Chris Hayes: Here's my question to you. Do you have a personal problem with white people? Is this animus?

Cord Jefferson: My best friend is white. My mother is actually white. My prom date in high school was a white woman. She was very white actually, she used to ride horses and do that whole thing. I have very deep roots in the white community.

Brooke Gladstone: You say they're learning the kinds of behavior, Ivy League fraternities for drug use and binge drinking or normalized behavior, leading to this white-on-white crime scourge.

Cord Jefferson: [laughs] That was fun. That's what got me my first TV job actually, because a showrunner for a TV show saw that clip of me on Chris Hayes. He said, "I think you're funny. Have you considered writing for television?" He hired me for my first gig based on that.

Brooke Gladstone: When you read Erasure, you said you felt the book was written for you. You related to the protagonist, Monk, who's a frustrated novelist who people overlooked because his work didn't conform to expectations of what a Black writer should produce. You articulated your own frustrations as a writer in a 2014 article for Medium, The Racism Beat. You wrote, "If you're Black and your beat is to offer your thoughts and opinions on the degradation of Black Americans, you'll never want for steady work. A steady mind is not guaranteed." What led you to that?

Cord Jefferson: I had reached this point in my career when it felt like on a weekly basis, people were coming to me and saying, "Do you want to write about Trayvon Martin being killed? Do you want to write about Mike Brown being killed?" It felt like my job had become this sort of revolving door of misery. What can I say about this that people haven't been saying for generations?

When I started working in film and television, it felt like great, this is the world of fiction, fantasy, I can write about anything that I want to write about. I can write about any Black person doing anything. It wasn't long before people were coming to me and saying, "Do you want to write this movie about a Black person being killed by the police? Do you want to write this movie about a gang member? Do you want to write this movie about a slave? It felt like, "Oh, even here, even in the world of fiction, there's still real rigid perspective as to what Black life looks like, as to what Black stories look like, and as to what Black creators can do." I was really taken aback by that.

Brooke Gladstone: How was your mind when you picked up Erasure in 2020?

Cord Jefferson: I don't think it's saying anything unique to say that I was in a low place in the year 2020, but besides COVID, I had suffered this really big professional failure that year where I had come very, very close to getting a TV show that I co-created on the air. So much so that we'd written the entire season, we started looking for where our production offices were going to be in New York, and then at the last minute, the network pulled the plug on it. This to me was like evidence that it was never going to happen for me.

I felt like I will have a creative life, I will be this journeyman TV writer who works on other people's TV shows, and that's fine. I'll make good money, I'll be allowed to be creative for the rest of my life, but I'll never have something that's my own. I was starting to feel that way because I've been working so hard, I hadn't had time to read for fun in a long time. I'd never heard of Erasure. I read a synopsis. I went bought it and devoured it immediately. As I was reading it, I got the wind in my creative sails again. 50 pages into it, I was thinking that I might want to adapt it into a screenplay, and about 100 pages into it, I started thinking that I might want to direct that screenplay once it was written.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's talk about the process of adapting the book. Did you know immediately how you wanted to make it your own? I understand you got the rights for free from the author.

Cord Jefferson: I was nervous to talk to him because I knew that he had apparently told people no in the past.

Brooke Gladstone: He's not shy apparently about doing that.

Cord Jefferson: I've never met somebody who cares less about anybody's outside opinion than Percival Everett. [chuckles] I think that there was somebody who tried to adapt Percival's first novel, and the first question in the first meeting to him was, "Do you mind if we make the protagonist white?" Apparently, Percival said, "I don't mind that, as long as literally every other character is Black."

[laughter]

Cord Jefferson: Then they said, "Well, we're not going to do that." He said, "Well, then this is not going to happen." That has left a bad taste in his mouth, and so he was reluctant to allow people any more adaptations, and he eventually later told me that he felt like I understood the spirit of Erasure and I understood the essence of what he was getting at. Yes, he gave me the rights for free for six months, and he said, "Go write a script and if anything comes of it, then you can pay me then", and that's what I did.

Brooke Gladstone: When you heard they were green-lighting the movie, you started crying.

Cord Jefferson: Yes, I started crying in the meeting. Like I said, I had grown to believe that it wasn't going to happen for me. This is an industry where rejection is the norm. There's people out there who have been working far longer than I have who have never gotten anything made that they've written. I was overwhelmed. I couldn't believe that somebody was finally saying yes to me.

Brooke Gladstone: Did you consult much with Everett in the process? Did you have any fears when you showed him the film?

Cord Jefferson: Of course, it was a nightmare. There's a famous story about a French author named Boris Vian who had his book adapted and he went to the premier and 10 minutes into the film, he stood up and started shouting at the screen, and then he had a heart attack and died right there. That, of course, was my greatest fear, is that I'm going to show it to Percival and he is going to die. Fortunately, before he eventually signed off on the rights, then he asked to read the script and he read my script, and then he signed off on the rights to shoot the film.

Then when I was still editing, I brought him and his wife, who's another wonderful novelist, in, Danzy Senna is her name. Percival told me he really liked it. He's been a huge supporter of the project all along the way, but he's never had creative input, which I think is probably the best relationship you can have with an adaptor and an adoptee.

Brooke Gladstone: I loved your film and the book for the same reasons and for different ones too. We're going to try not to give any spoilers, but I want to try and bend myself into a pretzel in order to discuss some of the choices you made. I want to say that I thought the choices were brilliant.

Cord Jefferson: Thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: Monk writes his parody or satire that becomes My Pafology in response to a book that caricatures and plays up the degradations of Black urban life. Percival Everett is pretty unsparing about the author of that book. She, who grew up in Akron, Ohio, spent a few days with some distant family members in Harlem and then comes out with this blockbuster piece of cheesy exploitation proclaimed as Truth with a capital T. You are much kinder to the author of that novel, Sintara Golden, and she's played by Issa Rae in the movie.

[video excerpt]

Monk: I see the unrealized potential of Black people in this country.

Sintara: Potential is what people see when they think what's in front of them isn't good enough.

Brooke Gladstone: It's a more compassionate treatment overall than I think the book is to lots of people.

Cord Jefferson: Yes. The book is very funny, but the lows of the book are far lower than the lows of the film. That was a conscious decision. I wanted to make a movie that felt inviting to a lot of different kinds of people.

Brooke Gladstone: Why did you want to give Sintara a say?

Cord Jefferson: Do you know the term talented tenth?

Brooke Gladstone: No.

Cord Jefferson: W. E. B. Du Bois, he didn't coin the term, but he used to write about it. Basic encapsulation is that 10% of Black people are going to be the ones who bring the other 90% out of their misery. It's like it's up to the talented tenth to be the salvation of all of Black people. I think a more contemporary equivalent would be pull up your pants and behave in front of white people. Respectability politics thing that we need great Black people to help the other ones who are not great. The thing that I didn't want this movie to ever do was to scold Black people. I never wanted it to be about respectability politics, never wanted it to scold Black art. That's something Jeffrey and I decided on very early. That's the first question that he asked me when he sat down was, "Is this some talented tenth thing that you're trying to do?"

Brooke Gladstone: He was worried that you wanted to make these people credits to their race.

Cord Jefferson: Exactly. To me, that told me that he was even more right for the job than I had thought because he's thinking about these things in the way that I'm thinking about these things. To me, one of the ways that we avoided doing that was to humanize Sintara, was to hear her side of the story, and to understand that actually, this wasn't some person who was leveraging other people's agony for treasure. This is somebody who, as she says, I'm just giving the market what it wants.

What I definitely don't want people to walk away thinking is that anybody associated with the film believes that movies about slavery, movies about inner city poverty, movies about drug dealers, that this movie is saying that that kind of art is not worthy of existing. In fact, I really like 12 Years a Slave. I really like Boyz n the Hood.

Brooke Gladstone: It's a question of more stories, not less.

Cord Jefferson: Exactly. It's a question of why are the people with their hands on the purse strings so interested in green-lighting these kinds of stories over and over and over again, as opposed to why are artists on the ground level making art. They're making the art because they're making art within the parameters and institutions that have existed generations before they have.

Brooke Gladstone: Your film is so wonderfully meta because it is about a book which is about a book and it's adapted from a book, which makes it all the more dizzying that your film, which is so critical of the institutions that bestow prizes, have been swept up in an awards race of its own. What's that ride been like?

Cord Jefferson: We made this movie under no auspices. We made it with very little money and very little time relative to the movies that we are now in conversation with. It feels amazing. It certainly feels meta, but that was the intention. Percival's book is metatextual, and I felt like it was important for the movie to be metatextual. I think that's one of the things that's been very fun about it's seeing it all play out and I love it.

Brooke Gladstone: I noticed you didn't have nearly as much of Monk's novel in the film, but you did a great job of boiling it down except it wasn't nearly as offensive, which I guess was to avoid an X rating and to use the term differently.

Cord Jefferson: Yes, exactly. [laughs]

Brooke Gladstone: Then there's the ending. It continues after the novel ends with a specific reference to Hollywood as opposed to the book world. Is there any way to explain without serious spoiling how and why you took it there or anything about that?

Cord Jefferson: Yes. This is a larger conversation than just the book world. This is a conversation that encompasses basically all aspects of culture.

Brooke Gladstone: The film industry obviously has been very receptive to the critique your film has offered up. I guess as long as it's about Hollywood it's okay.

Cord Jefferson: Yes. Look, Hollywood is the most naval-gazing industry in the world, probably--

Brooke Gladstone: Except for media, maybe.

[laughter]

Cord Jefferson: Well, it's all the same these days.

Brooke Gladstone: Yes, you're right.

Cord Jefferson: I also think that Victor Hugo said that nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. I think that people are ready for something different.

Brooke Gladstone: Speaking of awards, in 2020, you won an Emmy for your work on Watchman. You even went viral for thanking your therapist in your acceptance speech.

Cord Jefferson: Thank you to my therapist Ian. I am a different man than I was two years ago. I love you. You have changed my life in many ways.

Brooke Gladstone: You've credited therapy with giving you the insight to depict a character like Monk. How so?

Cord Jefferson: Absolutely. There's two characters in the film that I empathize with very deeply, and that's Monk and Cliff.

[video excerpt]

Monk: Did you know dad had affairs?

Clifford: Oh, for sure.

Monk: Why did I have no idea? Why am I the last to know?

Clifford: Because you love them too much.

Brooke Gladstone: The reason I empathize with these guys so deeply is because up until very recently, I was similar to these men in that they had built up walls between themselves and the rest of the world. I grew up in a household that I think is similar to a lot of households that Black men grow up in. My father was present. My father coached my soccer team. My father helped me with my homework. My father spent a lot of time with me, but he was not emotionally available. Anytime that it came time to talk about more intimate things and my feelings he didn't really know how to do that and wasn't accommodating in that way.

I grew up thinking that vulnerability was a weakness. I think it goes without saying that I had a severe anger management problem for a very long time in my life till I started really seeking therapy about it. Then I saw a therapist one time who said something that I think about all the time, which is she said, "Underneath anger, particularly for men, is pain or fear," and that men are not socialized to say, 'I feel afraid.' Men are not socialized to say, 'You hurt my feelings.' Instead, we raise our voices and we throw things and we throw temper tantrums.

I just understand those guys. Monk is just so deeply angry from the moment the movie starts, but the great thing that Jeffrey does, and what I wanted to make sure came through in the movie, is that you always see the pain that's underneath there. You see the hurt and you see that this rage is just coming from a place of impotence and insecurity and tragedy. To me, that was my life exactly up until about five or six years ago.

Brooke Gladstone: You said if you tried to make this movie six years ago, you don't think you would've been able to do it right.

Cord Jefferson: Yes. I wouldn't have been able to get past the surface. I wouldn't have been able to really understand, I think who this guy Monk was. I think that I would've made a film that was probably much more celebratory of Monk and probably considered Monk this crusading hero who is out to teach all the awful people the errors of their ways. To me, what therapy and the deep work on myself has done is just allowed me to understand human beings more. I think that every artist who's interested in the human condition, if you're not in therapy, then you are limiting your work in very, very, very major ways.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you so much, Cord.

Cord Jefferson: Thank you. It's been an absolute pleasure to speak with you.

Brooke Gladstone: Same here. Cord Jefferson is the writer and director of the film, American Fiction. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang with help from Shaan Merchant. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC studios. Micah Loewinger will be back next week. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

 

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