The screenwriter behind one of the most-nominated book-to-film adaptations this award season said in his Oscars speech that the risk-averse film industry should support so-called risky creative projects by artists of color.
Cord Jefferson won an Academy Award on Sunday for Best Adapted Screenplay for American Fiction. The sleeper hit is based on Percival Everett’s 2001 novel, Erasure, and centers on a Black author who seems to have trouble selling his philosophical novels and instead writes and successfully sells a novel serving every negative stereotype about Black life on a silver platter to the publishing industry. As the Erasure author promotes his new novel James from the perspective of Jim in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the American Fiction screenwriter and director is advocating for more projects by artists of color to be greenlit.
“It’s a plea to acknowledge and recognize that there are so many people out there who want the opportunity that I was given,” he said. “I understand that this is a risk-averse industry. I get it, but $200 million movies are also a risk, and it doesn’t always work out, but you take the risk anyway.”
In his speech, Cord mentioned he was given the opportunity after others in the industry passed on the project because it was viewed as too risky to pursue. The film features an African American author questioning the type of novel publishers and society expect from him because of his race. Cord mentioned how the film industry is risk-averse, similar to the book publishing world. For Black authors, many literary agents and publishers tell them regularly that their stories starring Black characters and racially tinged storylines are not worth consumption by the national or international audience.
With the Black Lives Matter movement exploding after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the publishing industry took it upon itself to cater to Black authors. More agents were willing to open their submissions to saying publicly they wanted to support Black authors. More publishers were accepting those authors’ works. Four years later, the excitement of the attempt to balance the playing field is gone. The authors and the books that were greenlit during that time are now trickling down to bookshelves.
American Fiction stars Jeffrey Wright as a Black author and literature professor named Thelonius “Monk” Ellison looking for a publishing home for his newest novel based on a European tragedy. His agent, played by John Ortiz, keeps telling Monk that publishers didn’t get his book. They wanted something more “Black,” which Monk can’t figure out why that is expected of him. By the way, what is more “Black?” He sees the rise in We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, a new novel sweeping America by Sintara Golden, played by actress and authoress Issa Rae. Sintara’s book makes Monk’s skin crawl with the flagrant stereotypes of living in the ’hood.
So, one night in his study, Monk writes his own novel flagrant with stereotypes. He goes further to title the book, My Pafology, as opposed to My Pathology, under a pseudonym and an assumed identity as a convict. When a publisher wants the novel, Monk can’t believe the book sold so quickly. He decides to go even further with the ridiculousness and change the title to Fuck. The F-word is the main word the industry warns writers to not use in a title to make a book marketable to the masses, but the publisher says it will use that title. Monk is stumped by the events that have made him a star in disguise and tries to hide his identity amid the firestorm the book brings.
Black authors have long dealt with the expectations of applying stereotypes to their stories to make those stories more digestible to the American public. But the power of readers is diminished when authors are being told by the gatekeepers that their stories don’t matter because those books most likely will not sell, especially with main characters of color and racial plotlines.
In unofficial field studies, while networking with other writers over the years, I hear constantly how writers of color, particularly Black writers, in many cases cannot get an agent because they have been told by agents numerous times that readers are not looking for their stories. Therefore, their stories aren’t worth being published.
White writers, again from my networking experience, seem to be rarely told their stories aren’t sellable. Their work is also seen as more flexible with developmental editing, therefore they are more likely to get advice on how to improve their stories before they are told that their stories won’t be profitable. If they choose the traditional publishing route, then they are more likely to sign contracts with their agents of choice and eventually land a publisher.
To take matters into their own hands, many Black authors self-publish their books as entrepreneurs. That means they have to work extremely hard to make their stories visible to book buyers. Self-published authors usually pay out of pocket for their physical copies to be published and hope to earn a decent percentage of the sales.
American Fiction’s Oscar win places attention on the need to bring forth more creative projects produced by Black artists that have been rejected over concerns about the return on investment. Every creative project is risky, as Cord said, but it may be more worthwhile to take the risk and make sure the book, for example, gets into the the right hands. A book’s success depends on a good public relations strategy. So, the assumption a story won’t sell is, by industry standards, premature since all manuscripts carry financial risk.
The novel became a No. 1 best-seller and the film hit No. 1 on Christmas weekend 1995, dominating over Disney and Pixar’s first computer-animated venture Toy Story, Jumanji, and Grumpier Old Men.
