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Hello, and welcome to the Scene 2 Seen Podcast. I am Valerie Complex, an associate editor and film writer at Deadline.
Today, for the final episode of 2023 (!), we’re talking to director-writer Cord Jefferson and producer Jermaine Johnson about their latest project American Fiction, which won the TIFF Audience Award. The film stars Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, Issa Rae, Sterling K. Brown, Erika Alexander and John Ortiz.
American Fiction follows Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Wright), a respected author and professor of English literature. But his impatience with his students’ cultural sensitivities is threatening his academic standing, while his latest novel is failing to attract publishers; they claim Monk’s writing “isn’t Black enough.” One night, in a fit of spite, Monk concocts a pseudonymous novel embodying every Black cliché he can imagine. His agent submits it to a major publisher who immediately offers the biggest advance Monk’s ever seen. As the novel is rushed to the printers and Hollywood comes courting, Monk must reckon with a monster of his own making.
Jefferson has an impressive and varied list of projects under his belt including the groundbreaking limited series Watchmen for which he won an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series alongside Damon Lindelof for their episode “This Extraordinary Being.” Prior to making his way into TV, Jefferson was a respected and seasoned journalist, most notably serving as West Coast editor for Gawker.
Johnson is an executive producer on the Image Award-nominated series From Scratch, currently streaming on Netflix, in addition to producing American Fiction.
On today’s episode, Cord, Jermaine and I discuss Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, from which American Fiction is adapted, Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle, a film that tackles similar subject matter, and what it would be like if we all ended up working at the post office.
If you like what you hear, be sure to review, like, and subscribe to the Scene 2 Seen Podcast on Apple, Spotify, and iHeart.
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