![Cord Jefferson on ‘American Fiction’](https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/stsp/to_webp,q_lossy,ret_img/https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/12/15/multimedia/15cord-jefferson-01-mpqh/15cord-jefferson-01-mpqh-facebookJumbo.jpg)
From big things to small things, there was just all of this stuff that felt like it was speaking to me directly. I went to a college in Virginia called William & Mary, and there’s a reference to William & Mary in the novel. Nobody ever talks about William & Mary in pop culture! It just felt like somebody had written a gift specifically for me, like, “I made this for you.”
The parts about the expectations facing Black artists, did they match your own experience when you arrived in Hollywood?
Oh, definitely. I thought I was going to get there and it would be like, “Oh yeah, there’s a world of opportunity and we’re just going to write about whatever. The Black experience in America now includes everything, all the way up to being the president of the United States.” But there’s genres for “prestige Black projects”: slave overcoming adversity and escaping, Black civil rights activist overcoming white racism, inner-city gangland stuff, poverty and broken homes.
I’ll tell you a true story of something that happened to a friend that exemplifies this perfectly. She went into a meeting at this production company and they’re like, “What are you interested in writing?” She says, “I’m interested in romantic comedies, like ‘When Harry Met Sally,’ ‘Sleepless in Seattle,’ classic, generational, Nora Ephron comedies. I would also love to write a ’90s-style erotic thriller.” They’re like, “All right, great. We’ll come back to you later with some ideas.” About three hours later, they call her and say, “We’ve got this story about a blind slave who, thanks to a wealthy white benefactor, learns to play the piano and becomes a piano prodigy. Are you interested in this?”
Wow.
They see a Black person and they can’t see past that. I think there’s a lot of people who say, “Well, why would we hire you to write a rom-com? Why would we hire you to write an erotic thriller?” There’s an inability to think of us as having our own passions and our own complex existence outside of this very limited window of what they allow us to say about our lives. These are things that people of color have been talking about for a very long time. To me, the real spiritual ancestor for this project would be “Hollywood Shuffle” [Robert Townsend’s satire of Black representation in Hollywood, released in 1987].