Fresh Air - Best Of: Colman Domingo On 'Rustin' / Cord Jefferson On 'American Fiction'

Episode Date: December 16, 2023

Colman Domingo stars in the biopic Rustin as Bayard Rustin, the civil rights leader responsible for organizing the 1963 March on Washington. Rustin was forced into the background because he was gay. Domingo is also starring in The Color Purple, as Mister, the abusive husband. Maureen Corrigan shares her picks for the 10 best books of the year.Also, writer and director Cord Jefferson talks about his new satirical film American Fiction. It's about a Black writer who can't get his novel published because it's not considered "Black enough." Under a pseudonym, he writes the kind of Black novel publishers seem to want.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

From WHYY in Philadelphia, I'm Terry Gross with Fresh Air Weekend. Today, Coleman Domingo, who stars in two big films released in time for the holidays. In the biopic Rustin, he plays Bayard Rustin, the civil rights leader most responsible for organizing the 1963 March on Washington, but he was forced into the background because he was gay. In The Color Purple, he plays Mister, the abusive husband. Also, writer and director Cord Jefferson talks about his new satirical film, American Fiction. It's about a black writer who can't get his novel published because it's not considered black enough. Under a pseudonym, he cynically writes the kind of black novel publishers seem to want.

Jefferson has also written for Succession and Watchmen. And Maureen Carrigan shares her picks for the 10 best books of the year. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Terry Gross. Two of the big holiday film releases star my guest, Coleman Domingo. In the new musical film adaptation of The Color Purple, he plays Mister, the cruel, abusive husband who treats his wife like his personal slave. Domingo also plays the title role in Rustin, the biopic about civil rights leader Bayard Rustin. If you're not familiar with

Bayard Rustin, or you know his name but not much else, The reason is explained in the film. Rustin was the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King gave his famous I Have a Dream speech. The march drew 250,000 people from around the country, and it was Rustin who oversaw the planning and logistics. It was Rustin who introduced the idea of passive resistance to Martin Luther King. But Rustin was gay, and in 1963, several civil rights leaders feared that could discredit Rustin, the march, and the larger movement. Adding to their concern was that he'd briefly been a member of the Young Communist League, and later, during World War II, he was jailed for resisting the draft as a conscientious objector. Consequently, he was forced to remain in the background,

behind the scenes. President Obama did his part to credit Rustin by posthumously awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013, marking the 50th anniversary of the march. This year is the 60th anniversary. The film Rustin was produced by the Obama's production company, Higher Ground, and directed by George C. Wolfe. If you watched Euphoria, you'll recognize Coleman Domingo for his Emmy-winning performance as Ali Muhammad, who's in recovery and is the AA sponsor for Zendaya's character. Domingo is also known for his roles in Fear the Walking Dead, Zola, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, If Beale Street Could Talk, and Passing Strange.

And on Broadway, he was one of the stars of The Scottsboro Boys, with a score by Kander and Ebb. Let's start with a scene from Rustin. Bayard Rustin knows there's pressure on him to resign from any role in the march and resign from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which was led by King and is played in the film by Amel Amin. Rustin tries to convince King that the movement should resist against the threat of blackmail or smear campaigns targeting Rustin's homosexuality. Each of us are taught in ways both cunning and cruel that we are inadequate and complete.

And the easiest way to combat that feeling of not being enough is to find someone we consider less than. Less than because they are poorer than us, or because they are darker than us, or because they desire someone. Our churches and our laws say they should not desire. When we tell ourselves such lies, start to live and believe such lies, we do the work of our oppressors by oppressing ourselves. Strong, feminine Hoover don't give a s*** about me. What they really want to destroy

is all of us coming together and demanding this country change. Are they expecting my resignation? Some are, yes. Then they're going to have to fire me because I will not resign. On the day that I was born black, I was also born homosexual.

They either believe in freedom and justice for all, or they do not. Come in, Domingo. Welcome to Fresh Air. You're terrific in this movie, and I would be shocked if you were not nominated for an Oscar. Oh, Terry, thank you so much for having me. It means the world. Thank you. You know, I knew so little about Bayard Rustin. I grew up with his name. I heard his name. But he was like a guy in the civil rights movement. That's about all I knew about him.

What did you know before you were asked to do the movie? I knew a little bit more than most people. And I think any of the listeners out there will question why they didn't know about him. He was all but erased in the history books. I stumbled upon him. I was a student at Temple University in Philadelphia, and I joined the African American Student Union in my junior year. And I think we were just having a discussion about the civil rights movement and some of its leaders. And then they were describing Bayard Rustin. And Bayard, the more that someone described him, I became more fascinated. The fact that he was a Quaker and

from Westchester, Pennsylvania, that he played the lute and he sang Elizabethan love songs. He was a star athlete. He staged sit-ins and protests when he was a teenager. And he organized a march on Washington for jobs and freedom. I was like, wait, what? How come we don't know about this person? This is a person of such size and someone who seems to be full in their experience in the world. How is it possible that he's been erased from history? But, of course, I understood once I found that he's been erased from history? But of course,

I understood once I found that he was openly gay, I understood exactly why. And did you know at that point that you were gay? Did I know at that point that I was gay? I knew. I think I always knew. I grew up in inner city West Philadelphia and, you know, you, I think people know, you know. But then I was coming to terms with my own sexuality probably at the same time, that spark of understanding who Bayard Rustin was in the world. And I think I sort of maybe quietly and privately looked at Bayard Rustin as a North Star, someone who not only was true to himself and his experience and his sexuality,

but with limitless possibilities of what he could do, what he could be. He didn't marginalize himself. And so I must have downloaded that information in some way, shape, or form. And that's sort of helped me live my life completely and wholly. Now I'm 54 years old, and I think he was very purposeful to me at a young age. So who did you talk to? There's still some contemporaries of Bayard Rustin's who are alive who worked with him on the March on Washington. Were you able to talk with any of them? Oh, absolutely.

I was able to talk to, in particular, Rochelle Horowitz, who's featured in the film, played by Lily Kay. Rochelle Horowitz and I, we actually have a text feed. She texts me pretty much every day now. I just wanted to know the soul of this guy. And I literally was just at Walter Nagel at his apartment, which is he and Bayard's apartment. He still lives in the very same apartment. There were a couple for about 10 years from 1977 until Bayard's passing. Yeah. And Walter Nagel and I had lunch. It was the first time I went over to Bayard's apartment and it looked like time stood still. It was amazing. Walter Nagel and I had lunch. It was the first time I went over to Bayard's apartment, and it looked like time stood still. It was amazing. Walter Nagel has been the keeper of Bayard's legacy.

And there's all this religious sculpture and art and books and records and walking sticks, because Bayard Rustin was a collector of everything. Wherever he traveled, he got a lot of stuff. Now, the woman who you mentioned, Rochelle, what was her role in the march? Her role in the march? She organized transportation

for the March on Washington. And she was 19, 20 years old. You know, he had nothing but young people working with him, you know, because I think Bayer really liked to work with young people

because he felt like they weren't rigid and they were willing to, you know, do something like... Oh, they were willing to work under really crummy working conditions. Oh, yeah, exactly. For nearly 24 hours a day.

Exactly. Because you need that spirit, though. You're like, hey, that can do spirit. I want to play a clip of Bayard Rustin speaking. And this isn't you as Rustin, this is Rustin. So this is him speaking at the march on Washington, where he talked about the goals of the march. And the sound quality isn't great, but I think people will be able to make it out and hear what his voice sounded like. The first demand is that we have effective civil rights

legislation, no compromise, no filibuster, and that it includes public accommodation, decent housing, integrated education, FAPC, and the right to vote. What do you say? So his voice is higher than yours. Yes, it is. So what did you do to try to get his voice and his way of speaking? He had a very formal way of speaking, I think. Well, it was formal, but it was also he created it. He created his accent, right?

Oh, yeah, he created his accent. As I was doing research and I was finding any materials that I could find, interviews, debates, you name it. I noticed he had sort of a somewhat mid-Atlantic standard accent, very much akin to like Katharine Hepburn or Bette Davis. And at times it would sound a bit more British, and at times it would sort of fall away. And I was like, wait a minute, this guy's from Westchester, Pennsylvania. I'm from Philadelphia. We don't sound like that. Yeah, they're close to each other. Yeah, they're pretty close to each other. So I was like, something's going on there.

And I asked Rochelle Horowitz. I said, well, where'd that accent come from? And she said, well, he made it up. And I thought, wait, what? He made it? Who makes up an accent? Well, this guy does, which is brilliant. But he made it up for a couple reasons. One in particular is that he had a speech impediment. He used to stutter. So he would do work to make sure he was clear in his language. And he would also heighten it because he was a bit of a, he just was obsessed with anything British. That pitch of his voice in the march is even fuller than actually really. I mean, it was even higher pitch. It was a bit more like up here. And he would flourish it a bit more up here, even more so.

I was trying to find ways how he used it in different scenes, whether he was with members of the NAACP or when he was just in private, and then when it fell away when he was a bit more vulnerable. So I had to figure out how to calibrate it for a film. But in reality, it was all over the place. In every recording, it's something else. And so it was hard to pin down at first. And then I just had to take dramatic license and make choices with it. But also, I didn't want to

be a caricature and mimic his voice. I wanted to find those elements that worked narratively. So I had to really just really, you know, just really score it for myself. You mentioned he had a stutter. You had a lisp when you were young. Did you have a stutter too? No, you did your homework. I did. I had a lisp. I had speech classes up until I was about 11 or 12 years old. Where I would have to go with a speech therapist in school and dentalize my T's and S's and X's. And just really learn how to use my teeth and my tongue.

Because I was an avid reader. I read everything. But I think it just gave me more confidence to have a love for language. I think that's where my love for language started in speaking. Again, we have a similarity in that way, me and Bayard, where we had something to overcome when it comes to language. And I think it's made us, I don't know, I love speaking. I'm not afraid of coloring my words. That's probably really good training for theater, but also really good training for learning how to speak differently, like learning how to speak like Rustin, because you learned how to speak without your lisp.

Yeah. And I also had, when I was portraying Rustin, I had to wear prosthetics for my upper teeth. Yeah, go ahead. Because you have three teeth out. So that was also something I had to put those prosthetics in at least an hour and a half before. So usually you want to get set up with the men immediately. And I would start working with my mouth to make, because Bayard speaks a lot and he speaks with alacrity and he's got a lot to say.

So that was a great challenge, but I think it also gave me a slight lisp like he had, which was pretty awesome. I was wondering about those teeth. He got his teeth knocked out. In 1942. Yeah, when he refused to move to the back of the bus. Yeah, when he was one of the first people doing these bus protests, you know? So I was wondering, I was wondering like how you, I was thinking you didn't have your teeth pulled. I was hoping you didn't.

I'm like, I am not that method actor. I'm not that insane. When you were doing speech therapy to overcome your lisp and you learned how to pronounce your T's clearly and your S's and you learned to really clearly enunciate. Yes. Were you considered phony when you started speaking that way? No, I wasn't. I think at least I don't think I was because I would say things like I would go boxes, you know,

and I would have to just like dentalize and keep that tongue behind the teeth. Boxes, boxes, boxes. You know, it's funny. I still warm up very much when I do my warmups in the morning before I'm acting. I warm my whole mouth up because it's just a habit that I need to do to make sure my mouth is operating and doing the thing I need it to do. But I think every so often, I feel like even if you've gone through any sort of speech therapy, at times you can hear it slip once in a while.

It's ingrained in some way, although we do the work to overcome it. Can you share some of what your vocal warm-up is like? Sure. Let's see, I would start by going, I love to do things with T's and with language. I would say, one fat hen, one fat hen, a couple of ducks, three brown bears, four slippery sliders, five freakish felines freaking frantically, six assailant sailors sailing the seven seas, seven simple simons sitting on a stump, eight egotistical egotists eagerly echoing egotistical ecstasies, nine nibble-nit-nit, nibble-nibble-nut-nut on a cigarette butt. That's great. Did you make those words up? Did you make those phrases up? No, I didn't make those phrases up.

They came from, you know, it's all these theater games. Some teacher taught me that years ago. But it really opens your mouth up. And you also, you know, the... And you get your nasal passages open. You get your ping sound. So if I'm working on stage, I want to make sure that I'm supporting my voice and somebody can hear it in the 1,000th

seat on Broadway, you know? So there's all this work to do just to get sound out and make it sound natural and good and supported. My guest is Coleman Domingo. He plays the title role in the new film Rustin, and in the new musical film adaptation of The Color Purple, he plays Mister. We'll hear more of our conversation after a break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. Let's get back to my interview with Coleman Domingo. He plays the title role in the new film Rustin, about the civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, who organized the 1963 March on Washington, but was marginalized and kind of made to stay in the background because he was gay. And in the new musical film adaptation of The Color Purple, Clement Domingo plays Mister.

So also this month, The Color Purple opens, and you play Mister, who is an abusive, cruel, spiteful husband who treats his Much younger wife who he basically Bought for at a discount He treats her like his slave And so you have to draw on Completely different resources I would Presume than you did for The idealistic Bayard Rustin can you talk about

Where you find that More cruel part of yourself This is the way I think about how we Create characters Talk about where you find that more cruel part of yourself. This is the way I think about how we create characters. I have to look within. For me, that makes it more human to understand that we all have good in us and that we all have the capability to do some horrible things. If we weren't as evolved, if life didn't go well for us in some way, we can download and say, well, how will we feel?

Why would we want to do that? And that's the way I found Mr. I started to think, well, what was his dreams? What did he want? What did he need? What happened when he didn't get it? What systems were he living under? Why would he do this to this young woman? And that's the way I started to find character and find out how he operated.

So The Color Purple was a novel, still is a novel, by Alice Walker that was adapted into a film starring Oprah Winfrey. And then that was adapted into a Broadway musical starring Cynthia Erivo. And that Broadway musical was adapted into this film, did you see any of the preceding versions in their time? And did you go back and watch any of them

and reread the book for the movie? Yes, I first saw the movie in 1985, and I think I've watched it maybe 50 to 100 times in my life. And then I saw both versions of the musical, one starring LaChanze and when it came back

starring Cynthia Erivo, also with Daniel Brooks, who's my co-star in this film version. And then when I was offered Mister, I went back all the way to the source material

and read the book. Because I knew we were also doing something that was different. It's not the rehashing the film or the musical, even. I feel like, you know, when people come and see this experience of The Color Purple, they'll see it's a hybrid of sorts, but it really

is honoring the book in many ways. Why did you watch the film 50 times before you even knew you would be in another adaptation? Oh, man, I think what Steven Spielberg did in 1985 was masterful. It was beautiful to see, because I think it's just a part of, I don't know, it really does tell you so much about who we are, who we are as African Americans in America.

And it deals with family, It deals with generational trauma. It deals with women, people that maybe like your mom and grandmother and your aunties, you know, having conversations that seem private or dealing with male-female relationships or father-son that are complex. And you try, I don't know, I think I'm watching because I feel like I'm watching my family in some way. Not my immediate family, but like generationally. Where do we come from? How did we get here? What are still our struggles?

It's that timeless, actually. So I think that's why anytime it was on, anytime it's on a flight, I'll watch it. A flight, okay. It's true. It's good flight? Okay. It's true. It's good for a flight. It's great. Were you disappointed you didn't have a real singing role in the movie?

No. You know why? Because I figured out why. Why? At least for myself. First of all, when I got offered it, I went to the Broadway musical and started listening to all his songs. And he had so many.

Did I love them? I don't know if I loved the songs. I was like, okay, they're interesting. But when I got the script and I saw that, I think at that time he still had two songs in it. And then by the time we got into production, both songs were cut and I didn't say anything. I just thought, well, that's interesting. I wonder why. And I saw that maybe, I think about 13 songs were cut. And so I made a decision for myself as an actor. I thought, what happens to a person when they have no song? He doesn't have a song.

That's part of his problem. He's constantly playing the banjo, trying to come up with song, but he can't. And he keeps getting interrupted. I can use that as a character. That this is the one central character who doesn't have a song. And I think that psychologically, what does that do to a person

when they have nothing to come out of their heart and in their minds? I think he's lacking in imagination. He's lacking his own evolution. I think Celie and the women, the Sophia, they're constantly evolving. You know, and Harpo, who plays my son by Corey Hawkins, he's evolving. But Mister is just like his father, and they're still dealing with some pain and trauma and not evolving.

I want to congratulate you on the success you're having now between the Emmy for Euphoria and your two new movies, Rustin and The Color Purple. Congratulations. Thank you, Terry. This has been really wonderful. Coleman Domingo stars as civil rights leader Bayard Rustin in the new biopic Rustin, which is streaming on Netflix. In the new adaptation of The Color Purple, he plays Mister, the abusive husband. It opens Christmas Day. Our book critic Maureen Corrigan has made her list of the 10 best books of the year,

and she says she only wishes it could be longer. If you were to judge a year solely by its books, you'd have to say 2023 was outstanding. Here's my list of the year's 10 best books. Let's start with nonfiction. In her charged memoir, How to Say Babylon, Safia Sinclair summons up her childhood in Jamaica and charts her gradual revolt against her Rastafarian upbringing. To call that upbringing strict would be like calling water wet. Sinclair's father, a celebrated reggae musician, dictated his daughter's diet, education, and appearance. Dreadlocks, no jewelry, and figure-obliterating clothing. The pull of poetry, along with Sinclair's

own innate resolve not to become a subordinate wife, someone, as she says, ordinary and unselfed, carried her into a wider world. Monsters by Claire Dieterer is cultural criticism at its most incisive and wry. In this slim book, Dieterer, who started out as a film critic, dives into the vexed issue of whether art created by men and some women who've done monstrous things can still be considered great. Should geniuses like Picasso, Diederer asks, get a hall pass for their behavior? David Grand, whose 2017 book Killers of the Flower Moon is now a film by Martin Scorsese, wrote a gripping new work of narrative history this year. Part Robinson Crusoe, part Lord of the Flies, The Wager tells the tale of a British ship of that name that broke apart off the coast of Patagonia in 1741. Some of the stranded sailors patched together a rickety vessel and sailed 2,500 miles to Brazil. But then a second group

of sailors from the wager miraculously surfaced and the official survival story became much more complicated. On to fiction. Just the title of Laurie Moore's latest novel tells you how singular and strange her vision is. I Am Homeless, If This Is Not My Home intertwines a Civil War story with a contemporary tale in which a man takes the body of his deceased beloved on a road trip. Moore here movingly literalizes the desire to have some more time with a loved one who's died. Up with the Sun by Thomas Mallon is a novel about showbiz strivers in mid to late 20th century America. It zeroes in on the real-life actor Dick Kalman, who for a time was a protege of Lucille Balls. Mallon, whose novel Fellow Travelers, about closeted gay men during the McCarthy era, is now a TV miniseries, is one of our most evocative, and blessedly, one of our drollest novelists. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

is mostly set in the historically black and immigrant Jewish neighborhood of Chicken Hill in Potsdam, Pennsylvania in 1925. When the state decides to institutionalize a 12-year-old black boy who's been branded deaf and dumb, a group of neighbors violates boundaries of color and class to save him. If you think that premise sounds sentimental, you haven't read McBride, who contains the chaos of the world in his sentences. Talk about contained chaos. Catherine Lacey's novel The Biography of X is the story of a widow during what she calls the boneless days of her grief, trying to piece together the truth about her wife, an artist who called herself X. Real-life figures like Patti Smith and the New York School poet Frank O'Hara trespass onto the pages of this edgy and unexpectedly affecting novel.

Paul Harding's This Other Eden is inspired by true events on Malaga Island, Maine, which was once home to an interracial fishing community. After government officials, under the sway of the pseudoscience of eugenics, inspected the island in 1911, Malaga's residents were forcibly removed. Harding's novel about this horror is infused with dynamism, bravado, and melancholy. Absolution by Alice McDermott tells the story of Tricia, a shy newlywed in 1963 who arrives in Vietnam with her husband, an engineer on loan to Navy Intelligence. There she meets Charlene, a strawberry blonde dynamo who conscripts Tricia into her army of do-gooders. McDermott, one of our most nuanced novelists, suggests parallels between the women's insistent charity and the growing American military intervention in Vietnam.

Justin Torres' Blackouts won this year's National Book Award for Fiction. At its center is an extended deathbed conversation between two gay men about sex, family ostracism, Puerto Rican identity, and the films they love, like Kiss of the Spider Woman, an inspiration for this novel. Torres's title, Blackouts, refers to the blacking out of pre-Stonewall accounts of queer lives, what the younger of the two characters here describes as stories of something grand, a subversive variant culture, an inheritance. These books of 2023 are outstanding, but so too have been the efforts to ban books this year. Here's to reading widely and freely in the new year. Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. You can find her list at freshair.npr.org.

Coming up, writer and director Cord Jefferson talks about his new satirical film, American Fiction. It's about a black writer whose novel is rejected by publishers because they don't consider it black enough. Under a pen name, he cynically writes the kind of novel full of the tired clichés the publishers expect. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. Our co-host Tanya Mosley has our next interview.

Here's Tanya. In the new satirical film American Fiction, Thelonious Ellison is a frustrated writer who can't get his latest book published because editors say it's not black enough. So he decides to write the kind of black book they want out of spite, using every tired and offensive trope he can think of. He submits the manuscript under a pseudonym, and to his surprise, he's offered a million-dollar book deal. This film is TV writer Court Jefferson's directorial debut.

He got his start as a journalist before becoming a screenwriter for shows like Succession, The Good Place, Master of None, and Larry Wilmore's former late-night TV series, The Nightly Show. In 2020, he won an Emmy for his writing of episode six of Watchmen, titled The Extraordinary Being, along with Damon Lindelof. American Fiction features a star-studded cast that includes actors Jeffrey Wright, Issa Rae, Adam Brody, and Sterling K. Brown. Cora Jefferson, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thank you so much for having me.

Okay, so the main character in American Fiction, Thelonious, whose nickname is Monk, played by Jeffrey Wright, is a writer and college professor who writes this book out of spite. And the book's contents play into all of the stereotypes about violence and trauma with these over-the-top characters. But, of course, Monk writes it under a fake name. So to add to the lies, he says he can't reveal his true identity because he's running from the law. I want to play a scene. It is Monk and his editor played by John Ortiz. And they're talking with Paula from one of the publishing houses over speakerphone. Let's listen. Hello. Hello, Paula. Arthur. So wonderful to hear from

you. I hope that you are with the man of the hour. I am indeed. He's right here next to me. Mr. Lee? Yeah, this is he. Oh, really? Yeah, damn it. Mother f***er. Right, okay.

Yeah, I was a little confused at first, but... We're both very excited to discuss Thompson Watt's offer. Yes, well, first of all, let me just say that all of us here at Thompson Watt are thrilled with my pathology. It is about as perfect a book as I have seen in a long, long while. Just raw and real. Mr. Lee, is this based on your actual life? Yeah, you think some bitch-ass college boy can come up with that shit?

No, no. No, I don't. That was a scene from the new movie American Fiction. In court, this film is based on Percival Everett's 2001 book Erasure. When did it become clear to you that you wanted to adapt it? Oh, wow. Almost instantly. I found Erasure. I'd had a really bad 2020. We've all had a bad 2020. I don't think that I'm saying anything unique there, but mine was bad, not just because of COVID, but also because I'd come very, very close to getting a

television show on the air. And at the last minute, they killed it. And that was about September of 2020. And so I was feeling pretty bereft and kind of creatively adrift. And I'm a pretty slow reader, normally, but this was a book that I just devoured, you know, when I it was one of those ones when I when I set it down and went somewhere else, I would sort of my mind would drift toward it, and I would come back and read more of it. It felt like it was a book written specifically for me. Like the themes within it were things that felt like... Parallels to your own life. Well, in so many odd, eerie ways. And so about 50 pages in, I knew that I wanted to try to adapt

the script. I would say about 100 pages in, I knew I wanted to adapt it and direct it. And then at some point, I started reading the novel in Jeffrey Wright's voice. That's how early I started thinking of Jeffrey as being the lead character for this. He just came to me. And as soon as I was done, I called my manager and asked him to contact Percival so that I might beg him for the rights to the book. The death of the family storyline is so refreshing. It's a refreshing surprise because the movie promos and trailers don't actually promote this part of the story. But his mother is suffering from the early stages of dementia.

And he's being asked to take a leave of absence from his job as a professor because of his anger, which means he's leaving without a salary. It feels so relatable and universal. And as you mentioned, a lot of parallels to your own life. Yeah, yeah. No, you know, like Monk, I had had these issues come up in my different professions. I started out as a journalist for about eight or nine years, and then I started working in film and television in 2014. And I had had these experiences in both of those arenas in which people had, you know, when I was a journalist, people were like, you know, toward the end of my career, it had started to feel like there was this revolving door of misery

that I was expected to write about. And so sort of on a weekly basis, they would come to me and say, do you want to write about Mike Brown getting killed? Do you want to write about Trayvon Martin getting killed? Do you want to write about, you know, this unarmed black person getting killed? It just felt like there was this constant churn of just violence and misery. And so it's like, I don't want to do this anymore. And so when I got into film and television, it was thrilling because it felt like, great, we're in the world of fiction.

We are not bound by the realities of anything. We are allowed to write about black people in space. We're allowed to write about black people riding unicorns in the underworld. It doesn't matter. We can do anything. And then lo and behold, you know, people would call me and they would say, do you want to write this TV show about a about a black teenager murdered by the police? Do you want to write about this movie about a slave? Do you want to write this movie about crack dealers? And it just felt like, oh, even here, even here, you're still in the world of fantasy, there's still just such a hugely limited perspective as to what black life looks like. And then on top of that, as you said, you know, there's a lot of these family issues that take place in the novel that, you know, there's a trio of siblings and I have two older brothers. And, you know, we've had we've had our sort of like various ups and downs in our relationship. You know, there's an ailing mother, as you mentioned. You know, my mother didn't die of dementia, but my mother died of cancer about eight years ago.

And, you know, I moved home at a certain point to help take care of her, as Monk does. And so, you know, there's an overbearing father figure in this story that sort of reminded me a little bit of my father and who looms large in my life and my brother's lives. There was just so much overlap. It just started to feel strange, as I said, as if somebody wrote me a book specifically. You know, this cast is a pretty amazing cast. Another person that does such a great job in this film is Issa Rae. She's hilarious and really laser sharp in this film. She plays the character, Sintara Golden, whose work is basically what sets Monk off because her debut is We Lives in the Ghetto. And it's exactly the kind of work he's railing against. In this clip, she's at a literary festival speaking before a packed house and reads a passage from her book. Where are our stories? You know, where's our representation? And it was from that lack that

my book was born. Would you give us the pleasure of reading an excerpt? Yo, Sharonda, girl, you be pregnant again? Might be, I tells her. And if I is, Ray Ray is going to be a real father this time around. Poor, this scene is so over the top and hilarious um you know monk is just in misery watching all of this unfold what was it like to write that scene was it kind of fun to write it yeah absolutely you know the whole movie was fun to write there is catharsis and getting some of this stuff out this is you know i do relate to a lot of the situations in which Monk finds himself. And it's also just, you know,

I think that satire to me has always had a special power. You know, I think that there, you know, I'm forgetting, I heard a quote recently that, I forget who said it, but it was, if you're going to tell people the truth, then you need to be funny or else they'll kill you. And I think that that is sort of what satire is able to do is it's really able to, you know, it's a big tent thing. It sort of allows people to come in

who might not otherwise want to listen to what you're trying to say. And so I think that writing that scene and, you know, all the scenes in which there's, you know, you're talking about these serious issues, but you're talking about them in a way that makes you laugh and in a way that sort of makes other people laugh. I think that there's a power in that that, you know, other kinds of art don't have. That's so interesting about satire because I agree with that quote.

But it also just feels like for the last few years, world events and life in general have felt so ridiculous and fantastical that sometimes, at least for me, it's been hard to consume satire. Um, because everything feels like it's just completely over the top and we're laughing to keep from crying. Yeah. But I think that even if, even if we're laughing to keep from crying, I think that's still a worthy goal. I think that is, if nothing else, if we lose our ability to laugh and to tell stories and to fall in love, like all of these things that make life worth living. If we can't find ways to do that stuff, then we're really in trouble. You know, I heard you say that the spiritual predecessor to American fiction is Hollywood Shuffle, which is a satirical comedy that came out in 87.

It was directed and co-written by Robert Townsend and Kenan Ivory Wayans. And I'm going to play a clip from it. But Robert Townsend plays Bobby Taylor. He's a black actor trying to make it in Hollywood. And it's loosely based on Townsend's experiences in the industry. So this scene I'm about to play, the character Bobby has nabbed this role in a movie called Jive Town Jimmy's Revenge. And he's about to get in a fight with some street gangs. It's so full of stereotypes for it. It's amazing. Yes.

So on the set, Bobby is wearing a big Afro wig and wearing a shiny suit and is reciting this cartoonish Jive talk. Let's listen. You killed my brother. My main man. I loved it, this dude, baby. He was, he was, uh... Cut. Why is he stopping?

Bobby, that was terrific. That was terrific. Why'd you stop? What happened? There's no problem. I just forgot my line. Okay, that was terrific. That was terrific. Why'd you stop? What happened? There's no problem. I just forgot my line. Okay, that's fine. No problem. You want to look at the script? No, I'm okay. Great, okay. Let's go again.

Excuse me, Sidney. Before you do, I have another very good idea. Could you tell him to be a little more, you know... Yeah, Bobby. Bobby, I need a little more black. You know what I'm saying? Like, stick your ass out. Bug the eyes. You know how they move, you know? Jive-ass.

Jive-ass. Let's slate it. Let's go again. Sorry, sorry, Sidney. Scene 10, Baker 1. And action. That's a scene from the 1987 film Hollywood Shuffle, directed by Robert Townsend. Court, when did you first see this film?

What kind of impression did it have on you? Oh, my God. The biggest. I saw that movie when I was about nine or ten years old, probably. Yeah. And it just changed my life. I'm sorry. I'm trying to compose myself.

I love that. That scene is to compose myself. I love that. That scene is probably the funniest scene in the movie. It is. Yeah, dying laughing. And the reason it had this profound effect on me, I didn't, I certainly didn't know the word satire back then. I didn't know what that meant. But I knew how it made me feel. And, you know, 9, 10 is you're right in the thick of learning about, you know, slavery and civil rights and sort of the origins of this country. And the ways in which people teach you these things is basically by showing you horror movies. You know, I remember watching like Eyes on the Prize, this documentary. I remember watching Mississippi Burning, Gene Hackman, and Willem Dafoe.

It's really great. It's about the Mississippi murder of the three civil rights activists. I remember now. Yeah, yeah. It's a great movie, but it gave me nightmares. I remember specifically waking up in the middle of the night, worrying that the Klan was going to come to my house and harm my family. That is how we were teaching these lessons to children. worrying that the Klan was going to sort of like come to my house and harm my family like that. That is how we were teaching these lessons to children. And I really like those movies. I think that they're important. But when I found Hollywood Shuffle, I was like, wait a minute, this is

talking about racism the way that those other things are talking about racism, but it's doing it in a way that is making me laugh every every three seconds, like in a way that in a way that those other things are talking about racism, but it's doing it in a way that is making me laugh every three seconds, like in a way that's hilarious and accessible and not scary and just sort of joyful in some ways, you know? Monk has a PhD. Both of his siblings are medical doctors. Their parents, they have this beach house. You interweave their lives seamlessly and it feels real and accurate. But how did you navigate or was it a challenge at all navigating or incorporating these characters without falling into that kind of respectable depiction of blackness? Yeah. I mean, that's something that the minute Jeffrey sat down to first discuss the script with me when we first had our first meeting his immediate question was he said you're not trying to do some talent and

tenth bill cosby pull up your pants and behave in front of white people thing are you and i knew instantly when he asked that that he was the perfect person for the role because that's that had been something that i'd been thinking about as i was making it and it's something that that i didn't want to do you know i think that there's this scene that again i don't want to spoil it but there's this scene where monk and sentara meet toward the end of the film and they kind of have their ideological conversation about where they where they come from in their art practice and their approach to making stuff that i felt was really important to make sure that we didn't, we didn't come at this from a sort of like respectability politics, pull up your pants kind of thing that, that, you know, this is a person who's, you know,

again, I don't want to spoil it, but that scene was important to me to include in order for us to avoid this kind of thing. Because, you know, one of the things that Jeffrey and I decided when we first set out to make this was we never wanted to police blackness. We never wanted to police art, and we especially didn't want to police black art. That that is sort of not conversations that we found interesting or important, that the other conversations we were having were vastly more important than that. And so, yes, they have PhDs. Yes, they're doctors. Yes, they're doctors. Yes, they're professors.

But the greatest part about it is that, you know, Cliff's a plastic surgeon who, meanwhile, is, you know, struggling with, you know, a cocaine habit and his life is falling apart and he's divorced and his children dislike him. And Monk is this kind of he's a professor. But, you know, you see that he's kind of pathetic and angry and resentful and miserable. And he's kind of, you know, he feels insecure and weak.

And, you know, these are people just with real problems. You know, I think that these are people who are just human beings. Cora Jefferson, thank you for this conversation. No, no, it's my honor. Thank you so much. Cord Jefferson wrote and directed the new satirical film, American Fiction. He spoke with our co-host, Tanya Mosley. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.

Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salet, Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Anne-Marie Boldenado, Thea Chaloner, Seth Kelly, and Susan Yakundi. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. I'm Terry Gross. This message comes from NPR sponsor Grammarly. What if everyone at work were an expert communicator? Inbox numbers would drop, customer satisfaction scores would rise, and everyone would be more productive. That's what happens when you give Grammarly to your entire team.

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