Jeffrey Wright is a frustrated author bent on making the publishing industry see its own racist hypocrisy in the first trailer for American Fiction.
In Cord Jefferson’s directorial debut, Jeffrey Wright plays Monk, a frustrated author who decides to take on the culture’s obsession with reducing people to stereotypes, particularly entertainment that profits and peddles in tired — and offensive — tropes about Black Americans.
“What really struck me was that too few books were about my people. Where’s our stories? Where’s our representation?” Issa Rae’s Sintara Golden, a rising Black author, is seen telling a crowd in the trailer, before she begins to read from her new book. “Yo, Sharonda! Girl, you be pregnant again?!’ ‘If I is, Ray Ray’s goin’ be a real father this time around.’”
The excerpt garners a standing ovation from the room and a deep pain for Monk, who within the trailer begins to hatch a plan after his latest book proposal is turned down because the publishers want a “Black book.”
“They have a Black book. I’m Black, and it’s my book,” he responds to his agent, who quickly replies, “You know what I mean.”
Unable to get the industry to listen, Monk decides to “rub their noses” in their hypocrisy, creating a pen name to write his own “Black” book, My Pafology. But his plans to humiliate the industry with a story about “Black stuff” like “deadbeat dads, rappers, crack” goes awry when a publisher actually buys his book, pulling him into the very world he scorns.
The film, based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett, is also written by Jefferson and stars Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, John Ortiz, Erika Alexander, Leslie Uggams, Adam Brody, with Rae and Sterling K. Brown. Jefferson, Ben LeClair, Nikos Karamigios and Jermaine Johnson produce with Rian Johnson, Ram Bergman and Everett serving as executive producers.
During a Q&A tied to the trailer’s release, Jefferson shared that he first heard about the novel while “reading a review for a different book in December of 2022” called Interior Chinatown.
“In the review, it said, ‘This novel has a satire reminiscent of Percival Everett’s Erasure.’ I’d never heard of Erasure, so I went and bought it and just devoured it over Christmas break,” he said. “Within 20 pages, I knew I wanted to adapt the screenplay. Within 50 pages, [I was] reading the character of Monk in Jeffrey Wright’s voice — that’s how early I started thinking of Jeffrey for it. By the time that I was done, I just really knew that I wanted to direct it. There were so many overlaps with my personal life and things that I’ve been thinking about for literally decades, that when I was reading it, it really felt like somebody had written me a gift personally.”
American Fiction will be released by Orion Pictures through Amazon MGM Studios in limited theaters on Dec. 15 before expanding on Dec. 22.
Read More: World News | Entertainment News | Celeb News
Hollywood
