Jo Reed: Welcome to Quick Study, the monthly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts. This is where we'll share stats and stories to help us better understand the value of art in everyday life. Sunil Iyengar is the pilot of Quick Study, and he's the Director of Research and Analysis here at the Arts Endowment. Good morning, Sunil.

Sunil Iyengar: Good morning, Jo.

Jo Reed: So what are we talking about today?

Sunil Iyengar: Well, as you know, Jo, we in the NEA's Office of Research and Analysis frequently obsess about measurement in the arts.

Jo Reed: Yes, this is why our blog is called By Any Measure, correct?

Sunil Iyengar: Touché. We know the arts also has measurable benefits for individuals and communities, and it's part of the job of our office to try to understand, document, and publish those benefits. So today, I wanted to discuss three novel measurement strategies that some of our peer agencies have used. That is, governmental cultural agencies from three other nations, the U.K., Canada, and Australia.

Jo Reed: Go right ahead, sir.

Sunil Iyengar: Thank you. Let's start with the U.K. Within the U.S., as you know, the NEA has a partnership with the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Department of Commerce. Through this partnership, we were able to create something called the Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account, which reports on a yearly basis the value added by arts and cultural industries to U.S. GDP.

Jo Reed: That's right. We've talked about some of those numbers before on the show.

Sunil Iyengar: Right. It's a fairly complex methodology and took a long time to develop through the BEA and NEA working together. In fact, we expect to release new numbers next month. Well, in the U.K., they're trying to create a set of national accounts on culture and heritage. But unlike the U.S. approach, for example, they note that GDP, gross domestic product, tells only part of the economic story. They want to take into consideration such factors as the benefits to well-being, education, or say, cultural pride. The question they're facing is, what innovative measurement techniques can they use to capture these benefits as economic activity?

Jo Reed: W hat do they mean by something like cultural pride? What do they mean by heritage?

Sunil Iyengar: Yeah. So I should have said it's the U.K. Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport, DCMS, that is pursuing this study. According to their framework, they're considering the following categories. The built historic environment, landscapes and archaeology, a category called collections and movable heritage, performance and performance venues, and digital assets, specifically digital archives or online collections. It's important to note that the whole point of attempting this exercise is that so the U.K. can use the data for decision-making to monitor their investments in culture and heritage, and of course, cultural pride would be part of that, and to make course corrections as needed. But to do so in a way that's consistent with their communications about the benefits of other economic activity, so that culture and heritage can be evaluated in the context of other investments.

Jo Reed: That's quite a challenge. Do you have any sense about how they're going to go about it?

Sunil Iyengar: Well, here, they hope to take inspiration from the U.K. government's current approach in measuring what's called natural capital, that is, quantifying benefits from the natural environment. They also think that conducting surveys like, what are people willing to pay for a specific cultural heritage asset? How does the presence of that asset affect things like real estate prices? Or how people report their well-being or quality of life in relation to that asset? All these techniques can be used to help them quantify the relative benefits of cultural heritage.

Jo Reed: Do we have any idea when the results will be released?

Sunil Iyengar: As I understand it, the U.K. officials are still working on all this, figuring out what are the appropriate data sources and methods for each of these categories and their assets in the culture and heritage framework that they have to make sure they're not missing anything. So the actual results of any studies may still be some ways off.

Jo Reed: And you mentioned Canada, too. Are they trying something similar?

Sunil Iyengar: With Canada, we're talking about a pilot study that was run by Statistics Canada with cooperation from Canadian Heritage and the Canada Council for the Arts. This study wasn't done to obtain financial estimates through innovative accounting methodology. Rather, it tested an app to be used for collecting survey data from people to measure their self-reported degree of emotional well-being in the moment, as it were. So it's an app. The idea was to try to see if those who participated in various cultural activities were also likely to report higher levels of well-being than those who weren't.

Jo Reed: So when you say well-being, what do we mean here?

Sunil Iyengar: The survey questions in this app actually lined up with five distinct measures of well-being. Happiness, anxiety, relaxation, focus, and control of emotions. The four types of cultural activities included consuming it through digital media, of course, participating in culture through creating art or attending arts events, participating in or consuming sports activities, or doing crafts or hobbies.

Jo Reed: Okay, got it. So what did the researchers find?

Sunil Iyengar: So the researchers tested two sampling methods to get at the general Canadian population and understand how their cultural behaviors lined up or did not line up with what they reported as their sense of well-being in the moment using this digital app. What's interesting is that when they tried both methodologies, doing hobbies and crafts was positively associated with all the well-being measures on the survey. Consuming culture through media had a positive impact on all well-being measures except ability to focus, and this was true no matter which methodology was used. Attending and creating arts and culture was associated positively with all measures when you look at one survey method the researchers used, but when you look at the other, it only had a positive impact on happiness and relaxation. And finally, sports engagement was positively associated with all the well-being measures except anxiety, where it seemed to have a negative effect and this was true for both survey methodologies.

Jo Reed: Those are some interesting exceptions, especially the ability to focus, I think.

Sunil Iyengar: Right, and the one about anxiety. Yeah, I assume the Canadian government is considering the long-term feasibility of this survey tool, which is why it's a pilot. It's worth noting here that the app was tested during the COVID pandemic. So the reported rates of cultural participation were actually quite low. That said, it's a novel technique for sure and we in the U.S. are trying out similar methods. For example, through a NEA Research Lab Award to UCLA, we're currently supporting multiple pilot tests of an app called AIMS, or the Arts Impact Measurement System, which, like the Canadian version, surveys people on their well-being in the moment while engaging with arts activities.

Jo Reed: Well, I'd love to talk about that one sometime. But in the meantime, you also mentioned Australia. What's their measurement technique?

Sunil Iyengar: Australia's arts agency, Creative Australia, it's called, analyzed data from something called the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes and they issued a report last November. It's called Creating Well-Being, Attitudes and Engagement with Arts, Culture and Health. I know we have time for only a few findings, but let me just note a few things that stood out for me.

Jo Reed: Sure, what are they?

Sunil Iyengar: Well, according to the report, people who participated in the arts were more likely to register at the extreme high or low end of the happiness scale that was part of the survey. In other words, there wasn't a uniform pattern or relationship between arts participation and happiness, rather a tendency to fall on the extreme ends of the spectrum. People who reported better health subjectively tended also to be more likely to attend arts and cultural events than were others, and most survey respondents said they believed that participating in the arts can have a positive impact on overall health and well-being. The survey also asked some interesting questions about how Australians view, quote, arts on prescription programs, or what we've called in previous podcasts, social prescribing of the arts. But that goes into an entirely different topic, so I'll leave it there for now.

Jo Reed: Okay, but that's definitely a topic I'd love to explore with you sometime. So let's put that on the list. Sunil, thank you. I'll talk to you next month.

Sunil Iyengar: Nice talking with you, Joe. Thanks.

Jo Reed: That was Sunil Iyengar. He's the Director of Research and Analysis here at the National Endowment for the Arts. You've been listening to Quick Study. The music is We Are One from Scott Holmes Music. It's licensed through Creative Commons. Until next month, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

Music Credits: “NY”, composed and performed by Kosta T, from the cd Soul Sand, used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.

Excerpts from “Blue Crescent” from the album Blue Crescent, composed and performed by NEA Heritage Fellow Dr. Michael White, used courtesy of Basin Street Records.

Excerpts from “On My Way” from the album We'll Never Turn Back, performed by NEA Heritage Fellow Mavis Staples, used courtesy of ANTI- Records.

Excerpt from "Somewhere to Lay My Head” from the album In the Garden, performed by NEA Heritage Fellows The Birmingham Sunlights, used courtesy of the Birmingham Sunlights.

Jo Reed:  From the National Endowment for the Arts, this is Art Works. I’m Josephine Reed

Askia Mohammed: "I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown.
I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil,
to see if it could grow differently,
if it could drink of new and cool rains,
bend in strange winds,
respond to the warmth of other suns,
 and, perhaps, to bloom."

Jo Reed:  That was the late Askia Mohammad reading that evocative description of leaving one’s home in the South for another life in the North. It was in a footnote in Richard Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy.   Wright was one of six million African Americans who made that journey in the period following World War 1 through the 1960s.  This mass movement of people became known as The Great Migration, and it’s the subject of Isabel Wilkerson’s highly acclaimed and award-winning history The Warmth of Other Suns.

I spoke to Isabel Wilkerson about her book back in early 2011 shortly after it was first published. And it’s a book and an interview that stayed with me. So I thought revisiting my conversation with Isabel about The Warmth of Other Suns and the mammoth cultural shift that emerged from the Great Migration was a fitting addition to our celebrations of Black history month. 

When millions of African-Americans left the farms of the south for the factories of the north, they transformed not just the face of the country but its culture as well.  First there was the scale of the movement: when the migration began 90% of African Americans were living in the south, when it ended half were in the north. New York, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles were some of the cities absorbing these newcomers and their customs and traditions.  This merging of cultures, of north and south had a profound impact on American life and American art in all its forms: literature, theater, dance, visual art, and music were all shaped in some way by this internal journey. I spoke to Isabel Wilkerson about the far-reaching impact the Great Migration had on the arts.  I began our conversation by asking her to describe the circumstances that led so many to leave the south, to migrate north.

Isabel Wilkerson:  Migration doesn’t really capture it, because they were not moving or leaving with the idea of returning at that time, and most of them were thinking that they leaving for good.  And so in some ways, I view it and describe it as a defection from a caste system into which the people have been born and were not permitted to escape, unless they actually left on their own.  So it was kind of a fleeing, a kind of seeking of political asylum to parts of the country that would be more welcoming to them.

Jo Reed:  The system they left was the Jim Crow system of the South, and it was an all-encompassing system.  Can you give us a sense of what we’re talking about when we talk about Jim Crow laws?

Isabel Wilkerson:  Yes, I think that one of the things about talking about this era is that so many of us believe that we have an understanding of it based on the pictures that we might have seen of the black and white water fountains, for example.  But in many ways, that was just the least of it.  That was, in some ways, probably what many of them might have been able to live with, considering all that they were really up against.  From the moment they would awake in the morning to the moment that they turned in for the night, there were reminders, rules, protocols, expectations, limits, restrictions on every single thing that they might do.  In Birmingham, for example, it was against the law for blacks and whites to play checkers together. In courtrooms throughout the South, there was a black Bible and a white Bible to swear to tell the truth on.  That meant that if a black person were to take the stand, they could not swear to tell the truth on the same Bible that had just been used for the white eyewitness who might have just testified, so they’d have to stop everything and find a different Bible for that person to use, so that in every sphere of life, anything that could be conceived of was put into law.  There were separate staircases, separate telephone booths. Also, interesting enough, one that many young people respond to more than anything is the idea, the fact that an African American motorist was not permitted to pass a white motorist on the road, no matter how slow that motorist might be going. And of course, because a caste system in itself is in some ways hard to maintain--and it lasted for 60 years by law, and longer than that by tradition-- it was difficult to maintain.  And so therefore, the way to enforce it required violence, and so every four days, somewhere in the South during the time period we’re discussing, the early years of the migration-- the early decades of the migration, I should say-- there was a lynching of an African American once every four days.  And that was what was necessary in order to maintain this caste system, which in some ways was untenable.

[Mavis Staples – On My Way up and hot.]
 
Jo Reed:  Isabel, what did people find when they reached the North?  

Isabel Wilkerson:  They each found that the North was not as welcoming as they might have hoped.  They found anonymous cities where almost everyone had a reason to resent or feel somehow threatened by their arrival.  You had large numbers of people who had been living in a system where they had been so oppressed and so underpaid that they would have been willing to take anything, which would have driven down the wages of anyone who was already in these northern cities and working.  There was a great fear that they were going to drive down everyone’s wages, for one thing.  They also were people who had just come from the land, so they were not wise to the ways of the north and of the big cities, and they dressed differently and they spoke differently, and they were easily taken advantage of. And so they found that it was a cold, cold, dangerous and inhospitable place for them.  And yet, their goals were so modest; they merely were looking to find a place where they could get a job. So their goals were modest,   

Jo Reed:  Well, in the midst of all this struggle, nonetheless, these people who came from the South also brought southern culture with them.  And with that migration of culture, there came the transformation of American culture because of the Great Migration.

Isabel Wilkerson:  You’re absolutely right.  In fact, I think that’s one of the little-known aftereffects that is so immense that it’s hard to even put it into context.  This Great Migration was, in some ways, a transfer, not just of people, but of an entire culture.  And once the people arrived in these northern and western cities, they, by their exposure to the northern rhythms and metabolism, hearing inside their hearts and in their memories the language, the imagery, the music, the food, the culture of the South, there was a marriage of both North and South within the art and the cultural and creative expression of the people, but more importantly, I think just in a larger sense too, of their children, the children who had the opportunity to go to schools where they could actually go to school for an entire school year, as opposed to the few months when they were not needed in the field, where the children had the opportunity to say, take music lessons or to take art and to learn how to draw and to paint or to be able to go into a library, which they would not have been permitted to do in the South, to take out a library book something as simple-- that we take for granted now.  And so many people come to mind who are the products of this Great Migration, who literally combined, changed the culture as we know it. Toni Morrison.  Toni Morrison’s parents migrated from Alabama to Ohio. By going to Ohio, she would have had the opportunity to go to integrated schools, be exposed to literature in a way she hadn’t before and just walk into a library and take out a book, which would not have been possible back in Alabama at the time that she was growing up. 

Jo Reed: Isabel, there are so many people in literature whose experience is directly related to the migration and whose work actually is an outgrowth of their experience in the migration too.  Probably the first person to come to my mind is Richard Wright.

Isabel Wilkerson:  Richard Wright, whose every word, every word that he produced was, in some way, an effort to understand his experience as one of the participants in the Great Migration.  Native Son one of the greatest novels of the 20th century; Black Boy, his autobiography, was in some ways a deconstruction of his experience growing up in the South in Natchez, Mississippi as a son of a sharecropper, and then the description of his experiences, experiences that led him to leave and his ultimate arrival in the North.  And it’s, of course, from his words that the title of this book come.  And I love the epigraph in which he describes his leaving the South to fling himself into the unknown.  That is exactly what all of these people did, but he’s a great example of how the culture’s been changed as a result of this Great Migration.  The migration itself was such a watershed event in history, in 20th century history, that it has seeped into almost every aspect of the culture.  So in literature, we have Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison.  In theater, we have so many people:  Lorraine Hansberry, August Wilson, whose work was directly related to the Great Migration.  They are children of the migration, and their creative energies went toward understanding and recreating in their genre the experiences of the Great Migration. 

Jo Reed: And visual artists also powerfully  depicted that journey and the new life that African-Americans found when they reached the north.

Isabel Wilkerson: You’re absolutely right.  Romare Bearden, who was a child of the migration.  His parents migrated from North Carolina, and his work ended up representing the world that the migrants arrived in, the world that the migrants arrived in, the tenement life.  His collages were an ode to those experiences.  And of course, Jacob Lawrence, the great painter from the 20th century, his migration series is legendary.  Everyone has seen one of those panels somewhere depicted in the culture.  It became, in some ways, a turning point on so many levels, because it validated the experience of the migration during the 1940s when it was taken up and exhibited as truly fine art.  It also, of course, elevated him and it became an iconic representation of what the people had experienced in the North and what had driven them to the North from the South.  And in such simple, stark, beautiful imagery, he made it come alive so that there needed to be no words to express what the people had gone through.

[Dr. Michael White – Blue Crescent up and under]

Jo Reed: We’ve talked about art, literature, theater, but the impact of the migration was probably most strongly felt in the music.

Isabel Wilkerson:  Music as we know would simply not be what we can now take for granted had it not been for the Great Migration. It’s hard to even imagine what our ears would be hearing had we not had the Great Migration. All the blues musicians, from BB King and Muddy Waters, who were all carrying with them the sounds of the South, which would never have been able to get the wider audience, had these people not migrated and gone north where their art could be recorded and then sent all over the world, to then inspire such people as Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones and so many others across the Atlantic, who helped to shape rock and roll and who have given, in some ways, an homage to these blues greats in much they have said about what inspired them, so that the humble music of the people of the Great Migration was heard across the Atlantic by teenagers in Liverpool or teenagers in other parts of England and inspired them. So there you see the hand of the Great Migration spreading so much farther than one would really even imagine, if you just didn’t sit down and try to deconstruct it somehow, pull all these pieces together.  And in fact, it’s overwhelming to think about the effect that it’s had on culture.  And that is just with blues.  Blues is what we commonly think of when we talk about the Great Migration.  But I like to point to the role that it had in so many other musical forms also that become, in some ways, the sound track of the 20th century.  When we think about popular music, it would be inconceivable now from where we sit to think about popular music without Motown, for example.  And Motown simply would not have existed, had there been no Great Migration.  That’s because Berry Gordy, who founded Motown, his parents migrated from Georgia to Detroit where he grew up.  And then when he became a grown man, he decided he wanted to go into the music industry, but he didn’t have the money, the funds and the resources to go around the country, scouting out talent.  He just looked around him in the neighborhood where he was in Detroit, and there was Diana Ross.  Her mother had migrated from Alabama, her father from West Virginia.  They met in Detroit and there they married and had her.  The other young women who would join the Supremes, Florence Ballard and Mary Wilson, their parents, too, had migrated from the South to Detroit, and there you have just the beginnings of what would become the Motown sound.  The Jackson family, the Jackson Five, Michael Jackson, their parents migrated from the South, had talented children, who came to the attention of Berry Gordy, and an entire new way of thinking about music.  It’s hard to imagine 20th century music without all of the people who came out of Motown.

Jo Reed: And of course there’s jazz.

Isabel Wilkerson: Jazz simply would not be what we know it to be had there been no Great Migration.  You can go all the way back to Louis Armstrong . Louis Armstrong who came from New Orleans and went to Chicago. Miles Davis, his parents migrated from Arkansas to Southern Illinois, where he had the opportunity, the luxury of being able to learn and hone his genius.  Thelonious Monk, his parents migrated from North Carolina to Harlem when he was five, and he too had the incredible opportunity, which he never would have had, in the tobacco country of North Carolina, to hone his craft, and his genius.  And John Coltrane.  John Coltrane migrated from North Carolina to Philadelphia where he got his first alto sax at the age of 17.  It’s hard to imagine where jazz would be, where music, American music would be, where culture would be--in fact, international culture, because these are artists who have a following around the world, who changed the way we view and hear sound.  And so the Great Migration has had such a widespread impact on culture as we know it, not just in America but across the world.  I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that it’s hard to imagine what would culture be like had there been no Great Migration.

Jo Reed:  I also want to piggyback on that, music was also a place where the de facto segregation of the North—and it wasn’t the Jim Crow segregation of the South, but there was a de facto segregation and music disrupted. Where an integration, however tenuous, could take shape.

Isabel Wilkerson:  I think that you’re right, because I think about how music translates across culture and across race and across boundaries and how it, in some ways, was an ambassadorial entity, in some ways, the music itself.  The music could be enjoyed by people of all backgrounds, who might never have met, otherwise.  But it became, in some ways, a way to translate the experiences and the emotions of one culture, one group of people to many, many other cultures.  And in the same way that the migration was a transfer of people and a culture across the country. The art that grew out of this migration also serves that purpose.

Jo Reed:  Well the other thing I think that’s so interesting too, because you think of juke joints, for example, in the South, the small, small places where blues musicians, blues singers, particularly, would go and how that then gets transferred to a larger and more integrated audience up north.

Isabel Wilkerson:  A much more integrated audience, because in an odd kind of way, the migration is, in some ways, a marriage of regions within the United States, and the music becomes a marriage of regions and cultures.  And then you have that same marriage occurring in the audiences.  I think of the audience as beyond just the juke joints themselves, but just the listeners on the radio, people who may not have ever even met anyone from Mississippi or met an African American, is now having that intimate experience of listening on the radio or purchasing what would have been records at that time. Listening to the music of the people from the migration is a way of, in some ways, spreading a kind of humanitarian integration without even trying, because that’s one of the beautiful things about art in general is that art is not to be segregated.  Art is to be for the world, and that’s what this became.

Jo Reed: And the cultural institutions that sprang up in the north because of the Great Migrations-- I mean, certainly the clubs, clubs as in nightclubs, but then there were also clubs as in women’s clubs, most particularly, which really became places for pushing social boundaries but also cultural institutions.

Isabel Wilkerson:  Well, you know, there’s so many institutions that did grow out of this Great Migration. It’s almost as if you’re doing a genealogy of a culture, when you look at the Great Migration.  And the National Urban League, for example, can trace its growth to the fact that it served, as in some ways, the kind of immigration repository to help the people once they arrived.  We now think of it, in other ways, as being in some ways an institution that helps to lay out the current concerns of urban America.  But it flourished as a result of the fact that it had such a great raison d'etre once these people arrived in such huge numbers, by the millions in these big cities, and the churches, which also become a reflection of the culture, because so much of the music grows out of the churches. So many of the churches, for example, at Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York, its membership grew dramatically as a result of the migration to the point that Adam Clayton Powell said that almost all of the members of that church had someone in their family who had come up in the Great Migration.  You know, the original people who were there, everyone in the church either had been there already and had relatives that had come up, or they, themselves, had come up in this Great Migration. So it extends to almost every institution in these great cities of the North and the West can trace its existence to the fact that there was now a population to service and needing to be serviced by these organizations, a way to gather up the interests, resources, needs, and also the creativity of the people who were arriving in these great cities.  And so there is a connection there, so it is a kind of cultural genealogy that you might say happens when you begin to look at the Great Migration and what sprang from it.

Jo Reed:  And neither of us mentioned probably because it’s so obvious but gospel music was given a national stage because of the Great Migration, and then of course an international one as well.

Isabel Wilkerson:  You’re absolutely right.  I mean, there are so many-- I mean, rhythm and blues, a gospel, all of the growing out of the spirituals that go so far back into southern culture and were carried with the people-- many of them can break out, and many of the older ones can break out into the very songs that they grew up in the small, clapboard churches in Mississippi or Georgia. 

[Birmingham Sunlights - Somewhere to Lay My Head ]

And those are the things that were carried north as well, and that tradition and that form of music is carried through and has a very wide following.  Mahalia Jackson herself was a migrant who had come from Louisiana to Chicago, had a really difficult time finding a home.  As famous as she was, the Chicago police actually had to set out guards for the home that she eventually was finally able to buy in the neighborhood that she chose to live in, which happened to have been all white at the time.  And they had to set out a guard in front of her home. So she had a very difficult time, but she too was probably one of the most famous gospel singers of all time, and she was a part of this Great Migration.

Jo Reed:   You begin each section in your book with a quote from a writer—often it’s Richard Wright, but not exclusively, because there’s some James Baldwin too. Talk about …

Isabel Wilkerson:  And Langston Hughes.  <laughs>

Jo Reed:  And Langston Hughes.  Yes, indeed.  Talk about why you chose to do that.

Isabel Wilkerson:  I chose to do that because I think that Richard Wright stands out the most, because he is often speaking directly, absolutely directly to the migration itself; it’s a pure focus on the migration and the migration itself.  That was, in some ways, his life’s work.  So I think that the epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter from him stand out in particular, because he’s dealing directly with it.  But there are quotes from Ralph Ellison, from James Baldwin, from Mahalia Jackson, for example, from Zora Neale Hurston.  And the goal was to be able to show, without even having to say yet again, that this migration was huge and involved almost every famous person of African descent.  In other words, every famous African American that you can think of from the 20th century had a role in this Great Migration. Or as a product of this Great Migration. Zora Neale Hurston, for example, came from Florida to New York.  James Baldwin was the child of people who’d come from Georgia.  His origins were looking southward.  He spoke about that extensively in much of his work. So the goal was to be able to have as many voices speaking almost as a Greek chorus, as a chorus to breathe life into what you were about to read, to say that this does not just involve the protagonist, but so many other people, so many other famous people for whom the migration was deeply rooted in their own art. You have the oral history there before you with the voices of these famous people coming back and saying, “Yes, this is what we experienced.  This was our story.”

Jo Reed: And finally, tell me what first drew you to this story.

Isabel Wilkerson:  It is so hard to answer that question, because I grew up as the daughter of people who migrated from the South, met in Washington, would not even had met had there been no Great Migration, came from totally different states, my mother from Georgia, my father from Southern Virginia.  So I owe my entire existence to this Great Migration, as do many, many people.  The majority of African Americans in the North and the West are descended from this Great Migration.  When the Great Migration began, I should say, 90 percent of all African Americans were living in the South.  By the end of the migration, nearly half were living outside of the South; they were all over the country, so it was a total redistribution of an entire people.  But I would have to say that the awareness of my experience growing up in Washington, going to an integrated school in which I found myself exposed to people who were the children of immigrants. And the reason that, when I think about that, clearly as a child, I would not have been thinking that, you know, decades from now, I will write a book about this.  <laughs>  But it so happened that, years later, as I have thought about that and I’m able to put together the fact that I did not gravitate toward the people who had been in the North for long periods of time; I gravitated toward the children of immigrants, and they were the ones that I spent the most time with and who were my best friends, people whose parents had arrived from Finland or from Ecuador or from El Salvador or from Nepal or from Chile and Argentina.  And as I think about it, I found myself in a world in which the people that I felt the closest to were those who were going through what I was going through, which was living in two worlds at once and being a child and not really truly understanding what sociologists might have clearly been able to explain for me and also, oddly enough, not having a name for what I was, because I was not an immigrant and my parents were not immigrants.  And yet, I felt emotionally connected to people who were immigrants, because we were experiencing the same things, our mothers packing lunches that were so different from those other people who were already mainstream in the city that we all found ourselves in.  And there were lovingly prepared meals reflecting the culture that our parents had come from, but they were not the same as what we were experiencing with the others.  In other words, it turned out that maybe everyone else was having grilled cheese sandwiches, and our parents were creating other things for us that were different.  And so I found myself drawn to them.  So it’s a long way of answering the question that that is my earliest memory of how I was, in some ways, different but had no way of describing that difference. And I did not view myself as having a story to tell, because whenever it would be St. Patrick’s Day or something and people would talk about the great grandfather or the grandfather come from the Old Country with 50 cents in his pocket, and then he went on and did this, and his children went to college and, therefore, here I am.  I didn’t feel I had those stories to tell, and yet, it turned out there were millions of stories to tell.  And it’s that intersection of a little girl in Washington, DC, who is exposed to all kinds of people but seems to gravitate toward the children of immigrants, because in some ways it mirrors her own experience. That is what I would have to say is what the connection with that is what opened my eyes to the possibilities with this book.

Jo Reed: Well, Isabel, we’re all glad your eyes were opened to those possibilities, because you wrote one terrific book.

Isabel Wilkerson:  Thank you so much.

Jo Reed: That was Isabel Wilkerson, she was talking about her book, The Warmth of Other Suns.  Isabel is a 2015 National Humanities Medalist and also the author of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which argues that racism in the United States might be better understood as an aspect of a caste system, akin to those in India and in Nazi Germany. And recently, she is the subject of the narrative film Origin written and directed by Ava DuVernay and based on Isabel’s writing of Caste.

 You’ve been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating on Apple. It helps other people who love the arts to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

Isabel Wilkerson: This Great Migration was, in some ways, a transfer, not just of people, but of an entire culture. And once the people arrived in these northern and western cities, they, by their exposure to the northern rhythms and metabolism, hearing inside their hearts and in their memories the language, the imagery, the music, the food, the culture of the South, there was a marriage of both North and South within the art and the cultural and creative expression of the people, but more importantly, I think just in a larger sense too, of their children

Music Credit: “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T from the cd Soul Sand. Used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.

Jo Reed:  From the National Endowment for the Arts, this is Art Works, I’m Josephine Reed

Cord Jefferson:  You know, people say "This is your first movie. You got this tremendous ensemble," and the thing that I say is "Look what happens when you write real roles for black people, when you really give people substantial characters who feel real and who feel dynamic and who feel complex and nuanced and multilayered and who have beginning, middles and ends and real stories to tell, and they're not just there to come out and say some expository dialogue and then they either disappear or die while the white lead goes to save the day."

Jo Reed:  That is Cord Jefferson—he wrote the screenplay and directed the film “American Fiction.” Based on the novel “Erasure” by Percival Everett, “American Fiction” is a satirical examination of the ways in which Black people are often seen in very narrow and limiting perspectives in popular culture embedded in a complex and rich family story. Boasting an formidable cast led by Jeffrey Wright, “American Fiction” opened to critical acclaim and has gone on to be nominated for awards from nearly every major film guild and association —including the Sag Awards, Bafta, Spirit Awards, the NAACP Image Awards—culminating in five academy award nominations including Jeffrey Wright as Best Actor, Sterling K Brown for Best supporting actor, Jefferson for best adapted screenplay  and the biggie: a nomination for best picture of the year. Not bad for first-time screenwriter/director Cord Jefferson. 

I am a long-time fan of Cord Jefferson’s work in television. In fact, he was a guest on the podcast right before the pandemic talking about writing for shows like Succession, Master of None, The Good Place, and, most particularly, the ground-breaking series Watchmen for which he won an Emmy Award.  That conversation stayed with me because of his thoughtfulness, curiosity, and enthusiasm. So after seeing “American Fiction,” I was eager to speak with Cord Jefferson again about his film that had me laughing, crying, and thinking. He was gracious enough to join me. Here’s our conversation….

Jo Reed:  Cord Jefferson, "American Fiction" is based on Percival Everett's book "Erasure," which was published in 2001, and I'm curious when you read the book and if there was this instant recognition that you wanted to make it into a film.

Cord Jefferson:  Yes, I would say that it really was almost instant. I would say within 50 pages I was already reaching out to my manager and saying that I think I'd found my next creative project. Within, I would say, 100 pages I was thinking that I might want to direct this, not just write the script, and then at a certain point, I don't even remember when in the novel, I started reading the novel in Jeffrey Wright's voice. That's how early I started thinking of Jeffrey for the project. I just started picturing him in every scene for whatever reason. So, yeah, by the time that I was done with it I almost felt jumpy, like there was this kind of unstoppable energy in me. I was kind of bouncing off the walls because I felt so excited about this project, but it was still the holidays, and so I had to wait another couple weeks before I could even reach out to the author to ask for the rights, it felt electrified in my hands when I was reading it.

Jo Reed:  Okay, what about the book spoke to you so deeply?

Cord Jefferson:  Everything basically. So for people who haven't read "Erasure," it's about this Black novelist, Monk, who writes books that people think are not Black enough, and so to kind of fight back against them he tries to pull this prank in which he writes this very, very stereotypically trope-y Black book, so to speak, and it's full of violence and young Black men impregnating women and drug use and what I think we all understand to be stereotypically, quote-unquote, "Black stories," and he writes this thinking that it's going to be this piece of performance art, a prank on the industry, and it ends up becoming his best-selling book.  And he exists between these two worlds for the story in which he resents that the book is becoming this huge bestseller while also requiring the money that the book provides. And so those kinds of conversations about the limitations people put on Black artists, the limited perspective or the limited imagination that people have about what Black life looks like, about what Black writers can do, that's stuff that I'd been thinking about since I was a journalist. I'd been talking with my colleagues about that all the way back when I was writing for newspapers. I started working in film and TV in 2014, so for nine years before that I was working as a journalist, and then when I started working in film and TV I thought "Great, this is the world of fiction. I can write about whatever I want to write about. I can write about Black people in space. We can write about Black people in the underworld. It doesn't matter." And lo and behold, it wasn't long before people were coming to me and saying "Well, do you want to write a movie about slavery? Do you want to write a movie about a young Black person being killed by the police? Do you want to write a movie about a drug dealer?" And it felt like even here, even in the world of fantasy and fiction when we can write about anything we want to write about, there's no limitations, we are not beholden to reality, there was still this very limited perspective as to what Black writers could do and what Black life looked like, and so those themes were huge. Those really stuck out to me when I was reading the novel, and then on top of that Monk has two siblings. I have two siblings. We have our weird sibling sort of trio dynamic where sometimes we're closer, sometimes we're more distant. Monk has a very, very overbearing father figure. I have a very overbearing father figure. I love him very much, but he's admitted that he's overbearing. Monk moves home to take care of his ailing mother in the story, and I had moved home to take care of my ailing mother eight years ago. My mother died of cancer. So the Venn diagram between my life and Monk's life was a circle the more that I read the book, and it just felt like I couldn't get over this idea that somebody had written this book specifically for me. That's how it felt. It just felt like kismet in that way.

Jo Reed:  Well, "American Fiction" is your first film both as a writer and as a director, and it's an unusual film. It's a pointed criticism of culture and at the way the ideas of race gets flattened in cultural institutions, as you just said, and it's also this very complicated family story, and I have to ask you about the process of finding backing for it for you as a first-time writer and director of the film and a film that you can't categorize very easily.

Cord Jefferson:  Yeah, yeah. It wasn't easy. <laughs> Well, on the one hand, it was both easy and not easy, and I'll explain. And so on the one hand, this movie was made very quickly. The time between me picking up the book the first time-- that was December of 2020, and the movie was in theaters as of December 2023, so altogether that's three years from the very kernel of the idea to full execution, the movie being out, which is very, very fast in this industry. Some movies take seven, 10, 15 years to get made, and so I was very fortunate in that way. But the movie was made very quickly thanks to like three people, because the vast majority of people I took this script to passed. I would say that 98 percent of the meetings that I ended up having with distributors ended up with them saying, "This is one of my favorite scripts that I've read in years. Oh, my God, I love this script." By that time we had Jeffrey Wright attached. People were very effusive in their praise of Jeffrey.Then when I said "Well, great, you love the script. You love the actor. Can I get money to make the movie?" it was just kind of crickets. There wasn't really a major response there. I always knew that this industry was risk-averse, but I think that was the first time that I understood exactly how risk-averse the industry is and how afraid people are of trying new things and sort of taking risks on new artists, and fortunately we brought the project to Orion, where Alana Mayo presides, and Alana Mayo is a Black woman, and I think Alana Mayo saw something that other people didn't see, and so she believed in the film from the beginning and was just a huge advocate.. So I was very fortunate to find Alana and a handful of others at T-Street, the production company, and MRC, our financier, who really sort of believed in this and got it on its feet in a real way, because without them, this town was pretty chilly in its reception to this material. So, yeah, I just feel very fortunate we got it in front of Alana and the rest of the team.

Jo Reed:  You also have the most extraordinary cast for a first-time filmmaker. You have Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, Sterling K. Brown, Issa Rae, Leslie Uggams, Erika Alexander. You have Keith David just playing this tiny, tiny little part.

Cord Jefferson:  Yeah. <laughs> Exactly. 

Jo Reed:  How did you get them all onboard?

Cord Jefferson:  You know, people say "This is your first movie. You got this tremendous ensemble," and the thing that I say is "Look what happens when you write real roles for Black people, when you really give people substantial characters who feel real and who feel dynamic and who feel complex and nuanced and multilayered and who have beginning, middles and ends and real stories to tell, and they're not just there to come out and say some expository dialogue and then they either disappear or die while the white lead goes to save the day." And this isn't just sort of my assumption: This is what the actors told me themselves, that these roles don't come along for them. I get a little emotional when I think about it actually that John Ortiz, who plays Arthur, Monk's agent-- he's wonderful in the role, and he said a few weeks ago at a press conference…  he said he read the script and then he called his representatives and he said "Wait a minute. He wants me to play the agent?" And his agent said "Yeah," and he said "Nobody ever asked me to just play the agent." He said this idea that he was being asked to just play a guy, just a regular human being, and there was nothing in the story about his tragic circumstances of being an inner-city Puerto Rican kid who had experienced violence or poverty-- like none of that came to bear on this role. We just wanted him to be this lovely book agent who had this great relationship with Monk who really wanted him to succeed, and they had this wonderful, rich backstory of supporting each other in their early days. He said that he was amazed that somebody was offering him this part and that somebody had written this role and we didn't have to talk about all of these sort of traditional issues that people might put in of identity and violence and tragedy just because he was a Puerto Rican man, and I think that that to me was so meaningful, to hear the actors say that, and I think that that is what the actors themselves felt. Erika Alexander, who plays the love interest, Coraline-- I was talking to Erika, and she said something similar. She said  "This actually just feels so much like me," and Erika's first three roles when she was starting out in her career were a foster child, a prostitute and a slave and this happens for a lot of actors of color, that they're not really asked to just portray layered and nuanced, fully realized human beings. They're asked to portray these kind of caricatures of what life might look like and these very limited perspectives of what their lives look like, and so I think that that's how we got it. It's just I gave Black actors real roles. I think that that is how I was fortunate enough to get the ensemble that I got.

Jo Reed:  Well, the movie certainly is publishing and moviemaking culture writ large, of course, in its sights, and you created a very pointed satire, which isn't easy, because it also needs to stay grounded. How did you manage that balance?

Cord Jefferson:  It was a process. So you try to find it in the script stage. From the outset, before I even started writing the script, I knew I wanted to make something that felt satirical but not farcical. That was always my goal.  I watched some satire movies before I started writing, and I think a lot of satire intentionally or unintentionally becomes farcical. Sometimes it's a directorial decision, and sometimes I think that it gets a little too unwieldy for the creators, and it becomes farce. I wanted to avoid that, because I think that this is a story that could actually happen in the real world, and I wanted to acknowledge that sort of in the creation of the film. So I tried to find it on the page. They say you make a movie three times. It's in the writing, it's in the shooting and then it's in the editing, and so then we tried to find it on set, and sometimes things got a little too dark. Sometimes they got a little too light, and we had to rein it in, but we really, really found the tone of the film in post. That was the place that we were able to really refine it, sand down the edges, cut the stuff that was too broad comedically and started to feel silly, cut the stuff that got too dark and started to feel like "Well, it's hard to pull out of this dive that we're in to sort of move on to something else," and so that's where we really refined it and sort of found this balance between the humor, the pathos, the balance between the family stuff and the professional stuff. That all really sort of came to be in the edit. I had this wonderful editor named Hilda Rasula, who really, really helped me balance those things and really helped me find the tone of the movie. There's some really, really great stuff that we left on the cutting room floor, really great stuff, and I would watch it and I would say "This is really great, but this isn't the movie. This is really great for a different movie." That's really where "kill your darlings" comes to bear, is that you need to look at something and say "Yes, this is wonderful, but this is wonderful for a different project. This is not wonderful for this project." And so that's where a lot of the stuff ended up getting cut, was like "This is great. It's just not the movie that we are making."

Jo Reed:  Well, within the satire or surrounding the satire, I mean, enmeshed in it is this rich, complicated story of Monk's family life and issues among siblings and an aging parent, and they're all very successful professionally, but 24/7 care is an expensive proposition. I don't care who you are. So we're laughing about the satirical professional side of things, and at the same time our hearts are just so moved by this family, so again you're blending not just satire in a family story but the professional and the personal too.

Cord Jefferson:  Yeah, and I think that that's important. My favorite movies are ones that feel like life, and life is neither comedy nor tragedy. It's neither professional nor personal. It's all of these things. It's everything at once, right? It all comes at you at once, and you need to juggle these things, and that's what sort of Monk is doing. Monk is living a complex, difficult and funny but also tragic life, as we all do, and so I wanted to make sure that this movie felt like somebody's actual life, and there have been moments when my professional life has been chaos and I need to deal with that personally and vice-versa, and I think that I wanted to reflect that. One of the sort of important things about the story was to show the fully realized breadth and depth of Black life. And so to do that you really have to explore every facet of their lives and to acknowledge that this is a full human being, that these are full human beings. And just on a technical writing level, I also think that the family stuff really helps ground the film. A lot of people tried to convince me to cut out a lot of the family stuff, for instance, Lorraine and Maynard, that sort of love story, the romance that blossoms in the film. 

Jo Reed:  And Lorraine is the long-time housekeeper for the family

Cord Jefferson:  Yes. A lot of people read the script and said "Well, why do you need this? You know, these are ancillary characters. This is a tangent. Who cares if they get married? It's going to be expensive. It's going to take more time." And every time I heard that I was just like "Absolutely not. There's no way I'm getting rid of those characters. I don't care if you think that they're ancillary. The intention is to show the diversity and sort of like reflect the fullness of Black life." And to me to limit the character of Lorraine to just the housekeeper who comes out and says some exposition and then disappears into the background while everybody else does their thing-- I know that most movies would treat Lorraine like that. I know that the vast majority of films would treat this housekeeper character as if she was just there to maybe come out and say a couple quick jokes and give some exposition and then go away, and I felt like it's important to the film and it's important to me to not make that exact same decision, because I know that that's the decision that a lot of directors would make. So I felt like that stuff really grounds the satire, right? I think that it allows us to be funny and to have these really funny comedic scenes but then also follow them up with things that end up grounding it immediately thereafter so that it doesn't feel, again, like the entire story is collapsing under the weight of the comedy and it's becoming slapsticky and silly. Again, it's satire but not farce.

Jo Reed:  Well, that's actually one of the things I appreciated so much about the film, is that the characters you created, even the smaller characters, just seem so full. Even though they have very little screen time, they're really realized, and Myra Lucretia Taylor, who plays Lorraine, for me was a beating heart of the film...

Cord Jefferson:  Absolutely.

Jo Reed:  ...and I could look at that face forever. 

Cord Jefferson:  Absolutely, and I don't know if you remember when he walks into the house and you hear her sort of like squeal with delight at seeing Jeffrey. That was the first scene we shot with Myra and Jeffrey and Tracee, and Jeffrey said that as soon as he heard her voice-- he said he just felt like he was at home. He said it was such a huge moment for his character walking into that house, because that's the first time we were shooting in that house too. He said "As soon as I heard her voice I just felt like `Yes, I'm at home. This is so welcoming and warm, and this is the exact emotion that I wanted to feel in this moment.'" And so, yeah, she represents to me unconditional love in the film. These are children raised in a house where the love was conditional. They were raised by parents whose love was conditional and who could be frigid at times, and so this is a person who's able to look at them as they are and meet them where they are in the world and love them no matter what, and that's deeply important to the story for me.

Jo Reed:  Well, Jeffrey Wright is such an extraordinary actor, and I really also appreciated how much space you gave that performance...

Cord Jefferson:  Thank you. 

Jo Reed:  ...and let it really breathe. So there's so many close-ups, and he's one of those actors who can be completely still and still convey multitudes.

Cord Jefferson:  Absolutely. No, it's wonderful. I said that Jeffrey does stuff with his eyebrows in this movie  that some actors can't do with their entire bodies, so he's just truly brilliant, and that's something that I learned really quickly on set, was I was like "I don't want to shoot this now like a traditional comedy. I don't want to edit this like a traditional comedy where we're doing fast cuts back and forth and you're looking at everybody saying their lines."  Some of the best moments and the funniest moments to me in the film are when we just linger on Jeffrey's face and see his response to the punch line. It's like the punch line is funny, but it's enhanced by Jeffrey's facial expressions and his response to the madness that's going on around him. One of my favorite scenes in the film is that first scene when Jeffrey walks into the book festival event where Issa Rae's character, Sintara, is reading an excerpt of her book, and Jeffrey says not a single word in that scene, and yet he steals the show in some ways just because he's so funny. Just what he does with his face and just the acting that he does just looking around wordlessly is so phenomenal and so great and so funny despite the fact that he's just standing there. It's amazing.

Jo Reed: Well, I think an important moment in the film is when  Jeffrey, Monk, has a  one-on-one conversation with Sintara, who, as you say, is played by Issa Rae, who's written this very popular book that seems to be conveying all the Black tropes that Monk is pushing up against, and it's such an interesting conversation, beginning with Monk being quite righteous about her book, which we might add he has not read. 

Cord Jefferson:  Yes, exactly. I'm happy you caught that. Some people don't catch that. <laughs>

Jo Reed:  But then he and we, the audience, too I think are schooled by her. Suddenly she comes back at him, and it's a lot more complicated than he was giving her credit for and I think it's fair to say that the audience was giving her credit for.

Cord Jefferson:  Absolutely. That's one of the reasons why I really love that scene. Jeffrey and I-- when we first set out to make the film, I had been thinking about this when I was writing the script, and one of the first things that Jeffrey asked me when we first met to talk about the film,  he said "I just want to make sure you're not interested in making some sort of respectability politics, `Pull up your pants and behave in front of white people, and this is how you behave to be a good Black person. This is the kind of art you make to be a good Black artist.'" We never wanted the movie to be scolding, and so to me it was very, very important to not make Sintara into this one-note villain and have Monk be this righteous crusader. When I was reading the novel I was really, really looking forward to this clash when we would see these two artists come at each other with their own ideologies about what it means to be a Black artist and what it means to make Black art. I was so looking forward to that, and it never came, so that scene is not actually in the novel, and so I was craving it so much that I knew when I sat down to write the script I had to include it somewhere. So what I really like about that scene that you're getting at is that the tables are turned on Monk in that scene. All of a sudden Monk, who's so pugnacious, and he steamrolls his students, he steamrolls his colleagues, he steamrolls his family, steamrolls his girlfriend-- he's just a very sort of combative guy who always manages to get the last word. And all of a sudden here's this woman that you assume the entire movie is going to be sort of the foe that our hero Monk comes in and needs to save, and in that moment when you realize like "Oh, she's a lot more thoughtful about this than we had considered before, and she's smart, and she's really given this some consideration"-- all of a sudden when Monk feels the tables turn some people in the audience are probably feeling the tables turn too. Some people in the audience have probably been lulled into this idea that she is this caricature and she's ridiculous and she's the villain, and all of a sudden it's like "Oh, this becomes far more complicated than I thought, and she's far more complex than I thought." That to me was really, really important, A, just to sort of make sure that we weren't commenting on what art was good or bad, but, B, just because I think most arguments in movies need to be draws. That's sort of like how you make the most interesting scene. You need to come at it from "What would this person say to get me on their side?" And I think it's important to make sure that everybody in the scene is smart and has good arguments, and sort of for this film especially I never wanted it to feel like it was spoon-feeding you answers. I never wanted it to feel didactic. This is not an op-ed column. It is a movie that allows you to think for yourself, and so that scene was important to get to that point where it's allowing people to think for themselves.

Jo Reed: Well, a similar moment in the film is when Monk is writing his book.  In "Erasure" Percival Everett includes the parody Monk writes

Cord Jefferson:  Yes. The entirety of the novel is within the novel, yeah.   

Jo Reed:  But you obviously can’t do that in the movie—you choose a different way to convey Monk’s book

Cord Jefferson:  Yeah. So as a writer, I'm always very critical of writing scenes in film and television, because so many of them are just some writer beating furiously at their keyboard and writing a mile a minute and then turning and chugging some Black coffee and then getting back into it, and for me writing has always been a practice of deep insecurity, of pain, of real frustration, and so I wanted to make something that, A, sort of like actually reflected what the writing was to me and what writers are to me, but then, B, as you said, we have the entirety of the novel within the novel, and I knew that that's not cinematic and we couldn't understand the gravity of that, and so it was important to have a scene that had the same gravity and sort of had the audience leaning-in the way that the entirety of that novel within the novel had me leaning-in. So what I came up with was manifesting the characters that Monk is writing directly in front of him in his study, and it's this great scene with Keith David and Oak having this mano-y-mano conversation directly in front of Monk in his study. And I think that it is performed so beautifully by those actors, and they brought such life to it and it was such an interesting take. That was one of the scenes in the film where I really saw the power of acting, and it really, really changed how I considered that scene. I considered that scene initially to be one that was going to be very kind of broadly comedic, and then Oak and Keith David got in there and performed it with such subtlety and such intensity that it felt like "Oh, this is what the scene should have been all along," and it is one of my favorite scenes in the film, and I think that a few people have told me that it's their favorite scene in the film as well.

Jo Reed:  Yeah, it's so interesting, because my note is these actors are not playing this for laughs.

Cord Jefferson:  Exactly, and that is what's the fascinating thing about it, right, is that when I wrote that scene-- without giving too much away one of the lines in that scene is Oak saying "I hates this man, I hates my mom and I hates myself," and when you write that you say "How can anybody say these words and it not sound ridiculous?" At least that was my idea when I was writing it, and then the minute we started rehearsals-- we didn't really have much time for rehearsals because we didn't have much money, but we rehearsed that one, and the minute we started rehearsing it there was just a magic in the air. It was one of these things where people were running from all around set to try to get a look at what these guys were doing, and it felt like "Oh, this is not ridiculous in the way that I thought it was going to be ridiculous," and that is even more powerful, because it allows you to see the way that this book might become a bestseller. I actually think that seeing them do that really helped sell the idea that this book becomes a hit, because you see with the right shading you can see that somebody might go "Oh, maybe this is good," and that I think added so much to the story that I hadn't even considered when I was writing it. It really is sort of like an interesting  interesting glimpse at what actors can bring to a scene that you're not expecting.

Jo Reed:  Exactly, exactly, and it also makes us understand why Coraline, Jeffrey Wright's girlfriend, played by Erika Alexander, who's not an idiot by any means, actually likes the book.

Cord Jefferson:  Exactly, and it's also-- if you're paying really close attention, you're seeing that some of the demons that Monk is exorcising  in that writing. He says "Well, I'm just writing this as a goof," but the issues that Monk has with his father…. it's a scene in which a young man is dealing with his father, right, and so you're realizing that as much as he's saying like "This is pointless to me and this is stupid" he may be fooling himself when he thinks that he's not actually putting some of himself in this narrative.

Jo Reed:  I promised I would only keep you for 30 minutes, so this is my last question, and that is this has been such a success that it has to be so gratifying. Are you focused now more on film, especially having met with such great success with your first one?

Cord Jefferson:  Yeah. I always want to write TV, and in fact I'm still contractually obligated to write TV for the next year and a half or two years, so I'm going to keep making TV hopefully well into the future. But that being said, there is really something that I really loved about making a film. I really love the finality of it. I really love sort of just being able to tell this condensed story and say like "Here it is, and it's done, and we're moving on." I really love the camaraderie of just being on set. I really enjoyed that. TV writing is wonderful. I love it, but you got soft hands in TV writing. A lot of it is driving onto a lot and sitting in an air-conditioned room all day and then having fancy salads delivered to you at lunchtime and then going home at 6 PM, and you're done, and you email in your script, and you move on from there, and then whoever is directing the episode directs the episode. This was an experience in which you're sitting there at one o'clock in the morning on a Tuesday night. It's cold out, it's raining. You've still got a scene to shoot, and people are miserable and want to go home, and you're tired and you're hungry, but you're out there with 60 other people and you're building something together, and there is something really, really special about that, that collaboration and that support that you have and the camaraderie that builds. I really love that, and, yeah, I'm never going to let that go. I want to do that as much as they'll let me.

Jo Reed:  And that's where we're going to have to leave it, Cord. Thank you for giving me your time. Thank you for this wonderful film...

Cord Jefferson:  No, thank you.

Jo Reed:  ...and these wonderful performances and congratulations on all of the nominations!

Cord Jefferson:  Yeah, thank you so much. I am so thrilled for these actors. I'm so proud of them. I'm so proud of everybody who worked on the movie, and thank you so much for having me. It's a real honor.

Jo Reed:  Not at all. Thank you. Okay. 

That was Cord Jefferson—he directed and wrote the screenplay for “American Fiction.” which has been nominated for five academy awards. If you’re interested in his thoughts about writing for television, particularly on the series Watchmen, listen to my 2020 conversation with him. We’ll have a link in the show notes.

You’ve been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating on Apple. It helps other people who love the arts to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.