ONE OF THE few films to briefly halt the runaway Oppenheimer train on Oscars night back in March was American Fiction, which triumphed in the Best Adapted Screenplay category (also besting Barbie, Poor Things and The Zone Of Interest). And rightly so —because writer/director Cord Jefferson’s screenplay is not only something of a marvel in its own right, but a masterclass in adapting a novel for the big screen.
The novel in question was Percival Everett’s Erasure, which shares a basic story with American Fiction —a frustrated African-American writer, Thelonius ‘Monk’ Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), decides to fashion an alter-ego for himself — Stagg R. Leigh —and write a stereotypically Black book in disgust at the way he sees the industry going; but of course, the book becomes a huge hit. Jefferson was a big fan of Erasure, but after cutting his teeth on Damon Lindelof ’s Watchmen series for HBO, had come to believe that regarding a text as sacred was not the way to go. “My thinking when it came to adapting this novel was, ‘I don’t have to hew so closely to the text,’” Jefferson tells Empire, in an interview conducted shortly before the Oscars. “What I needed to hew closely to was the essence of what Percival was trying to get at.”
There are several major changes from the book. There’s the title, for one. American Fiction is not Erasure erasure, but a title that Jefferson settled upon after he was talked out of his original choice: ‘Fuck’, which was inspired by a section in the book in which an enraged Monk changes the name of his novel to the least commercial, most offensive thing he can think of. Only to, once again, find people lapping it up. “That was probably the scene that made me laugh the hardest,” says Jefferson. “And it’s rare that I laugh out loud when I’m reading. But I was told that they wouldn’t even give the film a rating.”