The 1A Movie Club sees 'American Fiction' (Rebroadcast)

WAMU 88.5 | By Haili Blassingame

Published February 19, 2024 at 11:50 AM PST

Aaron Bryant, Curator of Photography, Visual Culture, and Contemporary History and Jeffrey Wright speak onstage during the AMERICAN FICTION screening at Oprah Winfrey Theater at the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture.

A question that every artist must confront is what kind of artist will they be.

But there are other questions too. How will they pay their bills and support a family? How will they honor the impulse that drove them to make art in the first place? And what happens when these two things oppose each other?

These questions get even stickier when race is involved.

For this edition of the 1A Movie Club, we’re discussing the film “American Fiction.” It was directed by Cord Jefferson and stars actor Jeffrey Wright as the struggling writer, Monk. It premiered in theaters last Friday.

The movie follows a frustrated novelist fed up with the way the publishing industry profits off of stereotypical Black stories.As a joke, Monk writes his own stereotypical Black novel. But the book becomes more successful than any of his previous works. All of this happens alongside Monk’s increasingly chaotic family life.

We hear from actorJeffrey Wright about the film and his performance in it as well as 1A‘s entertainment correspondent and a 1A producer about their reactions to the movie.