Percival Everett Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

As the Oscars draw closer, more and more category winners seem to be locking into place. One of those categories that took another step to being pretty much over is Adapted Screenplay.

This is fact: Oscar-winning American Fiction screenwriter Cord Jefferson will receive the WGA West‘s 2024 Paul Selvin Award next month. The first-time feature scribe will be feted during the West Coast ceremony for strike-delayed 77th Writers Guild Awards on April 14 at the Hollywood Palladium.

In a very competitive race, Cord Jefferson won his first Academy Award in the Adapted Screenplay category for the dramedy “American Fiction.” Based on the 2001 novel “Erasure“ by Percival Everett, “Fiction” overcame a slew of worthy nominees such as Christopher Nolan‘s screenplay for “Oppenheimer,” Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach‘s bizarrely categorized script for “Barbie,” and Tony McNamara’s adaptation of “Poor Things” to take the prize.

Caroline Brew editor Cord Jefferson’s “American Fiction” won outstanding film adaptation at the 36th annual USC Libraries Script Awards on Saturday, while Apple TV+’s “Slow Horses” won in the episodic series category for the second year in a row. Jefferson and Percival Everett accepted the award for “American Fiction.” In his speech, Jefferson recalled his experience reading Everett’s novel “Erasure” in 2020, which he went on to adapt into “American Fiction.” “It felt like I was reading a book written specifically for me. It felt like I understood what was going on in these characters in the story on a molecular level,” he said.

The 36th annual USC Libraries Scripter Awards on Saturday named Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction its outstanding film adaptations, giving the Oscar-nominated script a boost leading into next weekend’s Academy Awards.

I share my colleague Pete Hammond’s fascination with Cord Jefferson’s BAFTA win for his screenplay adaptation, American Fiction. It is no small thing for a self-consciously American story to win a very British award against competition as formidable as Christopher Nolan, especially for a debut film.

American Fiction filmmaker Cord Jefferson and writer John Wells have signed on to Just Cause, Amazon’s upcoming thriller limited series, starring and executive produced by Scarlett Johansson, Deadline has confirmed.

Clayton Davis Senior Awards Editor Emmy winner and Oscar nominee Cord Jefferson will write and executive produce the upcoming Scarlett Johansson limited series, which serves as her first major television role. The “American Fiction” filmmaker has boarded the Amazon Prime Video adaptation of John Katzenbach’s novel “Just Cause.” Additionally, acclaimed writer John Wells has joined the project, co-writing the series with Jefferson, and will also serve as an executive producer. “Just Cause,” first published in 1992, tells the story of Matt Cowart, a Miami reporter.

American Fiction, a new film based upon the book ‘Erasure’ by Percival Everett. Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, John Ortiz, Erika Alexander, Leslie Uggams, Adam Brody, Keith David, Issa Rae and Sterling K.

Jeffrey Wright, star of Cord Jefferson’s provocative debut feature American Fiction, says he felt a personal affinity with his character Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison in the film, in part because of the challenges Monk experiences with regard to family issues. Monk is an author and a professor of English literature who discovers he may have to lower his standards to attain some kind of glory in the phony world of publishing. We follow him as he takes an enforced leave of absence to care for his ailing mother, a situation that the actor himself is painfully familiar with — Wright’s mother died a year before he received Jefferson’s script.

Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the year’s most talked-about scripts continues with writer-director Cord Jefferson‘s feature film debut American Fiction.

Hello, and welcome to the Scene 2 Seen Podcast. I am Valerie Complex, an associate editor and film writer at Deadline.

Variety FYC Fest on Dec. 6 in Los Angeles. Variety‘s senior awards editor Clayton Davis, Senior Artisans Editor Jazz Tangcay and Senior Entertainment & Media Writer Matt Donnelly moderated several panels throughout the event.

“He’s changing the narrative.” The new comedy, “American Fiction,” features a wickedly sharp and bitingly funny premise. The feature-length directorial debut of Cord Jefferson, a producer and writer on acclaimed series such as “Watchmen,” “Station Eleven” and “Master Of None,” the film is adapted from Percival Everett’s “Erasure,” a brilliant indictment of the way modern culture handles race, a pointed satire about the commodification of marginalized voices and a writer forced to confront himself and his own creative integrity.

“This was three years ago, that I had a note from an executive on a script that I wrote that I needed to make a character ‘Blacker’,” director Cord Jefferson said at Deadline’s Contenders Film L.A. panel for American Fiction. “A lot of this is taken directly from my personal experience having worked in entertainment.”

Clayton Davis Senior Awards Editor Cord Jefferson didn’t always know he wanted to be a director. While working on Netflix’s comedy series “Master of None,” actor/writer/creator Aziz Ansari asked Jefferson out of the blue if he ever wanted to direct. Jefferson recalls, “I said, ‘No, I’ve never been to film school, I don’t know anything about cameras or lighting.

Valerie Wu Intern The 2023 annual Newport Beach Film Festival (NBFF), hosted from Oct. 12 to Oct. 19, has announced its slate of awards winners.

Clayton Davis Senior Awards Editor Cord Jefferson’s satirical comedy “American Fiction” has won the Audience Award for narrative film at the Middleburg Film Festival. Proving to be a true crowd-pleaser, it’s the third audience prize for the MGM title on the festival circuit following the Toronto and Mill Valley Film Festivals (at the latter it tied with “Rustin”).

American Fiction” from writer, director and producer Cord Jefferson, and the recent winner of the Toronto Film Festival’s People’s Choice Award. Based on the novel “Erasure” by Percival Everett, the film stars Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison,” a frustrated novelist who is fed up with the establishment profiting from “Black” entertainment that relies on tired narratives and themes. After he writes an outlandish book making fun of the offensive tropes, his success propels him into the center of hypocrisy.

Michaela Zee After winning this year’s Toronto International Film Festival’s people’s choice award, “American Fiction” has pushed back its limited release to Dec. 15 and will expand in theaters on Dec. 22.

EXCLUSIVE: Filmmaker Cord Jefferson has, in recent years, made two life-changing decisions.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic In Cord Jefferson’s idea-dense “American Fiction,” no one wants to publish literary professor Thelonious Ellison’s latest novel. Thelonious — or “Monk” to his friends — has delivered a modern reworking of Aeschylus’ “The Persians” (hardly bestseller material to begin with), but all the industry can see is the color of his skin.

In Cord Jefferson cinematic adaptation of Percival Everett’s Erasure, American Fiction emerges as a hard-hitting commentary on identity, storytelling, and the microaggressive terrains of the publishing industry. With a powerhouse ensemble, led by Jeffrey Wright and supported by the likes of Tracee Ellis Ross and Sterling K. Brown, the film aims to deconstruct the publishing world as it relates to myriad facets of Black lives.

Clayton Davis Senior Awards Editor With “American Fiction,” Cord Jefferson, best known for penning television episodes of “Succession” and “Watchmen,” helms one of the finest directorial debuts seen since Sam Mendes’ “American Beauty.” In the style that feels like an audacious blend of the screenplays of Alexander Payne’s “Sideways” and Nicole Holofcener’s “Can You Ever Forgive Me,” he shepherds an audacious dramedy anchored by a career-best and Oscar-worthy performance from star Jeffrey Wright. After debuting at the Toronto International Film Festival, it’s a movie that could be a contender for the coveted TIFF Audience Award, and it would be deserved.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic In December 2020, Cord Jefferson sat down with the novel “Erasure,” by Percival Everett, and saw his life reflected back at him. “It was like someone had written down a Christmas gift for Cord,” he says.

EXCLUSIVE: Jeffrey Wright is set to star in the Untitled film from MRC and T-Street based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett. Cord Jefferson wrote the adaptation for the untitled film and is making his feature directorial debut.

NEW YORK -- Author, playwright and longtime champion of multiculturalism Ishmael Reed is receiving a lifetime achievement award for his contributions to literature.Reed is among this year's winners of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, given for work that “confronts racism and explores diversity," the Cleveland Foundation announced Tuesday. Percival Everett's novel “The Trees” won for fiction and Donika Kelly's “The Renunciations” was cited for poetry.

NEW YORK -- Daisy Hernández's “The Kissing Bug,” a memoir about a lethal illness that killed her aunt, has received a $75,000 prize from PEN America.The literary and free expression organization announced Monday that Hernández had won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for a work of any genre demonstrating “originality, merit and impact, with Joy Williams' “Harrow” and Percival Everett's “The Trees” among the finalists.Other winners included Yoon Choi’s “Skinship,” which received the $25,000 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for best debut story collection, and Margaret Renkl’s “Graceland, at Last,” presented the $15,000 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.

NEW YORK -- Colson Whitehead's “Harlem Shuffle,” Honorée Fanonne Jeffers' “The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois” and a debut story collection by Anthony Veasna So, a promising writer who died before his book was published, are among this year's nominees for National Book Critics Circle awards.Other nominees range from Torrey Peters' acclaimed first novel “Detransition, Baby” to Mark Harris' biography of Mike Nichols to Rebecca Solnit's “Orwell's Roses,” in which she connects Orwell's worldview to his joy in gardening and other domestic activities.Winners will be announced March 17.The NBCC announced five finalists in each of six competitive categories, and six nominees in a separate category for best first novel.