Giving Compass' Take:
- Candice Frederick draws attention to the barriers facing Black authors in getting their books adapted to film in comparison to their white counterparts.
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It’s been a turbulent ride for author LaDarrion Williams’ to get his story of a Black teen with ancestral magic adapted for the small screen.
His short film, Blood at the Root, went viral in 2021. Hollywood producers and executives showed interest in 2023, but suggested that it was “not marketable,” he said. Undaunted, he turned the short into a novel, and it became a New York Times bestseller in 2024.
But even after Malcolm D. Lee’s Blackmaled Productions optioned the novel in 2023, it was soon the same old story: rejection after rejection. A story about a 17-year-old boy who gets accepted to a magical HBCU where he discovers dark secrets about his family was labeled too similar to Harry Potter. Or he was told executives weren’t interested in young adult subject matter. Yet, he read in Hollywood trade outlets and other news media that other adaptations were being greenlit and recommended as the next Harry Potter-adjacent hit.
“It’s very purposeful, what we’re seeing,” Williams scorned, regarding the barriers facing Black authors.
Black authors like Williams, whose adaptations have been in a particular “development hell” for years that sometimes resulted in them losing their options altogether, have watched the work of some of their white counterparts get “fast-tracked.”
This May, Deadline highlighted the many books that have had or will see TV adaptations this year. Among them, only two were by Black authors. That disparity reignited discourse around not only the increasing dearth of Black stories on the small screen, but also the deep-rooted issue of buzzy Black books whose previously announced adaptations have quietly disappeared from the radar.
Those include adaptations of Akwaeke Emezi’s genre-defying debut novel Freshwater, Brit Bennett’s New York Times bestseller The Vanishing Half, Kacen Callendar’s queer young adult novel Felix Ever After, and Brandon Taylor’s semiautobiographical coming-of-age-novel Real Life. Each of those was announced throughout 2019-2020, without a single update since.
Read the full article about barriers facing Black authors by Candice Frederick at Capital B News.