SEPTEMBER INTERVIEW
Elle Johnson

Writer and showrunner Elle Johnson has worked in television for over twenty years. Her critically acclaimed 2020 Netflix series ‘Self Made: Based on the Life of Madame CJ Walker’ follows the first female African-American millionaire, who built an empire with her haircare products.

We sat down with Elle to discuss her inspirations, the making of Self Made, and how the television industry has evolved over the course of her career. 

When you sit down to start a project, where do you begin? What gets you excited about a new idea?

My bread and butter jobs tend to be cop shows and procedurals. I always really like to explore the idea of characters who act out of the norm. How do people become criminals? How do people do criminal acts? Or how does a person get so far out of “the norm” that they're able to commit a crime and, similarly, what is it that draws people to that type of world? I like to do a lot of research, to delve into something and figure out the little known facts and angles. But even before doing the research, I like to blue sky things - which is to make a concerted effort to think about the project before you even putting anything down on paper, to infuse it with those kinds of subconscious things, and allow themes to start organically emerging. Finding the angle, the hook, the themes… those are the things that really speak to me and keep me propelling forward, because ultimately what gets you over the finish line is having passion for the subject matter.

Has your inspiration for writing largely remained the same, or has it changed throughout the years?

I'm always trying to tell stories that are in some way deeply personal to me and rooted in something that I am trying to work out. I often refer to myself as a method writer. I like to feel as though I've gone on a journey with the material and not keep it at a distance. Although I do quite a bit of research, I try to find ways to make that experience more personal to me because the more personal it is, the more specific it is, the more universal it will be. And then, the more accessible it will be to a wider audience, because people will hopefully be able to see something of themselves in it, or recognize that it's a personal journey. We're all just humans on the planet having similar experiences, so if I'm interested in or moved by something, then chances are good that somebody else will be too.

How have you seen the television industry change since your career began? 

I've been doing this for more than 20 years and I’ve known of other black female writers like Jeanine Sherman Barrois, but we'd never worked together. I've always been the only one in the room. My expectation was that I would get hired on a show, but there would never be another black woman in the room. I feel like the biggest change is that there's a bigger appetite for these types of stories within the television industry and people are actually willing to make them, and to hire black women to tell these stories. It’s been a wonderful opportunity for us to tell our own stories, and to see our stories through our lens versus having to filter them through a male gaze or a white perspective. You know, that was one of the other interesting things about the show is that, you know, we were really telling this from a black perspective - we didn't have to have the white person who would be the entry point into Madame CJ’s life.

What was important to you in terms of shaping the character of Madame CJ Walker? What did you want people to know about her, maybe that you didn’t even know before starting the project?

We really wanted to tell a story that would not just put her on a pedestal and show her as a legend, but also show her as a living breathing woman who had relationships with people, who was flawed, who was a human being, who was capable of making mistakes. Her life has been very aspirational and impressive, but we didn’t want to show a strong black woman doing strong black women things, and succeeding. We wanted to show that there was struggle, and sacrifices that she had to make as a woman, as a business person, as a result of being so determined and dogged to have her business take off. We conceived of it in terms of what are the sacrifices that Madam CJ had to make in order to become a millionaire. She had to make sacrifices in terms of her friendships, her marriage, and in terms of her relationship with her daughter.

What surprised you about Madame CJ as a business woman? 

Part of what she wanted to do was enable other black women to lift themselves out of poverty, to better their circumstances. She would employ them as sales agents who could sell her product. She came up with a business model that was not only good for her as a businesswoman, but good for the people who worked for her. She helped empower her sales agents in a way that lifted them up and out of poverty. Madame CJ had ten thousand employees all across the country. We're talking about her giving jobs to ten thousand black women, enabling them not to be domestics, to be salespeople who were in charge of their own schedules, selling products, moving their lives, improving their own health and wellbeing, improving their economic standing. Also, part of her business model was not just rewarding her sales agents for making a lot of sales and making a lot of money, but encouraging them to give back to the community to make charitable donations. She would reward her sales agents when they would give back and make donations to other groups and people who were in need in the community.

What inspired you to pursue a career in television?

The idea of me becoming a writer kind of sparked for me when I was younger. I had a tragedy in my family where my 16 year old cousin was murdered in a robbery. It kind of set me on a path of thinking about storytelling, because the circumstances around that event were so vivid to me as memories. I was watching events unfolding and was aware that I was being changed and transformed by what was happening. As I got older and started looking at careers, I got interested in writing, and I really wanted to tell the story of my cousin, Karen, who had been murdered. I at one point thought I would try to become a novelist or a short story writer, maybe even a journalist. Those were things that felt really far out of my reach until I landed a job quite by accident in a television writer’s room as a script coordinator. It became a perfect storm of me realizing [television writing] was a way that I could tell these stories that I was carrying, not just about my cousin, but also my father and other family members who were in law enforcement. Television seemed like a place where my stories would fit and where my voice could be heard. (Elle’s riveting memoir, The Officer’s Daughter: A Memoir of Family & Forgiveness, was published by Harper in February 2021.)

What advice would you give to young women who want to be television writers? 

You just have to write the things that you are passionate about. If you do that, your passion will come through. If you’re passionate about it, somebody else is going to be passionate about it as well. You need to be authentic and true to yourself and find passion and tell the story the way that you think it should be told, and be truthful. Don't try to figure out what people want to hear.