Behind the Cover Story: Pat Jordan on Samuel L. Jackson Pat Jordan, a contributing writer for the magazine, wrote this week's cover story on Samuel L. Jackson. Jordan is the author of 11 books, including the memoir "A Nice Tuesday." He has recently written for the magazine on the Phillies" deceptive pitchers, haunted houses in South Carolina and the former N.B.A. referee Tim Donaghy. Were you a Samuel L. Jackson fan before writing about him? I was neither a fan nor not a fan. Like most people, I had just seen him in a lot of movies. After Sam agreed to talk to me, I went to Netflix and ordered maybe 20 movies. But I have strange sleeping patterns, and I'm up from 11 at night until 3 or 4 in the morning. And all his movies are all over TV at that time. By the time I got the Netflix, I'd already seen all his movies on television. He usually has small parts. I realized he's even in one of my favorite movies, "True Romance," a really sick comedy, as some drug overlord. He's everywhere. And that solved the mystery of how he got to be the highest-grossing film actor of all time? Sure! If he's in three minutes of "Star Wars III," that grosses $350 million and that goes into his ledger. As he explained to me, that money doesn't go straight into his pocket. But it eventually gets there, because he has three or four movies airing a night, and so he gets the residuals. It seemed from the piece that you got along pretty well with him. Unlike a lot of actors, he made a very quick decision that he could be honest and engage with me. A lot of times, actors have a blanket shellac, and everything they say sounds like it is manufactured. With Sam, I never felt that. Sam put up fewer barriers than most? He put up no barriers. Anything having to do with who he is, he was willing to talk about. But he was willing to joke around. He was a black revolutionary in the late "60s, and he claims he hung around with Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown and he started collecting guns because he was going to "kill whitey" in the race war. I said: "Yeah, me too, in 1967 I almost joined the John Birch society, and I was collecting guns, too. We could have met across the barricades. He started laughing. Did you find out anything you didn't expect while talking to him? I knew about the black revolutionary stuff, but what was the most surprising was about growing up black in Chattanooga. All those details about people calling him "nigger boy." That was an eye-opener. It puts his attitude toward his roles in blaxploitation movies in a new light. He knew the quality wasn't there. They weren't what he wanted to do. But what he liked about them, he said, was that he was among the first black heroes. The heroes had to be black drug dealers or gangsters, but at least they get one over on the white cops. I read somewhere that he didn't like that his daughter was dating white guys in college. He puts up a lot of that smokescreen. Yet, often when he talks about people he respects, it's white actors and directors: Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Robert De Niro, Quentin Tarantino, Bruce Willis. So he talks a good game about "whitey," but he's a much more equitable man than that. I admire him for overcoming an upbringing in an unbelievably racist place. So why did it take Hollywood so long to call on Jackson? I don't know! Well, he wasn't as handsome as Denzel. A lot of those guys, his group of black actors, went to Hollywood on their own. Sam and Morgan Freeman wouldn't go without an offer, without a part. Both of them had decent stage careers. I'm sure they weren't making big money in New York, but they were on Off Broadway and at Yale Rep. They were respected actors - why would they toss that on a dime so they could do a pilot for a sitcom?