You’ve gotta give Diablo her due
Diablo Cody has a tough-chick reputation. The tattooed, punkish sex blogger wrote a book about her year as a stripper, and the name of her blog is too risque for family newspapers.
But the novice screenwriter also has written a sweet, PG-13 movie that’s shaping up as a hit.
“Juno,” a sardonic comedy about a pregnant 16-year-old, is rolling out to more and more theaters, picking up rave reviews and Oscar buzz along the way. (It’s scheduled to reach the Spokane area on Friday.)
And Cody is in demand, with several projects – including one with Steven Spielberg – pending. Entertainment Weekly recently ranked her 38th on a list of the 50 smartest people in Hollywood.
“It’s insane, it really is. I sometimes wonder how much stimulation one person can take,” Cody says. “I really feel like I have adrenaline fatigue or something.”
Cody, 29, has defied high odds. Not only has her first screenplay been produced – just over two years after she banged out the first draft on a laptop at a Starbucks – but she says it’s virtually untouched from her original vision.
In the movie, precocious Juno MacGuff (played by diminutive, 20-year-old Ellen Page) finds herself pregnant by high school friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera), a breath-mint-popping track star.
After deciding against an abortion, Juno seeks out a childless yuppie couple (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman) who are “desperately seeking spawn” and agree to adopt her baby.
Cody, who grew up near Chicago, was inspired by a high school friend who got pregnant and had some of the same experiences, such as being mistreated by an ultrasound technician.
But Cody (real name Brook Busey-Hunt – she took her pen name during a trip to Cody, Wyo.) says the character of Juno is based on herself as a teenager. Juno’s hamburger-shaped phone echoes one Cody herself had when she was growing up.
Cody chronicled her adventures as a stripper in Minneapolis in the 2006 memoir “Candy Girl.” For “Juno,” she says, she drew on her experiences when she was “young and sweet.”
“I was able to kind of revisit that time,” she said, “before the stripping, before anything in my life was vulgar.”
Before the writers’ strike, Cody was moving ahead with Steven Spielberg on “The United States of Tara” for Showtime, starring Toni Collette in a comedy about a mom with multiple personalities.
She also was working on “Girly Style,” a college comedy for Universal, and will be a producer, along with “Juno” director Jason Reitman, on her horror comedy “Jennifer’s Body,” set to start filming in March.
Now living in Los Angeles, Cody said she’s done five scripts or so since “Juno.” And she has no plans to return to stripping.
“I can’t,” she said. “I’m too old.”
The birthday bunch
Actor Anthony Hopkins is 70. Actor Tim Considine (“My Three Sons”) is 67. Actress Sarah Miles is 66. Actor Ben Kingsley is 64. Actor Tim Matheson is 60. Singer Burton Cummings (The Guess Who) is 60. Singer Donna Summer is 59. Actress Bebe Neuwirth (“Cheers”) is 49. Actor Val Kilmer is 48. Singer-actor Joe McIntyre (New Kids on the Block) is 35.