Ex-stripper beats odds with ‘Juno’

A friend from high school was the inspiration behind the screenplay.

By JEFF BAENEN

ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

MINNEAPOLIS — 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 risqué for family newspapers.

But the novice screenwriter also has written a sweet, PG-13 movie that’s shaping up as a holiday hit.

“Juno,” a sardonic comedy about a pregnant 16-year-old who becomes a “cautionary whale” for her classmates, is rolling out to more and more theaters, picking up rave reviews and Oscar buzz along the way. 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 said during a “Juno” promotional stop in her former hometown. “I really feel like I have adrenaline fatigue or something.”

Cody, 29, has defied high odds. Not only has her first screenplay been produced — “Juno” reaches the screen just over two years after she wrote the first draft — but she says it’s virtually untouched from her original vision.

The chances of that happening are “one in a bazillion,” said Mason Novick, who stumbled across Cody’s racy blog while surfing for porn and ended up becoming her manager.

“Hollywood likes to hire a lot of writers and go through a lot of rigamarole,” said Novick, one of the “Juno” producers. But the film’s partners “knew that was her [Cody’s] voice ... and left it alone.”

“Juno,” released by Fox Searchlight, opened with an amazing $60,000 per-theater average take in limited release in early December and went into wide release around Christmas. Reviews have been positive, with The Associated Press calling it “the kind of movie all indie comedies wish they could be: light and lovable, perhaps a bit too pleased with the cleverness of its dialogue, but a small charmer nonetheless.”

In the movie, precocious Juno MacGuff (played by diminutive, 20-year-old Ellen Page) finds herself pregnant by high school friend Paulie Bleeker, a breath-mint-popping track star played by Michael Cera. After deciding against an abortion, Juno seeks out a childless Yuppie couple (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman) “desperately seeking spawn” (in the words of Juno’s cheerleader girlfriend) who agree to adopt Juno’s baby.

Cody, who grew up in Lemont, Ill., outside of Chicago, was inspired by a high school friend who got pregnant and had some of the same experiences as the movie’s title character, 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.) said Juno is based on herself as a teenager. Juno’s hamburger-shaped phone echoes one Cody herself had when she was growing up.

“I always say I’m kind of an emotional scavenger, because everything that I write about is drawn from life, it’s drawn from experience that I actually had,” Cody said between sips of Coke at a downtown hotel. She wore a Green Day T-shirt, blue jeans and classic Vans checkerboard slip-on shoes, with her hair dyed black and bobbed and her eyes outlined in mascara.

(There is another recent change in Cody’s appearance. She’s going through a divorce, and a freshly tattooed rose covers the “JONNY’S GIRL” banner on the pinup girl tattooed on her upper right arm.)

Cody chronicled her adventures as a stripper in Minneapolis in the 2006 memoir “Candy Girl.” For “Juno,” she said, 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.”’