Diablo Cody: “Diablo Cody: How I Punked the Establishment”

Okay, so her follow-up to Juno hasn’t fared so well at the box office:

“Did Jennifer’s Body bomb because of Megan Fox?

“Why did Jennifer’s Body bomb at the box office?”

But it was almost a sure thing that critics were going to savage numero dos from Diablo Cody, so why not blow out all that bad karma on a horror-slasher-feminist-whatever movie starring the not-future Mrs. Michael Bay?

GITS still loves Cody. And here’s one reason why: She’s so damned honest:

You know, I was really not planning to do a lot with my life. I was really just blogging and writing for my own pleasure. And I was lucky enough to be spotted by somebody who had connections and said, I think you could write a movie; I think you could be doing more than what you’re doing. It took somebody else’s ambition to get me started.

I never had a big audience in mind when I started writing it, but then a lot of people started reading it and getting in touch with me — some normal, some totally creepy and disingenuous. Luckily, the guy who wound up being my manager and producing partner was the real deal. That’s Mason Novick, who I still work with.

At first I didn’t trust him at all. I ignored his first few emails. When you are representing yourself in the way that I was, you can’t really trust anybody who contacts you. It’s like, they’re probably a pervert or just not trustworthy. But he was so professional and all business. He just wanted to make movies.

I said, Screenwriting is not that interesting to me. To be honest, I was enjoying the kind of gonzo sex writing that I was doing. But he said, No, writing a movie is easy. If you can pull this off just once, you won’t really have to work anymore. You can sit outside and write every day. And I thought, that doesn’t sound so bad. I’ll take a crack at this.

I had nothing to lose. By the time I started writing “Juno” I had quit stripping and started working as a temp at an insurance company, processing insurance claims over the phone. And my lunch hour would roll around; there wasn’t really anything else to do. I was like in this industrial office park in the middle of nowhere, so I would just work on “Juno” every day on my lunch hour. It was pleasurable to me.

“Screenwriting (was) not that interesting to me.” Completely unpretentious. I wonder how the majority of aspiring screenwriters would write if they had that attitude? Don’t care about what they want, just write what you want.

Meanwhile life goes on: Both Trackingb.com and Tracking-Board.com are reporting that Cody went out wide last week with “a new pitch rumored to be a fresh take on ‘Sweet Valley High.’”


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