Interview: Diablo Cody: Dancing as fast as she can

LOS ANGELES - Diablo Cody's Cinderella moment had arrived. Her film "Juno" was less than four hours from its Hollywood premiere. As the Centerpiece Gala presentation of the annual American Film Institute Festival, her highly anticipated comedy was about to be seen for the first time by hundreds of the industry's most important people.

And so was Cody. It was to be a flashbulbs-and-red-carpet event and she had nothing to wear.

With her husband, graphic designer Jon Hunt, at her side, Cody blitzed L.A.'s Grove shopping arcade, a tree-lined faux village of chi-chi boutiques. Cody's mall-rat jeans and T-shirt, Jeff Spicoli checkerboard Vans and gnawed black fingernails marked her as an infrequent visitor to the realm of exclusive retailing. "I loathe shopping," she groaned. In Nordstrom's shoe department, she said, "Look at this madness. My feet are so wide and these are delicate little European lady shoes."

When the clerk suggested high heels, Cody shook her head. "I wish, I wish, I wish. No, I actually can't wear heels. I have nerve damage in my feet from stripping."

Conversation died in a 20-foot radius. Eyes snapped toward her.

"That always gets looks," she said with an untroubled shrug.

Welcome to the charmed and frenzied life of Minneapolis' most celebrated former exotic dancer, turned Hollywood's hottest scribe, whose prizewinning debut script -- pecked out on a laptop in the Crystal Target store -- has those in the know hailing her as the most distinctive new voice since Quentin Tarantino and a shoo-in Oscar nominee.

Right now, she's caught in the headlights of her own onrushing success. Steven Spielberg tapped Cody to write the pilot for "The United States of Tara," his Showtime series about a suburban mother (Toni Collette) with multiple personalities.

Soon shooting will begin on "Jennifer's Body," her feminist horror comedy about a small-town Minnesota girl "who eats boys," with "Juno" director Jason Reitman producing and Megan Fox ("Transformers") in the lead. Next up are "Girly Style," her take on college sex comedies; "Time and a Half," a hipster postgraduate satire, and "Burlesque," a musical about cabaret artists. And she owes her publisher a book this month.

Under the circumstances, Cody is coping with her success as much as reveling in it.

"I'm completely overwhelmed," she admitted a month ago. "My life is chaos. I cannot even begin to explain to you how busy I am or how drained I am. My entire life is completely upside-down. Promoting the film has been really exhausting. I'm a professional writer and yet I have fewer and fewer opportunities to write. And I have to try to maintain my personal life as well."

The chaos boiled over Wednesday when she and Hunt announced the end of their marriage, a relationship that was often the subject of blissful commentary in her popular memoir "Candy Girl" and her widely read blog. The previous Friday she had obliterated her body-art tribute to Hunt -- a large upper-arm portrait of Cody as a bikini-clad cowgirl wreathed by the banner "Jonny's Girl" -- covering the words with a spray of red roses. Their split made headlines in the Los Angeles Times.

"We're not Brangelina," she said Thursday. "I did not realize how much of a personality I had become until yesterday when all this stuff surfaced."

Their relationship had been the subject of some speculation as Cody's life radically changed. When a picture appeared of Reitman and Cody sharing a celebratory hug after winning the top prize at the Rome Film Festival, rumors circulated. When he signed on to direct her next film, websites jeered: "Reitman Jumps on Cody's Body."

"No thanks," Cody said with an emphatic shake of the head. "He's the most devoted family man. He's got a new baby! He's like my brother."

Hunt also vehemently denied the insinuations. "That's so disgustingly sexist. The reason it's a meteoric rise is it's a meteoric talent."

In an interview for December's Mpls.St.Paul magazine, Cody's friend Steve Marsh asked her if "Juno" became a major success, would it mean "Bye, bye Jonny?"

"Are you kidding?" she replied. "That's a ridiculous question. He's not going anywhere. Everything we do we do side by side. I've got him tattooed on my arm, for God's sakes."

Acclaim everywhere

"Juno," opening Friday, a comedy about an accidentally pregnant Minnesota teen, was the surprise hit of the Toronto International Film Festival, where Roger Ebert wrote, "I don't know where I've heard a standing ovation so long, loud and warm." Much of the credit has gone to Cody. Typically, writers are shipped to a Siberian gulag when the time comes to publicize a film, but the sassy, photogenic, ever-quotable screenwriter is the film's public face.

She not only shares the limelight with star Ellen Page and Reitman (who praise her effusively), but often eclipses them. In Italy, England, Spain and across the United States she has captivated interviewers with her unique brand of profane feminism, lit-geek erudition and blistering wit. She was offered up as a sassy role model by Wired and interviewed in Esquire's "Women We Love" issue. She was "The Screenwriter" of the moment in Entertainment Weekly's holiday movie preview, and ranked 38th on the magazine's list of the 50 smartest people in Hollywood. (She admits to an IQ above 140.)

The frenzy of acclaim astonishes no one more than Cody, 29, who was living hand-to-mouth on her lap-dancing tips three years ago.

"We were always in debt," she recalled. "One day we literally had $9 left. We went to Cub Foods in St. Louis Park and bought a loaf of bread, a package of bologna and some generic cigarettes because my husband was still a smoker at the time. I remember saying to Jonny in the parking lot, 'Don't worry, honey, we can buy more bologna tomorrow after I finish stripping.' And we both started laughing so hard at how absurdly white-trash our situation was."

How times have changed. Cody arrived in full Hollywood regalia for "Juno's" searchlight premiere at the historic Cinerama Dome on Sunset Boulevard. An off-the-shoulder frock showcased her then-intact "Jonny's Girl" tattoo. She struck poses for photographers, looking like she'd be more at home in a hot rod than a studio limousine.

Before the house lights dimmed, Tom Rothman, chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment, the distributor of "Juno," shimmied through the crowd to pay his respects. "This is such a unique, special movie," said the man behind "Titanic" and "Star Wars" episodes 1, 2 and 3. "We're going to do absolutely everything we can for this one," he beamed. "Every now and then you get one you really don't want to [louse] up."

Originally scheduled as a low-expectation spring release, "Juno" was moved to a prestigious mid-December slot after its festival raves and stratospheric audience testing. It's now positioned as this year's "Little Miss Sunshine."

At the afterparty, praise for Cody's work flowed like champagne.

John Malkovich, one of the film's producers, said her script was clearly destined as the blueprint for "a very good film. It was funny, original and well-written."

Jason Bateman, who plays a married yuppie adopting Juno's baby, said the screenplay "deserves to be the star of the film."

"A great screenplay makes everybody step up to the bar and deliver," said Catherine Hardwicke, director of the youth drama "Thirteen." "You'd have to be a dirt clod not to like this movie."

An early thrill-seeker

It's a wonderful irony that the story of Cody's rise to movieland icon would make a lousy film. No one would believe it. Stripper-turned-screenwriter has become the accepted shorthand for her career, but her life has been a gallery of sudden, dramatic reinventions. Cody's very hair, rumored to be a natural reddish-brown, seems possessed by Sybil-like personalities. To look at her photos on her blog over the years is to see a restless chameleon.

Brook Joan Busey didn't set out to be Diablo Cody. She didn't concoct that identity until she entered the blogosphere in 2003, writing about her experiences in Mill City strip clubs, where she was known as Bonbon and Roxanne.

She grew up with older brother Marc, "coddled to the point of asphyxiation" in a lively Italian Catholic family in Lemont, Ill., southwest of Chicago. She attended parochial school for 12 years, a bright, geeky kid, deep into the normal teenage panoply of comic books, horror movies, rock 'n' roll, boys and blabbing on her hamburger-shaped phone. She was a thrill-seeker and an extrovert, caterwauling for Yak Spackle, a "horrible" punk band that she and her friends started.

She attended the University of Iowa, famous for its Writers' Workshop. One teacher called her the best writer he'd ever taught, but predicted that laziness would be her undoing. It was an early flare-up of Cody's "oppositional disorder," a tendency to torpedo jobs and responsibilities.

Returning to Chicago after graduation in 2000, she took a "dismal" secretarial position at a bankruptcy law firm. She began goofing off on "the World Wide Waste of Time," stoking her passion for the Beach Boys through visits to a fan site operated by Hunt, a musician and music journalist in Minneapolis.

"She started posting on there, and she was very funny," Hunt recalled. After she shared a few of her weird, impressive stories, "I thought, this girl is brilliant. So I kept encouraging her, saying, 'You're a genius and you're going to be huge someday, so please believe it.'"

Their correspondence evolved from friendly to teasingly romantic epistles in mock-Victorian prose, then warmed to the kind of messages Not Safe for Work. They arranged to meet in Los Angeles for their first date at a Brian Wilson concert. She was 24, he was 30.

"We were both hopeless romantics to the point where we had strings of failed relationships behind us," Cody said. "Romantic ruin is probably the way to describe our emotional history. But when we met, there was no sense of maturity or sobriety. It was like, 'Let's get married!'"

The two commuted between Chicago and Minnesota for eight months; Cody moved to Minneapolis in 2003. Another office drone position at the Fallon advertising agency confirmed that she was not cut out for a Mary Richards career. Walking past the Skyway Lounge, a seedy Hennepin Av. strip club, she saw an ad for amateur night. She lost that first catwalk, but transformed her life.

'Diablo' is born

Busey had been blogging about wage-slave drudgery, the lunch special at Arby's and other vital affairs of the day to little acclaim. But writing about stripper life under the nom de Web Diablo Cody, produced a remarkable spike in readership. Her observations about life onstage, backstage and in customers' laps were ribald, often illustrated with cheesecake self-portraits, cultivated the image of a hell-raising devil woman with a magma-hot libido. Readers lapped up her writings to the tune of 5,000 hits a day. She was Web royalty, and soon landed a job at the local alt-weekly City Pages, where she blended acid sarcasm with poetic turns of phrase.

Then the Internet delivered another gift. Mason Novick, a Los Angeles producer and manager, discovered Cody's blog and suggested a comedic memoir. The first installment of her six-figure advance for "Candy Girl" arrived just in time to buy that much-needed package of bologna.

Cody created "Juno" when Novick urged her to whip up a script as a screenwriting sample. She worked herself into the heroine, a wisecracking know-it-all with a lot to learn. She gave Juno a hamburger phone and her own hyperarticulate speech patterns. Hunt, himself an adoptee, provided some traits for Mark Loring, the conflicted adoptive dad: his huge comics collection and his middling success as a musician (Hunt fronted for several local bands including Landing Gear).

High school memories played a part, too. "The film is a 90-minute apology to a guy I hurt," Cody said. "I hope he gets that and doesn't think the film is just full of coincidences."

Exhaustion setting in

Lately, Los Angeles has been something between a home and a landing strip. She and Hunt, who married three years ago in a "Star Trek" ceremony at the Las Vegas Hilton, largely lived apart for the last two years, reuniting when he moved to Los Angeles in September. They shared a cramped two-room guest house, frequently separated by Cody's film work or Hunt's trips to Minnesota to visit his 9-year-old daughter. (They still own a home in Robbinsdale.)

Hunt, who found work in Los Angeles designing movie posters, called Cody's acclaim a mixed bag.

"The most important thing I do for her is I'm always around to support her," he said last month. "I'm always willing to be the person who's like the cheerleader there off to the side going, 'You rule!' And reminding her of how awesome she is. Now she gets it from other people. So perhaps I'm redundanting myself out of a job. I told her that I was waiting for a photo to appear of us together that said, 'Diablo Cody and guest.' And last week there was one."

For her part, Cody is swept up in the final stages of "Juno's" release. Last week the film opened strongly in New York and Los Angeles, and Cody shared the National Board of Review award for best original screenplay. She called those distractions "a blessing" at a painful time.

Revealing intimate details of her personal life in her blog now seems to have been a Faustian bargain, spurring cynical conjecture about her professional life.

"Everybody always wants to leap to conclusions when you're dealing with a woman, particularly a woman who has bartered with her sexuality in the past. Even though that was commerce, that was actually the sex industry. I'm not surprised, and at the same time it is slightly nauseating," she said.

Cody's friend Dana Fox, an established screenwriter, says that anyone who thinks a writer can succeed on Cody's level by exploiting a sexy image is mistaken. "People don't realize how incredibly competitive it is out here," said Fox. "Everyone in this town loves a backstory, and being a stripper actually gives her a bit of cachet. That said, talent is all that counts."

Maybe so, but Cody faces some tough questions. "We've been really insulted by insinuations in the past that Jonny would no longer be part of my life if my career took a dramatic turn," she said Thursday. "That's still insulting to us. This is not bye, bye Jonny. Jonny's part of my family and he always will be. Jonny is my best friend. I don't believe in bye, bye anybody."

In fact, they are starting a band, she said: "We're both really excited about it. I'm going to sing and play bass and Jonny's going to play guitar. No tour plans, though. Once you tour together, rumors begin."

Colin Covert • 612-673-7186