Juno and the paying cocks

The Oscar proceedings of ’08 may turn out to be a dog and pony event but with two genuine classics in contention – There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men – at least we’ll have something to root for. The big Cinderella story, however, belongs to another title. Juno, though frequently pitched as 'This Year’s Little Miss Sunshine', is, in truth, even better than that film. The sass-mouthed tale of a wise cracking teen who gets pregnant, Juno has been nominated in the Best Director, Best Actress, Best Original Screenplay and Best Film categories.

It’s a heck of a result for screenwriter Diablo Cody who, not too long ago, was a blogger, the literary equivalent of giving it away on a street corner.
“Yes,” she nods. “Technically that’s exactly what self-publishing is. But you’re creating an opportunity for yourself that perhaps the mainstream press doesn’t want you to have. That’s one thing I do love about blogging. You have all these incredibly talented people who would otherwise be left in the margins. You get to have a voice – then maybe get to be discovered. But my poor blog has gotten increasingly boring since I started writing professionally. All the attention shifted to the pay gigs. Now I’m blogging about what I have for lunch!”
Ms. Cody’s online witterings used to be a whole lot more exciting. Back in 2003, Cody (real name Brooke Busey-Hunt) was a bored secretary looking for cheap thrills. She signed up for an amateur strip night in a Minnesota club, before moving into peep shows and phone-sex as fodder for her now infamous blog, the Pussy Ranch.
“It happened on a whim,” she tells me. “And then it got worse. I could have stayed in a nice, safe, topless cocktail joint but no, I became bored and went to sit in a plexi-glass peep show booth and masturbate. I always had to sink lower and lower. But you know, people are so frightened of becoming desensitised and jaded when actually it’s really nice. And I never get bored with talking about stripping. I even bring the conversation around to it. I think I’ve just laid it all out there so many times that I feel really comfortable with it. It’s still endlessly fascinating for me. The idea of exaggerated femininity is endlessly fascinating. I could stare at Pamela Anderson or Dolly Parton for days at a time. To me, women with plumage are so beautiful.”
Talking to Cody, who comes from a good Catholic home, has a decent degree and is herself, quite clearly, the model for the all-quipping Juno, it’s hard to believe that her move into the skin trade was entirely down to a whim. Surely she had her writing or an investigation such as Gloria Steinem’s A Bunny’s Tale in mind?
“I don’t know,” says Cody. “It wasn’t in the back of my mind when I went into it. At least I don’t think so. But very soon after I started I realized that this is incredibly amusing. I mean it’s crazy funny, looking at all those guys. So I was inspired in a way I hadn’t been in a very long time. And I knew I had something I could write about exhaustively. But going into stripping was just me, snapping mentally, I think. So I don’t think it was like this clean-cut girl journalist entering the fray.”
For someone who describes herself as a ‘liberal feminist’ doesn’t that put her right in the middle of the bad guys in the arguments about raunch culture? Aren’t we all now agreed that pole-dancing is exploitation not empowerment?
“Oh yeah,” she says. “To me that’s the most interesting thing about the whole raunch culture dialogue. It frustrates me when I see women conforming to male behaviour in order to be part of a crowd or to placate men. But for myself, raunch culture was a homecoming of sorts because I’m a naturally masculine woman. I’ve been acting like a gross guy since I was a kid. But you’re right. It’s something I feel very conflicted about. Especially when I look back on the stripping period.”
At the age of 24, Cody wrote her memoir Candy Girl: A Year in The Life of an Unlikely Stripper, a blackly humorous account of the horrors of the skin trade and a book David Letterman declared was the only title in the David Letterman book club. Of course that meant telling her Catholic parents what exactly she’d been up to.
“That was an interesting phone call,” she says. “They didn’t know I was a stripper while it was happening. So I had to tell them once I got the book deal. I knew on one hand they’d be thrilled because I’ve wanted to be a published author my entire life. On the other hand how do I tell them what I’ve been doing for the last year? And that the book is a graphic account of what I’d been doing. But they took it pretty well. They were very supportive.”
Does she still have Catholic hang-ups herself I wonder?
“Oh totally. My entire life is a Catholic hang-up. There was definitely some psychological complexity behind the decision to strip. Obviously I’m glad I did it. It wound up being a strange trigger event. I have massive Catholic hang-ups. I don’t even know how to have a healthy discussion about morality with anybody. For me everything is still completely polarised. I mean you’re going to hell or you’re not. And I’m pretty sure I am. I envy people who were raised with a more flexible sense of right and wrong.”
The book and the blog led to calls from Hollywood producers – just shows what they read – and to Juno. In the nicest possible way, it’s like a Hallmark movie but with bite, I tell her.
“That’s so funny,” she says. “You’re the third person to mention Hallmark dramas or after-school specials. I really envisaged it as a very dark comedy like Election when I was writing it. Oh man, I’m a lot wussier than I thought. It came out touching and melodramatic and I was sitting around thinking, like, I’m this total badass. Damn! I’m like this total cyborg. I never cry during movies. So I never in a million years thought I would write something that would make people cry. And yet they do at every screening. It’s messed up, man. The only thing I was thinking about when I was writing was the whole sort of feminist angle. That was really important to me. It has certainly been a decade or more since we had a strong, curious, funny, profane female character in a lead. So that was the plan.”
But thanks to such all-American lifestyle aids as The Rules we’ve been led to believe that ladies across the Atlantic aren’t supposed to be funny.
“Absolutely,” she nods. “Sad to say it but it’s like The Stepford Wives back home. That’s why it has always been very important to me to find my sort of women, who share similar values to my own. People who aren’t fixated on this weird sanitised fairytale that has been peddled to American women for the last half-century or so. At the same time I do relish being a non-conformist. So if I move to an entire country full of back-chatting women I could feel very alienated. I wouldn’t know my place.”
How does this weird prejudice against humorous women manifest itself?
“Oh, every day of my life people look at me like I’m crazy. And the strange thing is that it worsens as you age. Nobody has too many problems with a saucy tart-tongued 20 year-old. But when you’re pushing 30 like me, everybody wants to know when you’re going to grow the hell up, quit horsing around and develop some nurturing tendencies. And I’m sorry but I don’t have nurturing tendencies. The same things are not expected of men. If anything they get to live in an opposite way. They’re expected to be these arrested man-children. It’s something that’s regarded affectionately and even fetishised. Women are reduced to being the eye-rolling caretakers. It’s a dichotomy I cannot identify with. A lot of American relationship culture plays this out, over and over.”
I point out that when the movie Knocked Up came to Europe it rightly became caught up in a backlash against the eye-rolling caretakers thing.
“Oh really? I like Judd Apatow a lot. I like broad comedies. I even liked Knocked Up though I did find myself wondering why are all the women written like big sisters. They were only there to facilitate the male’s half-assed journey into adulthood. Why are the women all such shrews tapping their toes and waiting for the men to grow up? That’s no fun. I way prefer to stay at their level. Let’s all be immature, not just half of us.”
Happily, she’ll have plenty of opportunities to correct such lazy stereotypes over the coming year. She has just written The United States Of Tara, a television series starring Toni Colette and produced by Steven Spielberg and the comedy-horror film Jennifer’s Body which will start shooting this month with Megan Fox.
“She’s not a final girl,” smiles Cody. “She’s a deliciously evil villain. Making Juno was a wonderful experience but this is going to be even more fun.”

Juno is released February 8