Diablo Redux on Letterman

Diablo Cody returns to Late Night to talk with Dave Letterman about being an Oscar nominee, what success has done to her, and the Starbucks at Target in Robbinsdale as inspiration for writing her screenplay JUNO.

The now famous, Diablo Cody developed many of her professional skills and interpersonal negotiations from being a stripper. I can say, even before she wrote JUNO she was plying her ability to manipulate people attentions for her to the maximum effect. She will admit to this fully.

At the magazine I work for we had an incident where we sent a photographer out to shoot a photo of her during the time of her “Candy Girl” book release. She was working at City Pages and had a desk there, so she wore fishnets and stripper lingerie and stuck a provocative pose – camera down low, one leg up, bottie hitched high. A lot to see...

Before our photographer left, she begged, pleaded and promised, in order to get him to give her copies of the photos “just for her personal use.” Within hours those digital photos were up on her blog site and she was spreading vicious gossip about our magazines art director -- most of it invented with a National Inquirer like tone.

The hot pose story spread like wildfire with both the StarTribune (gossip clumnist CJ) and The Rake magazine doing stories about the story. That’s one of Diablo’s biggest talents – she’s a self-marketing team onto herself and could teach a few of the handlers in LA some tricks. At that time, I wrote an quick message to Diablo telling her the trouble she caused the photographer because it violated our contract with him when he gave her a copy and then that she used it was yet another instance. She immediately removed the photos from her web site and apologized for her indiscretion in the matter, insisting, “I am a professional.”

By this time, however, Cody’s purpose had been achieved to double and triple her exposure and get everybody talking even if it involved some double-crossing to get there. I think she is very smart.

There is bound to be a lot of resentment and envy from fellow scribes for Cody’s actions and her stellar rise. Screenwriters’ never get the attention she has been able to garner and, likewise, screenwriters are not the most generous of folks when it comes to ego. Mind you, we do often get shafted and treated poorly by directors, producers and the industry in general. I am in sympathy. Especially in these times of the strike, when a great big shaft is being perpetuated against us.

I’d say there is a dimension to “Diablo Cody phenomena” that transcends her as an individual. Cody’s is the American rags-to-riches story so many in Hollywood like to glorify. Sure, here in Minnesota we have fairytale fantasies but perhaps it is the weather that prevents us for going about thinking we can act them out and live them. LA and California has no such pragmatic restraint.

More than anything else, the Diablo Cody fee-nom is related to the place Hollywood is in today. There is a perception that due to the internet, the business of entertainment and making movies is slipping away form the studio execs and their old-world models of filmmaking. They are grasping at straws, trying to find the next great, best thing that will walk in their doors. And Diablo being an irreverent, mouthy, self-promoting, PC generation standout is, for the moment, a dream come true.

But, no question, Cody did jump the stack. A lot of writers have been humping the LA treatmill for years and none have come near the stardom, celebracy, and attraction that Diablo has suddenly found herself inside. JUNO, her first screenplay has won her an Oscar nomination and she seems to be leading the polls. Not too many people are going to like she moved to the front of the line. The popularity polls don't vote for Oscars, the screenwriters' and members of the academy do. Her bubble will burst. As much as America likes to create sensational stories of the rise to fame, it just as quickly likes to expose and undermine them.

I don't use any of it against her. Diablo Cody is an entertainer. And so is everybody else working in the industry in Hollywood and New York. I think she has fun with the game and more of us should also. Compared to the droll hatred and self-righteousness of Robert Towne (even if he is a better screenwriter) I'd take Diablo any day over Towne. Cody's rise does not have much to do with great screenwriting but even she cannot live on her personality and instinct for the jugular alone.

Diablo Cody still has to sit down and write an interesting story and good dialogue and she does better at that than most first-timers. She's not a genius but this is not an industry for them. Afterall, look at all the brilliant writers in the 30s and 40s who went to Hollywood and got nowhere. It wasn't that they weren't great, it was just that they were in the wrong town.

Jonny Be Gone

How is it that we can be 6,000 miles away in Brazil and still hear the news that Diablo dumped Jonny? Bush could have bombed Iran and we would not have heard about it BUT Diablo dumps Jonny and has tatoo banner redesigned into Oscar roses... now that's world-wide news.

Jonny is the man Cody pledged to Steve Marsh in her Mpls/St. Paul magazine interview a few short months ago she'd never, ever get rid of due to her meteoric rise (watch out for the slippery slope) in Hollywood.

You had to see that coming even from 6 thousand miles away.

As they say in L.A., "Never say never." And tatoos can be fixed.

JUNO OPENS IN SELECT CITIES

A few weeks back Screenlabs blog got a special exclusive invitation to see JUNO, well, us and 400 kids from area high schools. We walked to the Lagoon Theater in Uptown, looked for the Fox Seachlight hired promo ace and BOOM we were though the turnstiles. And while the wide release date looks to be pushed to Christmas week, this long awaited and much ballyhooed Oscar hopeful is now playing in a few selected cities.

Believe me, there was a lot of chewing gum and text messaging going on around us once we got in our seats. The target audience for this film, I observed, has to be 15-year-old teens who gotta have unlimited minutes plan on the 'rents credit (who has time to worry about how many minutes you've got left?) and sharky grrrls with major attitude. Those TSA-styled movie industry thugs who strip search and confiscate cell phones outside movie screenings scare me but these kids blow them off, stuff their hand-devices in their undies without stop while keying their current rely.

A semi-depressed mid-teen girl dressed in grungy-T and tattered tights a few seats to my left is, like, breaking up with her boyfriend and trying to get in her last words in before the trailers start.

Behind me is a group of three boys, obviously geeky, smart, and high tech who all seem to be struggling with graduating from college. Not that they can't afford to graduate or that they aren't "college material" but they are Bill Gates and Steve Jobs types who don't see the point of wasting time in college so they went out and got jobs at Radio Shack

But we got free Fighting Elk T-shirts!

Where do you buy a mailing list for this target audience? Are these kids who all bought pink and purple Hello Kitty cell phones at the kiosk at Ridgedale Mall? If this room full of teenage lust is the target list, than we're sitting in front of the right movie to rock their world.

Ellen Page is perfect. She deserves an Oscar nom for this acting performance.

JUNO is a coming-of-age teenage, not too original, movie that feels a bit like a TV episode of THAT '70s SHOW. Cody's whipslash dialogue is sizzling and new to commercial films and would never pass censors on TV. Already, all over the net you'll find naysaysers who dispute JUNO's originality, its new vision, and the indie sophistication it tries to pass off in the marketplace.

Cody's JUNO is not Andrei Tarkovsky's STALKER but there certainly is more humor and subtle critique in JUNO than LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE, NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, AMERICAN PIE, or PORKY'S. Let's be honest, comparing JUNO to the 2004 NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, as I think Jason Reitman started to realize after final edit, is an bitch-slap.

Juno McGriff, who Page plays, is a street-smart girl who knows she's still a kid and needs to remind the adults around her of her teen irresponsible nature and that THEY are suppose to be the ADULTS. The dysfunctional world spinning around her is not teens out of control but instead fueled by feckless and fickle adults. Juno's musings on the nature of her predicament, her quick sass back toward friends and parents, and especially her tender yet blunt comments to the clueless boyfriend are well-worth the ticket price.

The reason Hollywood is gah-gah over Diablo Cody is because, first, they know how to and love exploiting the teenage audience especially when they have 2 weeks off school between Christmas and New Year. The studio execs realize they are a bunch of old men who don't speak the sexy double talk of cyber language in chat rooms, blogs, and the snap back of shopping malls cruisers. Cody does. They fear loosing this cash-cow audience segment to the internet.

Second, Diablo Cody is her own marketing machine. Well before entering the self-marketing center of the universe, Cody was molding every PR opportunity in her favor and blogging it - whether it be her naughtly photo in Mpls/St. Paul magazine episode that she deftly manipulated to get into CJ's column to seducing David Letterman with raunchy couch-talk - she's got that big Hollywood gossip entertainment instinct.

And while the smart-set always tries to criticize new films by the tyranny of "it's not original" it really doesn't matter because the more films you see, the greater number of books you read, theater scripts, film scripts, poems, short stories you will begin to discover nothing is original. The charge "it is not original" can be used against piece of art or literature without comeback. But JUNO is fresh for the fact that the dialog will amuse, the perspective of the lead character is uplifitingly real and invigoratingly present day.

I liked JUNO a lot and a huge number people are going to love it to death - most definitely the teenage girl who catches you out of the corner of her eye looking her Apple iPhone touch screen and snaps, "What are you LOOKING at scumbag?"

..........
If you act really fast, you might be able to get tickets to the Walker Art Center's FIRST LOOKS series screening of JUNO with Diablo Cody introducing her film and taking questions. General public tickets go on sale December 4th and it will likely sell out fast. Call: 612.375.7600 or walkerart.org/tickets/

JUST ANOTHER KISSY-E REPORTER

David Carr has relaunched his seasonal Carpetbagger column in the NY Times as we head into the Oscar season. The concept behind Carr adopting the self-described kissy-entertainment reporter identity (the man standing on the red carpet) is for the ex-Minnesota Twin Cities Reader reporter to blog about Oscar celebs leading into the statute horse race.

In one of his first blogs, Carr reveals he is writing a story of the upcoming Sunday NYT (December 2, 2007) on Minnesota-girl-gone-Hollywood Diablo Cody while speaking to JUNO film lead and Halifax native Ellen Page.

Carr also confesses he is ashamed of his kissy-ass reporting for the Bagger blog. Humm... I wonder who's holding the gun to his head?

STRIKES, YIKES & COMBAT BOOTS

Striking under Walter P. Reuther was never this exciting!

Diablo Cody, who Hollywood elsewhere's Jeffrey Welles has taken to calling "the new Tarantino" takes the picket line outside Paramounts Bronson gate entrance after a world-wind tour of Italy and London pimping her film JUNO at world festivals.

Is that Versace couture - sexy, fierce, and chic? Cody is high on everybodies preliminary lists for an original screenplay Oscar. Other Minnesotan's topping the lists are the Coen Brothers for best adapted screenplay and best picture for their NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN opening this weekend in theaters.

Talk around Hollywood is Cody had dinner with auteur director/producer Quentin Tarantino (if you're the new-Tarantino a meet is inorder) and also did phone with legendary rocker Roger Daltrey and posed in front of an Audi, tatoos ablaze in the flash of photographers strobes for the AFI Centerpiece Gala for JUNO -- officially the L.A. opening for her film.

As Jason Reitman blogged, JUNO got to play the Cineramadome, "...one of those milestones every filmmaker wants to hit in their lifetime" said the 30-year-old film director. However, Reitman felt comedy doesn't play as spirited on the crowd in the Buckminster Fuller geodesic domes vast space.

"That high ceiling just sucks the energy out of the room," blogged Reitman about the geodesic that is regarded to have the highest ratio of enclosed volume to weight.

An Edgar Wright Interview with Diablo Cody captures the mood of L.A. striking writers while their conversation naturally drifts toward the life of a stripper. As with the newest issue of Entertainment Weekly demonstrates, the rag to riches tale of stripper to Hollywood A-list writer suggests she is holding onto the tail of the dragon. In that article she explains that she wrote JUNO while sitting in a suburban Minneapolis Target store - a world vastly removed from that of an A-lister in Hollywood.

If Diablo hopes the talk about her adventures as Margaret Meade in the red light district will end with JUNO, just wait until she's up for an Academy Award.

CODY & REITMAN WIN TOP PRIZE AT ROME

Director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody accept the top prize at the 2007 Rome Film Festival for Cody's JUNO. Cody explained she was pimped in Versace dresses by Cody grooming Glam Squad before adding the old man's wooly rain cap.

The former-Minneapolis screenwriter can hardly believe her good luck in adapting to life in L.A. and the open doors she has encountered since moving to Tinsel Town. In addition to a grueling promotional tour, trips to film festivals to accept awards, being asked to reluctantly sit on "women in film" panels, she is also developing a TV series for Steven Speilberg called "United States of Tara" while facing a looming WGA writers strike.

Furthermore, there is much talk about Cody's next film, GIRLY STYLE an all-girl college sex comedy about a group of girls determined to lose their virginity yet may be too selective to achive their goals. Cody compares her movies to PORKY'S and other teenage sex titlators but believes she is taking risks by putting women in the lead roles normally reserved for young male actors.

Diablo Cody Interview