Cody is at once exuberant and wary about the media glare. About six months ago, when the cognoscenti starting calling her the next big thing, it was easy to see her as a screenwriter with a trick up her sleeve. Now that the movie's out, it's clear that Cody lives up to the hype.
In a town that shells out millions of dollars for screenplays so practiced that they read as though the human element has all but been squelched, hers is an authentic voice, alternately sardonic, wide-eyed, hilarious and sad.
"I've always gotten a large ration of negative reactions to positive in my writing," she says. "For some reason, it tends to provoke reactions on the extreme ends of the spectrum. I hate the idea that I'm some sort of self-invented Gatsby-type figure who clawed her way to the top. I have done nothing of the sort. I'm Forrest Gump. I feel like I'm superimposed in all these scenarios. I don't know what the hell I'm doing here."
Cody is certainly a refreshing conundrum, an unexpected mishmash and a self-declared "radical feminist" who's routinely received angry e-mails from readers who believe that's she a female chauvinist, complicit with the porn industry. Her memoir "Candy Girl" is certainly not for the fainthearted, full of the up-close-and-personal details of what it's like to strip and entertain depraved customers. Her book combines Diane Arbus prurience with a wacky sense of humor and Midwestern do-it-yourselfness; it landed her as David Letterman's one-and-only "Book Club 2006 pick" and a jaunty appearance on the show, where she declared herself the "Margaret Mead of sex."
In the book, she glosses over her motivations, except to say she wanted to escape from her life of privilege. Although she still likes going to strip clubs, today she says "they're gross places. They're little shame terrariums. I guess I was raised to feel shame more acutely than any other emotion. Maybe I felt that's home."
Perhaps this is why "Juno" might be one of the few movies, indeed one of the first pop-culture artifacts, that has dealt with teen pregnancy without the usual tsunami of humiliation.
Ironically enough, this ardently pro-choice gal has recently had her politics doubted by those who note that her protagonist Juno opts against an abortion after a punky Planned Parenthood receptionist offers her a boysenberry-flavored condom and tells her to fill out a raft of paperwork, adding, "We need to know about every score and every sore."
