"I would have written a really gory graphic abortion movie had I known. . . . I've had to field so many questions about the sinister pro-life agenda of 'Juno.' There was only one way to get Juno so she's sitting in the room with Mark and Vanessa."
Cody is referring to the scene that launched the film in her head, in which the scruffy but bright teen heroine goes to meet the yuppie couple (played by Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman) who want to adopt her unborn baby. "To me, there was an entire movie about a pregnant teenager, a prospective adoptive mother who's dying to be a parent, a reluctant adoptive father with a strange connection to the young girl, with Juno's father mediating the whole thing, and an attorney." Indeed, it's as if different strains of Cody's persona were having a confab.
Although there's been a tradition of journalists such as Nora Ephron, Nick Pileggi, Paul Attanasio and Stephen Schiff jumping into screenwriting, Cody is one of the first from the new blogging world to cross over, bringing with her much of the raucous, young, irreverent attitude of the Internet. She's an exhibitionist -- but she's honest. (Indeed, her own blog -- diablocody.blogspot.com -- is now featuring posts about the breakup of her marriage.)
She launched her first blog in the dark ages of the medium, back in 2001, not long after she graduated from college. In those medieval days, she used to take three buses at night to attend a class where she had to learn HTML so she could hand-code her own blog. She called the site "The Red Secretary," and it was the faux diary of a secretary in Belarus. "It was this proto-Borat character. I would write about my ancient computer, this flat with no hot water. All I wanted for X-Mas was an American Frisbee." The only people who read it were her family.
She then rebooted as a Beach Boys fanatic with a website devoted to them called "Girls, Cars and Surfing." On the site, she met Jonny Hunt and later moved to Minneapolis and married him. She was very bored working as a typist at an ad agency and launched another blog with a name that contains part of the female anatomy that can't be published in a family newspaper.
No one much read her personal chronicles until, on a whim, she tried out for amateur night at a strip club and wrote about that. Her page views soared. "Clearly I'm catching people's attention with sex. Who knew?" she says sardonically. "I kept stripping and blogging. It was kind of stunt blogging."
